The Malgorian Blog

I vaguely remember the whole point of steam queue suggestions being to suggest things steam thinks you'll be interested in based on various reasons. Actual reasons. Reasons that might actually make sense. "Similar to this game you own." "Similar to other games you play." etc.



This is in your discovery queue just to see if you might be interested.

You've already looked at a lot of games that we have the best information on for you. Until new games release, you might see less relevant games as you explore more of your queue.


I suddenly started seeing this for almost all of the suggestions it gives me. Now and then I see things being in my queue simply because it's on sale. No other reason to show it at me.

I think it's time to stop checking the steam queues for a few months.

Ordered a mid-tier Steam Deck earlier this week. Tracking shows it should show up on Monday. Which might mean it'll show up on Saturday. Either day is fine really as I have Monday off for vacation. I'll just be keeping a close eye on the tracking each day and stay at home if I see it go out.

Probably going to need/want a Steam Dock as well since that allows the deck to connect to a wired connection instead of depending on wifi. Again that's fine as I was planning on picking one of those up too. Might order that on Monday after I have the Deck in my hands.

We'll see if it lives up to the hype. At the very least it'll probably be able to play more of the games in my collection than my actual computer. ^^

This ordeal did teach me to never let Steam save my billing information though. When I decided to do so since I was ordering an actual physical object this time, I messed up. I typo-ed the postal code - had a number where a letter should have been. Steam tries to auto-fill Shipping info with your Billing info, so I wanted to try to get this fixed. (Was able to fix the Shipping info itself though.)

Turns out to change the billing info you need to basically re-add a credit card. Great. If you have a credit card or are willing to let Steam have it. So I had no way to do it. Put a note in to steam's support and they finally got back to me 3-4 days later. They actually told me due to the country I'm in, I'm not allowed to save my billing info anyway so they unsaved the entire thing.

Would be great if they'd just not to auto-save my fucking billing info every time I make a purchase then eh? Not like it's a secret to them what my country is when I'm giving them my address. Haven't bought anything since then so I don't know if it'll go back to trying to auto-save my billing info. (it's auto-checked. Gotta remove the checkmark before continuing with the purchase.)

Steam recently started shoving in everyone's face via their personalized steam fronts, the Steam Deck. Despite how I frame it in the last sentence, I'm not actually turned off of the idea of a handheld steam machine. (It's more a critique about what I think about the personalized store front experience given how bad it is at predicting shit I want to see.)

It's actually quite an expensive piece of hardware, with Canadian price tags ranging from 499 to 819 dollars, but then I bought a Switch for 399 dollars. If I were to get one of these Decks it would be for two reasons perhaps.

1. Potential Portability.
2. Potentially removing the vice grip Microsoft would have on my desktop choices.

As a handheld, it's definitely intended as a portable machine - and that could be useful for me if I just wanna lie down on the couch or bed and play some games, or to take with me on vacation potentially. My entire steam collection at my fingertips! Additionally this thing is designed to be able to plugged into your TV - it'll even have a sold separate docking station to make that more convenient. Kinda Switch-ish in that respect but that's fine too.

With regards to Microsoft, if I do most/all of my PC gaming on the Deck then I'll be more freely able to use Linux without sacrificing the ability to play games. I wish a lot more games would simply run on Linux but we got that chicken and egg thing going on with game availability on Linux. People don't port to Linux because it doesn't make economic sense - people don't buy games on Linux because the games essentially aren't available.

Even if this Deck itself is running Windows (and it likely is given Valve bragging it'll play the bulk of games on the platform, even current AAA titles) that isn't as big a concern to me. I'm not 100% about getting away from everything Microsoft - it's just that Microsoft's vice grip on consumer choice over the whole games issue becomes far less a concern if it's possible to scoop up all the games and put them into a single dedicated unit designed to play them.

Also the Deck is at the end of the day "Just a PC" according to Valve that's essentially designed by default to run steam. However as they say in their advertising, there's nothing stopping you from installing third party games and software on it.

This makes me think "Ooo. Would be fun to install GOG Galaxy alongside it!" Whether I would or not I don't know, but it would be nice to have the option there.

The biggest hurdle for me is how to pay for it. I ain't handing over credit card numbers for gaming shit. I made that decision years ago as I watched the Sony PS3 shit go down. I also don't hand credit card numbers over for things like repeated billing plans like Netflix. If they want my money they'll make prepaid cards available. This is the ONLY reason Crunchy Roll doesn't get any of my money. If they had prepaid cards available at stores in Canada I'd let my netflix subscription lapse in a heartbeat.

It does look like you can buy it via your steam wallet on steam, given that's where you have to reserve them currently for the Q2-Q3 2022 launch. This means I'd have to buy a bunch of prepaid cards for it!

However I'm not going to reserve it. Instead I just wish-listed it so that when it becomes available for general purchase I'll get a notification. This gives me time to watch how it unfolds over the next year in case it gets raked over the coals in early tests over various shit. Between now and Q2-Q3 2022 (Which I believe is Summer/Fall of 2022, so a little over a year minimum - most likely the general sales won't start until Q4 which would be Jan-March 2023.) that's plenty of time to buy some steam cards or at least put some money into savings for those cards later. If I find out I can't just buy it via my steam wallet on Steam itself, everything here is moot and I'll just pass on the system.

In short, the Deck does look nice. Steam is also trying hard to avoid any controller drift issues like we're seeing on the Switch and PS5 controllers (for example) these days. That's also a good reason to wait for general purchase in my opinion... the early birds can tell me if they're seeing a lot of drift despite Steam's apparent concern.

Kinda wanna do a rant on the whole controller drift issues we're seeing more of these years, but I'll hold off on that for now.

On a completely unrelated note (sorta) this Deck would be a good opportunity for Steam to try selling those controllers of theirs again. If people are going to be buying docks for the Deck, they're going to need controllers! While I'm sure a Microsoft controller will work just fine, and I'd probably buy one of their PC controllers for this if I go the dock route, I would like some options.

So, the first Steam Summer Sale with Valve's new sale format has concluded and it's being reported that it's a "Smashing Success". Essentially games bought were up and revenue was up. But I think whether or not it's a success depends on who you were.

For instance "According to Galyonkin, though, about 36.8 million copies of games were sold during the 2016 Summer Sale, compared to 33 million sold in 2015."

So about 3.8 million more games were purchased in this sale compared to the last. There -are- margins of errors since games that sold less than 5000 copies, etc were not included and whatnot. Of course this is true for both sales.

I will point out however, from my own personal browsing, most of the games that dared to go above 70-75% discount tended to be games from small indie devs, games that were out for ages already, or games with bad reps. That wasn't the case in the 2015 sale that had flash sales and daily deals that routinely jumped into the 80-95% discounts.

Anyway, back to the comparison. So it looks like about an extra 3.8 million games were sold during the 2016 sale compared to the older format. This sounds good, until you consider that over this year Steam has seen an increase of about 45 million new users that were eligible to purchase games.

During a sale a single user will usually buy more (often much more) than a single game. For my part, I spent 20 dollars in total since there were some bundles of niche games and the like that were on sale. That's 20 dollars more than I spent on other steam sales since this new format began. (Compared to how I use to spend between 60-120 during a sale when flash sales and daily deals were a thing.)

So what I take from this is that while a few more games were sold, overall FEWER people are actually buying games.

Why is this a smashing success however? Because total revenue was up 40%. Up to 223.2 million compared to $160 million in 2015 when they had 45 million less users. Fewer games sold, more profit. Hell yeah, definitely a success to the devs and Valve!

But not so much a success for gamers. But who cares about those. This is why you'll often see people on Steam and forums complaining about how much the summer sale sucked. Because for gamers, it did. As others will frequently comment "Why do people make such a big deal about the Steam sale now? You can get those kinds of deals ALL YEAR ROUND." And it's true.

These changes came into effect pretty much right after the ability to refund/return games on Steam. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what Steam wanted to avoid - people buying a game during the normal sale, then returning it only to rebuy it when that game came up in a flash sale or daily deal.

When they saw that scenario happening, they had to make a choice. They could do what they did above - simply not give out any better deals during a sale, thereby axing off the time limited sales that everyone were really looking out for and wanted (And thus spent overall more money on).

Or they could have instituted a new rule on their game refund policy, whereby a user would be unable to repurchase a title for 2 weeks after demanding a refund. That would allow the sale to pass by in it's entirety so people wouldn't be scrounging for the cheapest possible price. Either they'll buy the game at it's normal price or they'll wait for a flash sale that made it an instant purchase. If people bought a game and didn't like it, then that's certainly understandable. That's why I don't recommend a 15 day wait period before they can return it. But the odds of the game becoming enjoyable within a 2 week period is extremely unlikely. Especially if no update was done on the game. (I'd argue that the 2 week period could be cancelled prematurely if a dev DOES do an update however.) If they're just trying to bicker about the price then they shouldn't have bought it in the first place. And in this scenario, they'll do just that - until the final day. Like they've done in the previous years.


Choice B, that they didn't take, wouldn't have done much to change things. People would still have the same purchasing habits of either buying things on the first day, or waiting as long as possible, the last day, to purchase things if it didn't show up in a flash/daily deal. I'd argue that with the infusion of an extra 45 million users the Steam sale would have seen even higher revenues compared to the 223.2 million. (Consider myself as one example. I'm sure I would have spent far more than 20 bucks during the sale if it had it's flash sales and daily deals. I would have also been keeping a much closer eye on the sale overall.)

However Choice A, which they did take, meant less work on their part, and higher revenue per game sold on their part. So it was a no brainer. And so long as the overall revenue went up they're going to pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Doing some math, I wouldn't have considered the sale a success myself unless the games/gamer sales maintained the same or increased, and/or the total revenue/gamer remained the same or increased. (Rather than hoping the extra cash/game would be enough to offset the loss of interest in the platform from gamers noted by the fewer purchases per person.)

So, I'd expect them not to be happy unless they had at least sold a total of 44.4 million games in total - to account for the extra 45 MILLION gamers this year compared to last.

Alternatively, I'd expect them to have pulled in at least $215.3 million in overall reven- egads, looks like they did! Which goes to show you how much more money they leeched from each gamer. They just -BARELY- outdid themselves compared to last year after accounting for the extra 45 million users. To me that would still count as more of a breaking-even or even a failure if you want to consider inflation into the issue.

On a side note, I was a bit sore since I couldn't even sell the sale cards I had dups of on the market place due to their new account protection racket requiring a cellphone. I don't have a cellphone. As a result I'd have to wait 2 weeks before my card sales would be shown on the marketplace for others to buy. Problem is, the sale would have been over by then - and those very cards would have disappeared before potential buyers would even see them. Yeah, fuck you steam. :D I went and converted all the cards I collected by spam-clicking through the queues most days into gems. Overall, didn't give a shit.

Want to know what I would like to know? I'd be interested in seeing how GOG did with it's summer sales between 2015 and 2016. Did a few searches for it, but came back without any results. I did notice that their sale looked more interesting overall. I think the main thing holding me back from buying much on GOG is that I can't buy GOG gift cards (Locally at least - unsure if they're even an option though) to add money to my account there, which is the ONLY reason Steam gets any purchases out of me at all.

Want to know the only other thing I noticed about the Steam sales since the format was changed? I mean other than the absence of amazing sales. (As noted, the kinds of deals you find on there now are things a person can find all year round from third party key sellers, etc) What I noticed is that for the first day or three of the sale, Steam is utterly unusable. Everyone knows there's no reason to wait for a good deal now, so everyone goes there on the first day to make their purchases. As a result... LAAAAAAAAAG. That's something I never noticed ever being an issue in the old format - because people will wait for a daily deal. They buy their big 10gig+ game, then start downloading from Steam. 50 million people doing that. What could possibly go wrong. :P

So in summary:
1. More money per game.
2. Less interesting sale overall.(Seriously. They have to bribe you with cards to check your queue.)
3. Insane lag making the store unsearchable, unreliable, and often accidentally logging you out (or thinking you're logged out because they somehow can't verify you.)

I think I'll do a bit of research to see if I can find me some GOG gift cards. Certainly looks like I missed out by not checking up on their sale (due to not having any gift cards, didn't really check it out much.)