Looking back on the game distribution platform 'Steam' 2018, it looks like this

" Steam ", a highly popular download sales platform for PC games, has been going to unveil the "reforms and changes that took place in 2018" that is invisible to users and partner companies, so that the project has been done in 2018 I am looking back on.

Steam Community :: Group :: Steamworks Development
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/1697194621363928453

Data summarizing the number of active users of Steam in FY 2018 is the following image. There are an average of 47 million active users per day, 90 million active users per month, 18.5 million simultaneous users during peak hours, the number of new purchasers per month (the number of new users who purchase games ) Is 1.6 million people.

◆ Store - Although it was a Steam client that was the only server that delivered the game sales platform and game at the beginning of the release, in 2018 he faced a problem far beyond the imagination of that time. Steam is a platform used by 90 million users every month, so that it should be a platform that can respond to various concerns and gain opportunities to acquire users regardless of the size of developers, Announced that it will limit the content regulation to zero without limit in June. Regarding "adult visual novel" which is often restricted by something, it is supposed that there should be "right to play by the user" and "right to be created by the developer", so we decided to distribute it on the platform without regulation I will.

Steam will be able to deliver platform-side content restrictions to zero as much as possible, allowing "any illegal" game of any genre to be delivered - GIGAZINE

The evils created by limiting content control to zero as much as possible are addressed by improving Steam's "coming soon" tab and adapting content filtering tools to adult-oriented content . In addition, we are accelerating the movement to eliminate troll developers by changing the countermeasure to counterfeit games sprawling on Steam. In addition, improve the function of the Steam curator so that each user can see the store from a new perspective based on reliable opinions.

We opened a beta version of "Developer & Publisher Website" as a place to show new games to users. When developers release new games, users can receive notifications.

Developer & Publisher Home Page

In addition to updating the navigation traffic tool of the game to make it easy to understand the movement in the Steam store.

By improving the store's usability by improving the wish list as well as not only corresponding to the increase of the contents but also allowing the live stream and the GIF animation to be embedded on the store page, the developer can improve the game better I am improving to show it.

We also take measures to enable users around the world to use Steam more comfortably by responding to the Australian dollar and by responding to Turkish lira fluctuations . In 2018, several payment service providers have also been added, and the number of compliant service providers exceeds 100. Also in Japan and Poland, the Steam Wallet Card has started, and it has become possible to respond to cash payment in 45 countries. In 2018 the language supported by the Steam client has increased to 26.

The result is the graph below. By classifying the region of Steam users on a sales basis it is as follows and you can see that users who live in various regions of the world are using Steam compared to 2012 data.

◆ Steam Community
Among the new features of the Steam community added in 2018, it is particularly remarkable that Steam chat was remodeled. Improvement of Steam chat was done to provide functions expected for the latest chat function, and notable improvements include 'greatly improved group chat', 'more flexible friend list' Deeply refined rich presence "," completely rewritten voice chat system using WebRTC on a private network "and others are mentioned. Many of the new technologies of Steam chat combined with Steam broadcasting are the early versions of SteamTV , which tested on The International and PAX Artifact .

There is a danger of escalating to harmful controversy sometimes to the online community where many people gather. The Steam community is also dangerous, and there seems to be a case where the discussion becomes uncontrollable by providing players free dialogue places. Therefore, Steam maintains the game bulletin board soundly, manages the harassment report, builds a moderation tool to be able to deal with the contents generated by the user who reported, and the full time moderation team It seems to have set up . The moderation team has been in operation since the latter half of September 2018, responding to the 11,2329 posts reported from users, and resolving most of them within one day. Although there are more than 300 million posts on the Steam community in 2018, the moderation team succeeded in validating user-generated content for 332,687 things that were reported to be problem for over 3 months from the time of operation That's right.

Game-centered communities are sometimes large-scale, sometimes there are cases where inappropriate content exists for some users. For example, suppose that a fan of the original supremacy feels that a character of a certain game can not be regarded as "authentic," or a blatant expression such as "not suitable for viewing at the workplace" exists. Some users install this mod with no sense of strangeness, some users may not want to see screenshots on the game's community page. So Steam uses the Google's image content recognition API " Vision API " and Amazon's image recognition service " Amazon Rekognition " to identify inappropriate images and add a function to blur by default I will. Note that this function can be turned off at any time by the user.

In addition, we are giving more privacy setting management functions to users, responding to GDPR , simplifying adding friends, and so on. We also organize community building events such as a spring cleaning event , a sale star game during the summer sale period, a comfortable full-blown cottage during the winter sale period, and an annual "Steam Award".

Steam Award

◆ Expanding the playing environment
In August 2018, we released a new version of Steam Play. Updates have been made to greatly improve the Linux user's gaming experience, and Windows games that have not yet released the Linux version can now be played on Linux. Initially, 24 titles were announced as compatible beta version, but the cooperation of the community helped the game's operation verification test proceed rapidly and more than 3,400 games were reported to be compatible with Linux I will.

Valve releases Steam Play employing Proton that can run Windows games on Linux to enhance Linux user's gaming experience - GIGAZINE

Steam's management, Valve continues investing in Vulkan and builds a shader pre-cache for support to allow users to play games on their favorite platforms while reducing the burden on developers doing.

The following graph summarizes the results of investigating the most frequently used controllers on Steam. According to the survey , it is said that 36.7 million players are using controllers when playing games with Steam, these data are useful for steam input development, also helped Nintendo Switch compatible with pro I suspect it is. In addition, Steam supports 300 or more devices, and all supported devices are supported without any additional work.

Steam said that in 2018 he was energetically working on improving and evolving the VR experience on PC. In May 2018 we released a new SteamVR and provided an input abstraction layer for developers. In June of the same year SteamVR Skeletal input which is another input system was also announced. This allows the VR controller to recognize the position and movement of the user's hands and provide the animation data as a stream to the VR application with the sensor's accuracy as precisely as possible. By using this data, developers can animate the hands of users' avatars and realize hand-based interaction in VR space. In addition, SteamVR motion smoothing was announced in November. This is to provide a high quality VR experience to more PCs, estimating motion and animation based on the last two frames delivered when the frame punch starts, extrapolate new frame It is function.

SteamVR Home also has a variety of upgrades, including a new Steam desktop panel calling feature and asset packs that content creators can use to create environments.

Besides, the Steam link corresponds to Android and Raspberry Pi, and the range of streaming play of a game on a large TV or smartphone is expanding.

◆ Additional features of Steamworks
Steam inventory service , a technology to support persistent items in games like PUBG, has been upgraded and it is now possible to hold items with unique and dynamic properties in all Steam games. It is possible to implement what makes burning purple hat trace headshot simply by using simple setting script, and all processing after implementation will be processed by Steam side. In addition, in the year 2018 Steam inventory service seems to have created 3.8 billion items in the whole game.

Also, it became possible for Valve to reflect what you learned from the easing of DoS attacks in multiplayer games provided on Steam. In addition, considering that games are released on multiple platforms, Valve also helps create a steam independent environment by making the GameNetworkingSockets library open source. Because the Steam version of the game uses Valve's private network, games such as Dota 2 and CS: GO can receive the same DoS protection. This seems to lead to protection from the script kiddie by relaying all the game network traffic and making the IP address of the game server and the client anonymous. In 2019, Valve revealed plans to make private networks available even for non-Steam version games.

Behind the scenes of Steam
Steam said that it carried out many infrastructures in 2018. We are doing an important upgrade to the Solr server that supports store search, user review, Steam workshop, and even if the meteorite falls at the main data center, we will continue to disaster recovery plan so that there will be no obstacle to Steam I am working on it. In 2018, 2.7 petabytes (2.7 petabytes) were added so that grant of 1.7 billion trading cards, 488 million trade processing, 245 million emoji creation, and 218 million screen shots can be performed without difficulty We have deployed a new SQL server with FAST solid state storage.

Valve has established and operates its own global private network since 2015. This global private network is directly connected with more than 28,000 regions and local networks in 28 cities in 21 countries, and should realize this tremendous level of network, Valve partnered with Internet top companies all over the world It seems to be doing. On this private network, game distribution, game play, voice chat, and other data in over 229 countries are being provided to users with high speed and low latency. Valve's edge network capacity is 12 Tbps, which is increasing at a rate of 50% over the previous year. Also, in 2018 we deliver 15 exabytes (15 billion gigabytes) of data to customers. In addition, the traffic of the entire Internet in 2003, which is the service start year of Steam, was an estimated 9.3 exabyte.

In addition, by completely transferring Steam's entire website to HTTPS, we are improving the security of the entire website. In addition, in May, we aim to relax security problems and respond promptly, and in collaboration with HackerOne we launched a bug prize program. By January 2019, a reward of over $ 471,000 (about 5.1 million yen) is paid to security researchers who cooperated in the safety and protection of the Valve platform.

In addition, Steam support corresponds to more than 44 million support tickets submitted by both customers and game developers. In addition to inquiries to support, in 2018 Valve's game review team responded to 42,600 review requests, play 11,111 games (or DLC), and store 14,448 store pages I am reviewing it.

In the past 12 months Valve has paid around 10,000 partners, among which the number of new partners who joined Steam was 2,300. Valve also changed the Steamworks distribution agreement, changed it to offer more rewards to steam reached titles that reached certain revenue, and clarified that gaming sales data can be shared as needed It is.

Steam reviews the revenue sharing ratio with game developers and makes it a platform that developers can earn more - GIGAZINE

As a goal of 2019, Steam has set goals for "Improve ease of discovery in stores" "Service start in China" "Steam library update" "Steam community event system upgrade" "Steam TV expansion" "Steam chat Mobile application release "" CS: Release of "Steam trust" that upgrades technology supporting Trust Match Making of GO and becomes fully usable in all games as a complete Steam function "and" Steam PC Cafe program " .