Remember No Man’s Sky and all the furore surrounding its release compared to the vast expectations heaped upon it? Well Valve are taking a step that should help reduce some of those feelings in future.
They’re revising their guidelines so that once Discovery Update 2.0 is released in the near future, all store pages should feature in-game screenshots, as opposed illustrations or concept art. They’re leading the charge themselves, updating the DOTA 2 page to reflect the changing rules.
“We haven’t been super crisp on guidelines for screenshots in the past,” Valve note in their guidelines, “so we’d like to take this opportunity to clarify some rules in this space. When the ‘screenshot’ section of a store page is used for images other than screenshots that depict the game, it can make it harder for customers to understand what the product is that they are looking at.”
The important next step is to ensure that these screenshots are updated in the run up to a game’s release. You could quite easily argue that the screenshots on the Steam page for No Man’s Sky were indicative of the game and where it was heading early on during development, but weren’t properly updated as planned features changed over the course of development. That’s what sparked so much of the anger and resentment towards the game when it was released. Still, it’s a good and positive step by Valve.
via Eurogamer
MrYd
So you take a really powerful PC, stick a couple of the most poweful graphics cards you can find in, and turn everything up to maximum. Gorgeous 4K screenshots which run as a nice little slideshow on the Steam page at pretty much the exact framerate the game will be running at like that.
A case of Valve making some vague statement to satisfy a few people that complained about something while not really doing anything at all.
Starman
It’s not just the quality, but what’s shown in the screenshots too. (ie: everything shown must actually be in the game)
camdaz
Would it have made any/much difference if all of No Mans Sky was all screenshots?
I agree with Mryd above, it’s easy for developers to show the best screenshots possible and show off there games the way they want.
TSBonyman
That’s an interesting development. I’ve never had any reason to look at the steam page as i’m on PS4 but i understood it was the videos more so that people were complaining about not being representative.
Avenger
This is a really great step in the right direction for digital store fronts. Of course loads of NMS apologists will hate it for the sake of defence, nevermind common sense about improving representation of products.
The Lone Steven
This is a good direction but it’s Valve covering their arses after the whole NMS turning out to be medicore and 90% of it’s userbase wanting refund stuff.
It is easy for any developer to use full specs but well, I suspect it’s the norm anyway when marketing the stuff etc..
It will be interesting to see how the shovelware “Noes, you are wrong! I WILL SUE YOU!” crowd handle this as it could destroy them. By that, i mean the god awful stuff that is on Steamlight and it really crap. I mean, ET:The game levels of crap. Hopefully, no more repeats of NMS where features were turned out to be lies.
I won’t be responding to any NMS stuff as well, I merely don’t want to so don’t reply to moi.
What? I have no interest. I will throw a frozen digestive at you!