Valve Is Making Game Devs Use Actual Screenshots On Steam

[Guest]

Valve announced that developers will no longer be able to include pre-rendered photos, concept art, or marketing images under the "screenshots" section of a title's Steam page.

Valve Is Making Game Devs Use Actual Screenshots On Steam : Read more

 

[WildCard999]

Good, the whole point of a screen shot is to show actual gameplay, not some pre-rendered pic/video to make the game seem better then it actually is (Example: No Man's Sky).

 

[clonazepam]

Dragon's Dogma is another good example. Obviously doctored screenshots, and also not even from the player's perspective.

Clean it up for the sake of the children. For many, the gaming industry is their first real introduction into the world of business. Don't let them grow up already jaded to shady business practices.

I'm only half serious, but yeah, good move by Valve.

 

[ledhead11]

Awesome! Truth in advertising, what a concept!

 

[none12345]

About time they crack down on this.

 

[badaxe2]

It makes sense, since we're at a stage when pre-rendered anything should be a thing of the past. Well, at least except for RTS cinematics perhaps.

 

[anonymousdude]

Makes sense to me especially after the whole No Mans Sky fiasco.

 

[chicofehr]

It would be great if players could upload their own images too steam like on the nexus mod website. Also there are many abandoned games on Steam and I wonder how they will enforce this if the developer doesn't respond. Will they change the pictures themselves?

 

[Kimonajane]

Good

 

[ADHDgaming]

chicofehr they will likely just take it off the store

 

[amateramasu]

It would be great if players could upload their own images too steam like on the nexus mod website. Also there are many abandoned games on Steam and I wonder how they will enforce this if the developer doesn't respond. Will they change the pictures themselves?

They'll probably just remove the images, I think they're doing this pre-emptively before changing the whole ui of the store page

 

[tingRe]

When will they demand refunds be given to customers who are screwed by DRM that refuses to let the game run on their systems?

 

[synphul]

This is a good move, screenshots should be just that, screenshots. Even cinematic scenes are a bit misleading while technically being 'screenshots' for many games since the cinematic scene is often rendered much higher with more amazing camera angles adding to effects that the user won't actually experience during game play.

 

[old_newbie]

This is not only for promo pics vs gameplay, it is also for blatant false advertising. Take "One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3" for example. The images on the steam screenshots are from the PS4 version. This wouldn't be so bad for a PC master race guy, except for the fact that the Steam PC version is actually a crappy PS3/Vita port, with nowhere near the graphical effects and detail of the PS4 screenshots that are shown. This is a bad trend for multi-system titles which has been around for a while (in the old days the "better" PC images were displayed on console adverts in magazines). Kudos to Valve for the crackdown on Steam.

 

[alidan]

@clonazepam to be fair with dragons dogma, those screenshots are likely all from in game, just with a developer's tools to change the camera angle. Im perfectly ok with them making a screenshot more dynamic so long as they don't outright lie about what the game looks like.

@badaxe2 it honestly depends entirely on the kind of game or style they are going for, take grim dawns opening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpqtoLyNG-E

you could make it all in engine, but i don't mind these kind of pre rendered. but as we move closer and closer to 4k, i really want in engine cutscenes, as they SO don't require massive space for the video.

@chicofehr just an example http://steamcommunity.com/app/219990/screenshots/
I make arguments against steam curation based on I want to buy some bad games every now and then, but I would never buy them from from a shady dev website that looks like a scam. they could make user screenshots a thing right below the dev curated ones. I mean look at some of the grim dawn ones, I would never take deve curation away because what if some people wanted to troll the game and post them doing horribly in the game on purpose, or made the game look like the biggest menu simulator possible, with grim dawn at some point your items can litterally take up an entire screen with text about what it does and stats, then compare it to an item that does the same thing, and that item can go in 2 slots so now there is a third item layered in there too.

@tingRe they already do, you get a blanket refund if the game is less then 14 days old or less then 2 hours played. If you went longer, someone reviews the refund request.

@old_newbie this is more of koie tecmo is a horrible developer/publisher then a normal problem for everyone else.

 

[knowom]

Good work on Valve's part to bring some integrity to the gaming industry.

 

[jimmysmitty]

It makes sense, since we're at a stage when pre-rendered anything should be a thing of the past. Well, at least except for RTS cinematics perhaps.

I don't think we will ever find a day where pre-rendered does not in some way look better. Until we can of course literally re-produce real life visuals.

Cinematics I am not against. For instance most of TF2s videos are all cinematics but they are also funny as hell and fun. They, however, do still reside in the game itself so they are fine.

 

[alidan]

It makes sense, since we're at a stage when pre-rendered anything should be a thing of the past. Well, at least except for RTS cinematics perhaps.

I don't think we will ever find a day where pre-rendered does not in some way look better. Until we can of course literally re-produce real life visuals.

Cinematics I am not against. For instance most of TF2s videos are all cinematics but they are also funny as hell and fun. They, however, do still reside in the game itself so they are fine.

look back at older games, and their craptacular 3d rendering, but the game itself, even if it is FAR more basic, still looks better then the render.

today, a pre rendered video looks meh, and only makes me mad because i don't want it in a game that's already 50-60 damn gigs, Ill take in game almost any time over cg

 

[jimmysmitty]

It makes sense, since we're at a stage when pre-rendered anything should be a thing of the past. Well, at least except for RTS cinematics perhaps.

I don't think we will ever find a day where pre-rendered does not in some way look better. Until we can of course literally re-produce real life visuals.

Cinematics I am not against. For instance most of TF2s videos are all cinematics but they are also funny as hell and fun. They, however, do still reside in the game itself so they are fine.

look back at older games, and their craptacular 3d rendering, but the game itself, even if it is FAR more basic, still looks better then the render.

today, a pre rendered video looks meh, and only makes me mad because i don't want it in a game that's already 50-60 damn gigs, Ill take in game almost any time over cg

Most of the larger games are due more to the texture sizes these days rather than the pre-rendered stuff.

TF2 looks the same, although some of their older Meet the Team look a bit worse since they have updated the graphics in TF2 a few times.

Just an example, Wolfenstein is a massive game because of the id TECH 5s MEGATextures not because of pre-rendered scenes.

 

[alidan]

It makes sense, since we're at a stage when pre-rendered anything should be a thing of the past. Well, at least except for RTS cinematics perhaps.

I don't think we will ever find a day where pre-rendered does not in some way look better. Until we can of course literally re-produce real life visuals.

Cinematics I am not against. For instance most of TF2s videos are all cinematics but they are also funny as hell and fun. They, however, do still reside in the game itself so they are fine.

look back at older games, and their craptacular 3d rendering, but the game itself, even if it is FAR more basic, still looks better then the render.

today, a pre rendered video looks meh, and only makes me mad because i don't want it in a game that's already 50-60 damn gigs, Ill take in game almost any time over cg

Most of the larger games are due more to the texture sizes these days rather than the pre-rendered stuff.

TF2 looks the same, although some of their older Meet the Team look a bit worse since they have updated the graphics in TF2 a few times.

Just an example, Wolfenstein is a massive game because of the id TECH 5s MEGATextures not because of pre-rendered scenes.

Oh, I get that, but every time I see pre rendered video in a game that looks... meh, let's take valkyria chronicles and it makes me mad the game used 25gb of my hdd when it clearly didn't need to. If i can see where the detail went, like shadow warrior 2, Im perfectly ok with the 12 gb install, but lets go a game like titanfall, the first one, where 20-30gb was all uncompressed audio... I have a fairly crap cpu, but in many intensive games, I have my own music play and its either flac or mp3, pretty sure they could have cut a crap ton of space out if they compressed.

on a side note with wolfenstein, from my understanding, my computer was able to get 30+ fps when I did not look around, sometimes hitting 60, but because of their cuda backed texture decode which falls back on the cpu when cuda is not used, and nothing being held in ram, it all streams, I could not get the game to go over 12fps when moving around. the megatexture system, at least as it existed in that engine, was flawed beyond words, especially when there are quite a number of games that at least to me, look and play better then it did, crysis 3 is 14gb, dragon age inquisition is 30, battlefield 4 is 24, there are probably a number of other games i'm not thinking of because I either don't have them or just haven't stood out as games I remember, and on my brother's computer which does have a modern cpu, I was constantly up against things that showed pixels in the textures, for 50gb that's not acceptable to me and screams heavily flawed system