7 ms·

Valve should admit fault and pay the fine. Although they finally have a refund system in place on Steam these days, previously their system could be considered

by brandur 10y ago

Valve should admit fault and pay the fine. Although they finally have a refund system in place on Steam these days, previously their system could be considered borderline fraudulent. In the past, I bought ~3 3-D games that claimed Mac support, but turned out to be completely non-functional on the platform because I had an Intel GPU. Upon pointing it out to Valve and the developers, they would deny fault, and reply that I should have read the system requirements more carefully. That may be true, but given that the majority of all Macs sold today come with Intel chipsets, there should have been a marquee warning in a 50 point font indicating that Mac is "kind of" supported, but not really.

x0x0 10y ago
Also, while it would obviously not catch every case, a warning that hey, this game won't work on your current system seems like a pretty low bar. The valve clients definitely can and I think do capture system hardware.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  To be fair, the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page from the Steam website. Could they put the system info in a cookie?
  - x0x0 10y ago
    No, the client can push it to a valve hosted db. So yes, there are corner cases. Eg if you've never installed the client this won't help with your first purchase. But so what?
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    > the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page from the Steam website. No one told them they had to architect it that way. It'd be a reasonable requirement to have the purchasing experience from within the desktop client be aware of what the computer running the client can actually support. If that means doing something a little bit smarter than a simple embedded browser, then so be it. The Google Play Store knows which apps are and aren't compatible with all of my devices, and I don't consider that to be an especially high bar (but rather, the minimum).
  - tomnipotent 10y ago
    Would be trivial to pass the data as custom HTTP headers.
  - alcari 10y ago
    The client connects to the backend with a binary protocol that, among other things, gives it a token which it hands off to a web API that returns a valid cookie for the Steam store. They inject that cookie into the integrated browser instance. That's the tech they already have on hand.
- stablemap 10y ago
  Indeed: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
- erik 10y ago
  PC game hardware requirements are fuzzy though. It wouldn't be impossible, but it isn't obvious how to do it either.
  - SolarNet 10y ago
    Well I think instruction set is a pretty easy bar to start with. Heck you could do it automatically. Is the executable compliant x86? is the User's machine x86? I could program a prototype for that in a few minutes if I had the info valve does already.
    - sunahe 10y ago
      Stram games that you buy are not restricted to a single machine. I often buy games from a phone client and later (not) play them on one of my two PCs. Seeing any compatibility warnings when I buy would be quite weird.
      - x0x0 10y ago
        Valve would obviously keep every hardware you've ever logged into the steam client on. So if you've played a steam game on the Sunahe account on a windows box, aha, Sunahe has windows! No warning. But a red box for graphics intensive games that says "We've never seen you on a device that can play this" is, again, a low bar. Or a windows only game for an account that is mac only.
        spdionis 10y ago
        Not very useful. If you have at least once played on an old computer that you don't use anymore but which had windows installed this would break. And before you say that steam could detect that i don't use that computer anymore, they would have to ask for confirmation and that would be unexpected and annoying in my opinion. Generally the necessary UX would be too complex to be useful.
        izacus 10y ago
- rincebrain 10y ago
  The caveat is that it wouldn't be retroactive, at _best_ (to say nothing of how they'd need to quantify comparison between extremely different hardware types) - currently the hardware requirements are freetext fields with no constraints, which is how you get things like the requirements on [1]. [1] - http://store.steampowered.com/app/391570/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/391570/
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    Steam could have some sort of automated benchmarking service - start with a server with a decent video card, and post the specs. Hire a gaming bot maker to make some kind of testing AI, and let it just play through games and automatically post the FPS statistics. Or maybe someone could start an independent startup that provides this automated benchmarking service. I guess it's a legit excuse to learn how to write a gaming bot, as a weekend project.
    - rincebrain 10y ago
      Sure, but you'd still need volunteers to run (and not cheat) their benchmarking service on the long tail of far too many hardware variants for them to purchase and keep in a dark room somewhere, as well as some way for vendors to set the minimum requirements in a useful manner (e.g. ideally a one-dimensional scale per type of requirement), or it's not going to get used. I think it's certainly doable to some approximation of correct, and that Valve is probably in the best position of all the game distributors to do it with their existing HW survey infrastructure (and quantities of app on their platform) giving them a large background in what they're looking to quantify, and for whom. I just wanted to observe that it's far from trivial, and would still involve some level of crowdsourcing data (or paying someone like PassMark to use their single numbers for performance of given pieces of hardware as a scale for vendors to map things against, though the different workload numbers show that making this comparison isn't simple...)
    - w-ll 10y ago
      Steam had a benchmark in CS:Source and i'm disappointed they haven't added a more modern one. I know they track hardware data, but I like to do comparisons when I upgrade and using various other benchmarks and tracking/comparing results is hit or miss.
busterarm 10y ago
If you have under 2 hours played on any game they give you automatic refunds if you request it. Did you actually ask for a refund? Game developers on Steam != Valve
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  That is a relatively new thing. In the past you had to get a hold of their support, which was hit or miss, and hope they would do you a favor.
  - brandur 10y ago
    Exactly. Steam operated for a very, very long time with no refund system at all. It's a positive thing that they've finally added one after all these years.
    - blakeyrat 10y ago
      (And they only did because EA's Origin has had a return policy from its founding. Competition is good. Monopolies are bad.)
izacus 10y ago
Hmm, I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel chips not being able to run most of the modern things. At some point you as a customer need to accept just a tiny bit of responsibility for your purchases, it's not up to companies to babysit you and check if you actually need the thing you're buying. Especially on a storefront like Steam, where you can buy a game on one platform to play it on another.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel chips not being able to run most of the modern things. Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years. When I worked at retail, IT support and at Apple Care almost every single PC game issue a customer brought to me was for, you guessed it, them buying it without looking at the requirements and their PC not meeting the requirements. Look at it from someone without a technical background (the majority of PC owners): they don't know what their system has, they don't know what many of the terms mean or what's better than another and they don't understand drivers. At all. The PC games that required the least amount of support? They were the runs that could run on practically anything and, granted, running on something sub-optimal is going to not be as awesome but hey at least it runs. There are many game frameworks that support this type of graceful degradation. I would like to see more companies adopt this attitude so anyone can buy any PC game and expect it to at least run.
  - izacus 10y ago
    > Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years. Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"? What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs and requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong.

by brandur 10y ago

x0x0 10y ago

Also, while it would obviously not catch every case, a warning that hey, this game won't work on your current system seems like a pretty low bar. The valve clients definitely can and I think do capture system hardware.

colejohnson66 10y ago
To be fair, the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page from the Steam website. Could they put the system info in a cookie?
- x0x0 10y ago
  No, the client can push it to a valve hosted db. So yes, there are corner cases. Eg if you've never installed the client this won't help with your first purchase. But so what?
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  > the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page from the Steam website. No one told them they had to architect it that way. It'd be a reasonable requirement to have the purchasing experience from within the desktop client be aware of what the computer running the client can actually support. If that means doing something a little bit smarter than a simple embedded browser, then so be it. The Google Play Store knows which apps are and aren't compatible with all of my devices, and I don't consider that to be an especially high bar (but rather, the minimum).
- tomnipotent 10y ago
  Would be trivial to pass the data as custom HTTP headers.
- alcari 10y ago
  The client connects to the backend with a binary protocol that, among other things, gives it a token which it hands off to a web API that returns a valid cookie for the Steam store. They inject that cookie into the integrated browser instance. That's the tech they already have on hand.
stablemap 10y ago
Indeed: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
erik 10y ago
PC game hardware requirements are fuzzy though. It wouldn't be impossible, but it isn't obvious how to do it either.
- SolarNet 10y ago
  Well I think instruction set is a pretty easy bar to start with. Heck you could do it automatically. Is the executable compliant x86? is the User's machine x86? I could program a prototype for that in a few minutes if I had the info valve does already.
  - sunahe 10y ago
    Stram games that you buy are not restricted to a single machine. I often buy games from a phone client and later (not) play them on one of my two PCs. Seeing any compatibility warnings when I buy would be quite weird.
    - x0x0 10y ago
      Valve would obviously keep every hardware you've ever logged into the steam client on. So if you've played a steam game on the Sunahe account on a windows box, aha, Sunahe has windows! No warning. But a red box for graphics intensive games that says "We've never seen you on a device that can play this" is, again, a low bar. Or a windows only game for an account that is mac only.
      - spdionis 10y ago
        Not very useful. If you have at least once played on an old computer that you don't use anymore but which had windows installed this would break. And before you say that steam could detect that i don't use that computer anymore, they would have to ask for confirmation and that would be unexpected and annoying in my opinion. Generally the necessary UX would be too complex to be useful.
        izacus 10y ago
rincebrain 10y ago
The caveat is that it wouldn't be retroactive, at _best_ (to say nothing of how they'd need to quantify comparison between extremely different hardware types) - currently the hardware requirements are freetext fields with no constraints, which is how you get things like the requirements on [1]. [1] - http://store.steampowered.com/app/391570/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/391570/
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Steam could have some sort of automated benchmarking service - start with a server with a decent video card, and post the specs. Hire a gaming bot maker to make some kind of testing AI, and let it just play through games and automatically post the FPS statistics. Or maybe someone could start an independent startup that provides this automated benchmarking service. I guess it's a legit excuse to learn how to write a gaming bot, as a weekend project.
  - rincebrain 10y ago
    Sure, but you'd still need volunteers to run (and not cheat) their benchmarking service on the long tail of far too many hardware variants for them to purchase and keep in a dark room somewhere, as well as some way for vendors to set the minimum requirements in a useful manner (e.g. ideally a one-dimensional scale per type of requirement), or it's not going to get used. I think it's certainly doable to some approximation of correct, and that Valve is probably in the best position of all the game distributors to do it with their existing HW survey infrastructure (and quantities of app on their platform) giving them a large background in what they're looking to quantify, and for whom. I just wanted to observe that it's far from trivial, and would still involve some level of crowdsourcing data (or paying someone like PassMark to use their single numbers for performance of given pieces of hardware as a scale for vendors to map things against, though the different workload numbers show that making this comparison isn't simple...)
  - w-ll 10y ago
    Steam had a benchmark in CS:Source and i'm disappointed they haven't added a more modern one. I know they track hardware data, but I like to do comparisons when I upgrade and using various other benchmarks and tracking/comparing results is hit or miss.

busterarm 10y ago

If you have under 2 hours played on any game they give you automatic refunds if you request it. Did you actually ask for a refund? Game developers on Steam != Valve

hvidgaard 10y ago
That is a relatively new thing. In the past you had to get a hold of their support, which was hit or miss, and hope they would do you a favor.
- brandur 10y ago
  Exactly. Steam operated for a very, very long time with no refund system at all. It's a positive thing that they've finally added one after all these years.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    (And they only did because EA's Origin has had a return policy from its founding. Competition is good. Monopolies are bad.)

izacus 10y ago

Hmm, I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel chips not being able to run most of the modern things. At some point you as a customer need to accept just a tiny bit of responsibility for your purchases, it's not up to companies to babysit you and check if you actually need the thing you're buying. Especially on a storefront like Steam, where you can buy a game on one platform to play it on another.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel chips not being able to run most of the modern things. Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years. When I worked at retail, IT support and at Apple Care almost every single PC game issue a customer brought to me was for, you guessed it, them buying it without looking at the requirements and their PC not meeting the requirements. Look at it from someone without a technical background (the majority of PC owners): they don't know what their system has, they don't know what many of the terms mean or what's better than another and they don't understand drivers. At all. The PC games that required the least amount of support? They were the runs that could run on practically anything and, granted, running on something sub-optimal is going to not be as awesome but hey at least it runs. There are many game frameworks that support this type of graceful degradation. I would like to see more companies adopt this attitude so anyone can buy any PC game and expect it to at least run.
- izacus 10y ago
  > Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years. Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"? What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs and requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong.