11 ms·

Steam Sales 2015

192 points by kelukelugames 11y ago

Cshelton 11y ago
Ah! Double Y axis charts! I have been arguing with another founder about the double-y and how we should not use it. What are peoples' response to the charts in this post? Do you find them easy to read/helpful/giving good insight into the data?
- thwarted 11y ago
  I find I have to think about them too long, and I think the rendering details contribute to that. There is nothing wrong with double y-axis graphs if you don't just slap them together because the x-axis has the same range. I think the lack of concern for the rendering details make these harder to immediately read than they should be. Why are the axis labels not colored the same way the lines are, or the entries in the key not positionally associated with their axis (rather than being in the center). The triangles and circles on the lines on "Steam Sales" offer no utility (except, perhaps, for color-blindness or if it was printed in black-and-white, but then dotted-vs-solid would be a better choice). There are horizontal tic marks, but they are separating the dates, not centered on the datapoint, meaning the data is being presented as a column, which a line graph is not best for (that is, the choice of graph given this data may not be the best one). And that's just the problem with one graph. There are two graphs on this page, and both have different rendering details. Consistency is important because it means understanding the rendering of one graph translates to the understanding of the other. Why doesn't the second graph have shapes over the data points? Why doesn't the second graph have tic marks along the x-axis? Color is used inconsistently: the unit for the blue line is units sold in the first one and dollars in the second one, and the side the graph the blue line is associated with switches. Despite that the axes that are denominated in dollars are showing different things (totals vs discrete values), there is value in having them both on the same side of the graph (and in the same color)—that the blue one switches sides means the viewer needs to concentrate harder on the key and layout leaving less time for interpreting the data. It would actually be better if four colors between the two graphs were used since there are four different domains of data being shown. They both show the same time range, but the dates are not formatted similarly along the x-axis. In both cases, the units on the labels are too exact. "60.00%": why is this 4 significant digits, a whole number percentage would do. At this size, the decimal point and percent sign almost get lost with the unneeded zeros. "Steam Sales" has units that are so big with so many zeros you have to think about the order of magnitude; these should be truncated to "$300M" and "65M".
- softawre 11y ago
  Yes. But I think the problem is they can give misleading insights if you're not careful.
  - Cshelton 11y ago
    Exactly my argument. I would rather not give the user the option of creating that chart in the first place because 95% of them are misused and give misguiding trends, etc.
    - pc86 11y ago
      If I was creating charts I would want the freedom to do this. Perhaps display a warning if both Y-axes are the same units (e.g. both dollars) because there is little reason to do that - either the values are related and the graph will be hard to parse/misleading, or the values are not related and they probably shouldn't be on the same chart. But I can certainly see a use case for $ v. %, etc.
      - dandelany 11y ago
        > display a warning if both Y-axes are the same units because there is little reason to do so OK - let's see a line chart showing the correlation between average daily lunch cost and annual salary :)
        pc86 11y ago
        A perfect example of "I know what I'm doing, let me do something that is usually disingenuous." :)
- threeseven37 11y ago
  I'm not sure how much you should count my input, but this was my first time to have seen a double-y axis chart and I'm still not sure if I was reading it correctly.
  - Cshelton 11y ago
    Don't worry, that's generally how most people feel, even if you've seen them many times. You have to pause and say, "...wait". I'd argue that the trends you actually see in almost all of them are misguided.
    - boxy310 11y ago
      I'd say the bigger concern is spurious correlation. The two factors may very well be unrelated, or share a common cause (like drowning and ice cream prices -- they're both driven primarily by heat). However, when talking about price and revenue it is legitimate to render them on the same chart, since revenue is a function of price. Steam in particular has proven to be a wonderful platform to demonstrate this phenomenon, as the elasticity of demand for games software is very high, and discounting even modestly generates far more revenue than you lose through the discount. Steam and the publishers benefit even more due to the low marginal cost of delivery, largely accountable to transmission costs and the marginal wear-and-tear on data servers.
- irremediable 11y ago
  I've always liked double y-axis charts. I do wish they'd colour-code the axis labels to match their associated lines.
- domfletcher 11y ago
  I think it depends very much on what you're trying to show. In the article the point he is making is that volume and average price have a roughly inverse relationship. As with almost all data vis it can be misread but for showing relationships between metrics over time it's the best chart.
- spott 11y ago
  I think the problem is that there are relationships that are very difficult to show cleanly using other chart types. Relationships between quantities with different units are hard to show otherwise, without significant cognitive overhead (a new unit ), or two charts which causes inevitable back and forth examination. You mention elsewhere that they are commonly misinterpreted or misleading. Care to show some examples? I can't think of any off the top of my head. These particular charts are poorly done because their isn't enough information about which axis refers to which plot line, but are otherwise clear in intent.
Mahn 11y ago
> PC worldwide core games market is estimated to be around $27B in 2015 (Newzoo). So, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 revenue, Valve is controlling around 15% of it. Pretty impressive! Is anyone else under the impression this number is too low? I mean, sure, it's still impressive, but at this point I would honestly expect them to control 30-40% of the PC core games market at least. I'd find it easier to believe that the NewZoo estimate is inaccurate.
- distances 11y ago
  I would myself have guessed at least 50%, but that would be just based on anecdotal experience. I've bought the occasional Humble Bundle outside of Steam, but that's the only one for several years now. The same applies for all of my friends as far as I know.
  - dagw 11y ago
    What is the revenue split for non-Valve games on Steam? While I certainly wouldn't have any problem believing that 50% of game sales happen through Steam, that is not the same as Valve getting 50% of the game sales revenue.
    - et1337 11y ago
      They take 30%.
      - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
        I imagine large publishers negotiate a much smaller cut.
        et1337 11y ago
        My understanding is it's much worse with big publishers. IIRC more like 60% publisher / 40% developer.
CliffyA 11y ago
Mad Max seems higher on that list than I would have expected especially launching alongside Metal Gear. The power of a movie license I guess.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  If anything I'd say a movie license in the world of gamers is a chain around your neck, because there haven't been a lot of films that made the jump well. Mad Max did well because it was a legitimately good game, and while Metal Gear was a big deal, its not as big on the PC as in Sonyland.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    And ET The Extraterrestrial is a legendary case.
    - douche 11y ago
      The Lion King movie game on PC was almost enough to shake confidence in the viability of Windows as a gaming platform
      - venomsnake 11y ago
        Why? I loved it. Both it and Aladdin? - they also were dos games.
        douche 11y ago
        http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/04/the-disnesy-disaster/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/04/the-disnesy-disaster...
      - venomsnake 11y ago
        Why? I loved it. Both it and Aladdin? - they also were dos games.
- 11y ago
joonoro 11y ago
>Indiepocalypse is cancelled, you can stop worrying now. I think I speak for quite a few people when I say thank God. I have nothing against indie games in general but the sheer volume of low-quality DayZ/Minecraft-inspired early-access survival game clones that were all broken in the same ways that were never finished by the developer have left me jaded.
- Zikes 11y ago
  I think it was fairly obvious from the start that it wasn't going to be a lasting trend. The games were obviously either uninspired clones or promising the impossible, and as soon as consumers caught on then the trend would die off. A lot of folks had to get burned to see that the fire was hot, but now they know, at least.
- alimbada 11y ago
  I'm reluctant to breathe a sigh of relief yet. I've been visiting the Steam Store a lot less since they opened the floodgates to any and every game under the sun as I believe discoverability is now horribly broken and the queue and recommendations features both fail to mitigate the issue.
  - debaserab2 11y ago
    Is that a problem with the catalog or a problem with the store? I've found steams interface for searching and finding new games is pretty bad.
    - speeder 11y ago
      I am both a gamedev and a avid game player, of some niche and strange genres included. I found out that Steam catalog, despite "opening the floodgates" is quite limited on some genres, some niche genres have the nicest games don't even volunteer for steam (usually because the nicest games have perfectionist devs that don't want to be "another shitty early access", for example Starsector, the game has been being sold in pre-release form for years now, but the dev flat out absolutely refuses to get on Steam, because he thinks the game ins't ready for that), and even when they do, they don't get enough traction with the public to get through Greenlight or to skip Greenlight. On some other genres, you will see loads and loads of crap shoveled at you, but the good games still don't fill completely the recommended games section screen... The only thing I think Steam can do differently in their interface, is make the "order by public rating" easier (this feature actually exists already! But is mostly hidden, every time I need it, I google around until I stumble on it, and each time I end on it by a different path!), usually when you do that you see a list of actually great games, mixing both truly great AAA games and actual underdogs (example: last time I checked for some genres, I owned all games on the first page on the list, some of those games I know I am one of the few people that own them, because they are not widely known, while others are full blown 100 million marketing AAA).
kelukelugames 11y ago
Why does HN say I posted the article 3 hours ago at 4 AM? I submitted it before 10PM last night.
- impostervt 11y ago
  I've had the same thing happened to stories I submitted, so I'm upvoting this question.
- revelation 11y ago
  If someone reposts the link after your submission didn't get traction, it will get the time from the reposter but you'll still be credited with the submission.
  - kelukelugames 11y ago
    I would like to understand this in detail. Did one of the mods make a post about it?
    - revelation 11y ago
      I think dang wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645
      - kelukelugames 11y ago
        That's an interesting link. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything related to reposts and giving credit to the original poster.
jpdus 11y ago
The numbers in the aggregated top list don't add up. ARK for example is listed with fewer revenues for the whole year than for June alone. This does not add confidence in the validity of other figures in this post.
- mediocrejoker 11y ago
  Also another post lists CS:GO as top selling of 2015 (5.6m copies) but in this post it doesn't make the list https://medium.com/steam-spy/preliminary-results-for-steam-sales-in-2015-43bb49a767bd https://medium.com/steam-spy/preliminary-results-for-steam-s...
Scirra_Tom 11y ago
Worth mentioning is the default pricing settings on Steam create vastly different prices geographically. We manually set out prices to match our store (https://www.scirra.com https://www.scirra.com, sorry can't help myself!). Bit of a PITA as we have to keep it updated regularly for volatile currencies, but we'd rather people buy from us directly. Geo pricing difference is significant, so depending on per country volume actual revenues may be minus a significant figure if those numbers are based on USD.
otakucode 11y ago
Steam still desperately needs a competent recommendation engine. Simply recommending the biggest sellers is a terrible solution, but appears to be what they are doing now. I am worried that Steam doesn't want to pursue this, however, because big publishers wouldn't like it. My personal Steam interface wouldn't be trying to sell me the latest AAA titles at all, for example. And Steam has thus far been very much a 'for the big publishers' affair. Sure indie devs have made some great successes there, but those were all despite Steams policies and structure rather than thanks to it. Steam also continues to face the threat of large publishers creating their own competing marketplaces, like EAs Origin. Since Steam offers nothing unique that a publisher couldn't reproduce themselves with little effort, drowning in a sea of clones wouldn't be terribly surprising. When Apple came out with iTunes, they demanded that music publishers do things like sell individual tracks, and cap those at 99 cents. They forced publishers to take advantage of digital distribution. So when music publishers wanted to compete, they found that they simply couldn't. Their board of directors would demand that they sell albums together. They would demand more than 99 cents a track. And users would never go for it. But with Steam, which places absolutely no restrictions upon the publisher whatsoever, that's not a problem. Origin showed that gamers loyalty to the franchises they like far outpaces any loyalty to Steam.. and why shouldn't it? Steam doesn't guarantee lower-than-physical-retail prices. They don't guarantee anything, really, for consumers. I would love to see Valve start squeezing publishers and forcing them to take advantage of digital distribution. Cap new game prices. It is patently absurd to pay $60 for a digitally distributed title when distribution makes up the vast majority of the price of a retail title and digital distro drops the cost of distribution to nearly nothing. It would require big publishers to violate their distribution agreement contracts with retailers, just like iTunes forced music publishers to violate their distribution agreement contracts with record stores, but Steam would end up being much more robust as a result. Back to the recommenation engine, though. My nephews got their first laptops for christmas. They're 9 years old and their parents are not technical at all. So they ended up with the cheapest Black Friday craptops you can imagine. There are plenty of things on Steam that they could play, but I didn't even install it for them. Because if I had, Steam would have inundated them with advertising for games that they don't have any chance of running, and, being 9 and used to tablets and consoles, they would not understand why they couldn't run something. Finding something they COULD play would be very difficult. Alright, I should stop complaining and just build something to solve the problem. At least Valve doesn't seem aggressive against scraping Steam data and the like.

Steam Sales 2015

192 points by kelukelugames 11y ago

Ah! Double Y axis charts! I have been arguing with another founder about the double-y and how we should not use it. What are peoples' response to the charts in this post? Do you find them easy to read/helpful/giving good insight into the data?

thwarted 11y ago
I find I have to think about them too long, and I think the rendering details contribute to that. There is nothing wrong with double y-axis graphs if you don't just slap them together because the x-axis has the same range. I think the lack of concern for the rendering details make these harder to immediately read than they should be. Why are the axis labels not colored the same way the lines are, or the entries in the key not positionally associated with their axis (rather than being in the center). The triangles and circles on the lines on "Steam Sales" offer no utility (except, perhaps, for color-blindness or if it was printed in black-and-white, but then dotted-vs-solid would be a better choice). There are horizontal tic marks, but they are separating the dates, not centered on the datapoint, meaning the data is being presented as a column, which a line graph is not best for (that is, the choice of graph given this data may not be the best one). And that's just the problem with one graph. There are two graphs on this page, and both have different rendering details. Consistency is important because it means understanding the rendering of one graph translates to the understanding of the other. Why doesn't the second graph have shapes over the data points? Why doesn't the second graph have tic marks along the x-axis? Color is used inconsistently: the unit for the blue line is units sold in the first one and dollars in the second one, and the side the graph the blue line is associated with switches. Despite that the axes that are denominated in dollars are showing different things (totals vs discrete values), there is value in having them both on the same side of the graph (and in the same color)—that the blue one switches sides means the viewer needs to concentrate harder on the key and layout leaving less time for interpreting the data. It would actually be better if four colors between the two graphs were used since there are four different domains of data being shown. They both show the same time range, but the dates are not formatted similarly along the x-axis. In both cases, the units on the labels are too exact. "60.00%": why is this 4 significant digits, a whole number percentage would do. At this size, the decimal point and percent sign almost get lost with the unneeded zeros. "Steam Sales" has units that are so big with so many zeros you have to think about the order of magnitude; these should be truncated to "$300M" and "65M".
softawre 11y ago
Yes. But I think the problem is they can give misleading insights if you're not careful.
- Cshelton 11y ago
  Exactly my argument. I would rather not give the user the option of creating that chart in the first place because 95% of them are misused and give misguiding trends, etc.
  - pc86 11y ago
    If I was creating charts I would want the freedom to do this. Perhaps display a warning if both Y-axes are the same units (e.g. both dollars) because there is little reason to do that - either the values are related and the graph will be hard to parse/misleading, or the values are not related and they probably shouldn't be on the same chart. But I can certainly see a use case for $ v. %, etc.
    - dandelany 11y ago
      > display a warning if both Y-axes are the same units because there is little reason to do so OK - let's see a line chart showing the correlation between average daily lunch cost and annual salary :)
      - pc86 11y ago
        A perfect example of "I know what I'm doing, let me do something that is usually disingenuous." :)
threeseven37 11y ago
I'm not sure how much you should count my input, but this was my first time to have seen a double-y axis chart and I'm still not sure if I was reading it correctly.
- Cshelton 11y ago
  Don't worry, that's generally how most people feel, even if you've seen them many times. You have to pause and say, "...wait". I'd argue that the trends you actually see in almost all of them are misguided.
  - boxy310 11y ago
    I'd say the bigger concern is spurious correlation. The two factors may very well be unrelated, or share a common cause (like drowning and ice cream prices -- they're both driven primarily by heat). However, when talking about price and revenue it is legitimate to render them on the same chart, since revenue is a function of price. Steam in particular has proven to be a wonderful platform to demonstrate this phenomenon, as the elasticity of demand for games software is very high, and discounting even modestly generates far more revenue than you lose through the discount. Steam and the publishers benefit even more due to the low marginal cost of delivery, largely accountable to transmission costs and the marginal wear-and-tear on data servers.
irremediable 11y ago
I've always liked double y-axis charts. I do wish they'd colour-code the axis labels to match their associated lines.
domfletcher 11y ago
I think it depends very much on what you're trying to show. In the article the point he is making is that volume and average price have a roughly inverse relationship. As with almost all data vis it can be misread but for showing relationships between metrics over time it's the best chart.
spott 11y ago
I think the problem is that there are relationships that are very difficult to show cleanly using other chart types. Relationships between quantities with different units are hard to show otherwise, without significant cognitive overhead (a new unit ), or two charts which causes inevitable back and forth examination. You mention elsewhere that they are commonly misinterpreted or misleading. Care to show some examples? I can't think of any off the top of my head. These particular charts are poorly done because their isn't enough information about which axis refers to which plot line, but are otherwise clear in intent.

Mahn 11y ago

> PC worldwide core games market is estimated to be around $27B in 2015 (Newzoo). So, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 revenue, Valve is controlling around 15% of it. Pretty impressive! Is anyone else under the impression this number is too low? I mean, sure, it's still impressive, but at this point I would honestly expect them to control 30-40% of the PC core games market at least. I'd find it easier to believe that the NewZoo estimate is inaccurate.

distances 11y ago
I would myself have guessed at least 50%, but that would be just based on anecdotal experience. I've bought the occasional Humble Bundle outside of Steam, but that's the only one for several years now. The same applies for all of my friends as far as I know.
- dagw 11y ago
  What is the revenue split for non-Valve games on Steam? While I certainly wouldn't have any problem believing that 50% of game sales happen through Steam, that is not the same as Valve getting 50% of the game sales revenue.
  - et1337 11y ago
    They take 30%.
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      I imagine large publishers negotiate a much smaller cut.
      - et1337 11y ago
        My understanding is it's much worse with big publishers. IIRC more like 60% publisher / 40% developer.

CliffyA 11y ago

Mad Max seems higher on that list than I would have expected especially launching alongside Metal Gear. The power of a movie license I guess.

jon-wood 11y ago
If anything I'd say a movie license in the world of gamers is a chain around your neck, because there haven't been a lot of films that made the jump well. Mad Max did well because it was a legitimately good game, and while Metal Gear was a big deal, its not as big on the PC as in Sonyland.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  And ET The Extraterrestrial is a legendary case.
  - douche 11y ago
    The Lion King movie game on PC was almost enough to shake confidence in the viability of Windows as a gaming platform
    - venomsnake 11y ago
      Why? I loved it. Both it and Aladdin? - they also were dos games.
      - douche 11y ago
        http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/04/the-disnesy-disaster/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/04/the-disnesy-disaster...
    - venomsnake 11y ago
      Why? I loved it. Both it and Aladdin? - they also were dos games.
11y ago

joonoro 11y ago

>Indiepocalypse is cancelled, you can stop worrying now. I think I speak for quite a few people when I say thank God. I have nothing against indie games in general but the sheer volume of low-quality DayZ/Minecraft-inspired early-access survival game clones that were all broken in the same ways that were never finished by the developer have left me jaded.

Zikes 11y ago
I think it was fairly obvious from the start that it wasn't going to be a lasting trend. The games were obviously either uninspired clones or promising the impossible, and as soon as consumers caught on then the trend would die off. A lot of folks had to get burned to see that the fire was hot, but now they know, at least.
alimbada 11y ago
I'm reluctant to breathe a sigh of relief yet. I've been visiting the Steam Store a lot less since they opened the floodgates to any and every game under the sun as I believe discoverability is now horribly broken and the queue and recommendations features both fail to mitigate the issue.
- debaserab2 11y ago
  Is that a problem with the catalog or a problem with the store? I've found steams interface for searching and finding new games is pretty bad.
  - speeder 11y ago
    I am both a gamedev and a avid game player, of some niche and strange genres included. I found out that Steam catalog, despite "opening the floodgates" is quite limited on some genres, some niche genres have the nicest games don't even volunteer for steam (usually because the nicest games have perfectionist devs that don't want to be "another shitty early access", for example Starsector, the game has been being sold in pre-release form for years now, but the dev flat out absolutely refuses to get on Steam, because he thinks the game ins't ready for that), and even when they do, they don't get enough traction with the public to get through Greenlight or to skip Greenlight. On some other genres, you will see loads and loads of crap shoveled at you, but the good games still don't fill completely the recommended games section screen... The only thing I think Steam can do differently in their interface, is make the "order by public rating" easier (this feature actually exists already! But is mostly hidden, every time I need it, I google around until I stumble on it, and each time I end on it by a different path!), usually when you do that you see a list of actually great games, mixing both truly great AAA games and actual underdogs (example: last time I checked for some genres, I owned all games on the first page on the list, some of those games I know I am one of the few people that own them, because they are not widely known, while others are full blown 100 million marketing AAA).

kelukelugames 11y ago

Why does HN say I posted the article 3 hours ago at 4 AM? I submitted it before 10PM last night.

impostervt 11y ago
I've had the same thing happened to stories I submitted, so I'm upvoting this question.
revelation 11y ago
If someone reposts the link after your submission didn't get traction, it will get the time from the reposter but you'll still be credited with the submission.
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  I would like to understand this in detail. Did one of the mods make a post about it?
  - revelation 11y ago
    I think dang wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645
    - kelukelugames 11y ago
      That's an interesting link. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything related to reposts and giving credit to the original poster.

jpdus 11y ago

The numbers in the aggregated top list don't add up. ARK for example is listed with fewer revenues for the whole year than for June alone. This does not add confidence in the validity of other figures in this post.

mediocrejoker 11y ago
Also another post lists CS:GO as top selling of 2015 (5.6m copies) but in this post it doesn't make the list https://medium.com/steam-spy/preliminary-results-for-steam-sales-in-2015-43bb49a767bd https://medium.com/steam-spy/preliminary-results-for-steam-s...

Scirra_Tom 11y ago

Worth mentioning is the default pricing settings on Steam create vastly different prices geographically. We manually set out prices to match our store (https://www.scirra.com https://www.scirra.com, sorry can't help myself!). Bit of a PITA as we have to keep it updated regularly for volatile currencies, but we'd rather people buy from us directly. Geo pricing difference is significant, so depending on per country volume actual revenues may be minus a significant figure if those numbers are based on USD.

otakucode 11y ago

Steam still desperately needs a competent recommendation engine. Simply recommending the biggest sellers is a terrible solution, but appears to be what they are doing now. I am worried that Steam doesn't want to pursue this, however, because big publishers wouldn't like it. My personal Steam interface wouldn't be trying to sell me the latest AAA titles at all, for example. And Steam has thus far been very much a 'for the big publishers' affair. Sure indie devs have made some great successes there, but those were all despite Steams policies and structure rather than thanks to it. Steam also continues to face the threat of large publishers creating their own competing marketplaces, like EAs Origin. Since Steam offers nothing unique that a publisher couldn't reproduce themselves with little effort, drowning in a sea of clones wouldn't be terribly surprising. When Apple came out with iTunes, they demanded that music publishers do things like sell individual tracks, and cap those at 99 cents. They forced publishers to take advantage of digital distribution. So when music publishers wanted to compete, they found that they simply couldn't. Their board of directors would demand that they sell albums together. They would demand more than 99 cents a track. And users would never go for it. But with Steam, which places absolutely no restrictions upon the publisher whatsoever, that's not a problem. Origin showed that gamers loyalty to the franchises they like far outpaces any loyalty to Steam.. and why shouldn't it? Steam doesn't guarantee lower-than-physical-retail prices. They don't guarantee anything, really, for consumers. I would love to see Valve start squeezing publishers and forcing them to take advantage of digital distribution. Cap new game prices. It is patently absurd to pay $60 for a digitally distributed title when distribution makes up the vast majority of the price of a retail title and digital distro drops the cost of distribution to nearly nothing. It would require big publishers to violate their distribution agreement contracts with retailers, just like iTunes forced music publishers to violate their distribution agreement contracts with record stores, but Steam would end up being much more robust as a result. Back to the recommenation engine, though. My nephews got their first laptops for christmas. They're 9 years old and their parents are not technical at all. So they ended up with the cheapest Black Friday craptops you can imagine. There are plenty of things on Steam that they could play, but I didn't even install it for them. Because if I had, Steam would have inundated them with advertising for games that they don't have any chance of running, and, being 9 and used to tablets and consoles, they would not understand why they couldn't run something. Finding something they COULD play would be very difficult. Alright, I should stop complaining and just build something to solve the problem. At least Valve doesn't seem aggressive against scraping Steam data and the like.