User experience is one of the driving forces behind how Steam operates, according to Valve’s Nathaniel Blue.

In our exclusive interview with him, he highlighted how a lot of Steam was built around “meeting gamers where they’re at”- basically formulating their ideas around the needs of players.

Doing Your Homework To Make A Good Platform

But how do you know exactly what gamers want? Research and partners, according to Nathaniel Blue.

“An old coworker of mine, Mike Dunkle was one of the instrumental people who worked on growing Steam here in Southeast Asia and coming long ago”, Nathaniel explains. “Also eClub being a partner of ours for 19 years now has been a big partner in helping us towards assessing what gamers want”.

“I think our strategies always been to focus on giving gamers features and providing them value and then we just believe if you get if you get the if you get localization right, you get the content right, and then if you get the price affordable and right, then people will typically just naturally look towards purchasing games, right?”, he says.

Of course, Nathaniel was humble enough to not say that Valve had discovered some secret technique to drive users. Instead, he painted the picture of Steam’s strategy as one way more logical one- tuning their services to customer needs, especially in areas with different states of internet infrastructure.

“We didn’t really do anything special, per se. We just kind of thought about what’s the value proposition to gamers to make sure they can get what they need. Because I’ve heard that in the past there was lots of issues around pricing around just being able to get the content in general, right? The cost of content”, he says.

“So I think back then we even did things like delivering Box Copies of the games and having most of the download on the optical drive at the time, right so that you didn’t have to pay for all of the bandwidth to get the game. So it’s kind of like, I think the general theme there is just meeting gamers where they’re at”.

The Steam Deck- Introducing Players To Something New

Of course, that doesn’t always mean being reactive. One triumph of Valve’s in recent years is the Steam Deck- having kickstarted demand for the handheld gaming PC.

“I think the Steam Deck is an example of a meeting gamers where they’re at but they didn’t really know made necessary that they wanted to maybe play their games on the go, right, and as soon as they pick up a Steam Deck and start playing they realize wow, there are games in my library that maybe I didn’t play that plays so well in this scenario”, he explains.

“I know that’s been the case for me, I play very different games on the airplane or on the bus or the train then I play at my PC desktop and so that’s kind of been a fun one”, he adds. “It’s definitely accomplishing our goal which is meeting gamers where they’re at, but also just providing more and more value to gamers over time. How do we make your Steam library more and more valuable to you? That’s gonna be features within Steam but it’s also gonna come in hardware products too like the Steam Deck where it kind of unlocks your game library into another realm of experience”.

While our talk on the Steam Deck wasn’t followed up with a release date for the device in Malaysia, he did drop a hint of who they’d be working with on the matter.

“I think the eClub is probably the local partner that’s probably going to have the most information when we need it. So our goal is to just continue to look at expanding it into to new places here”, he says.

“At Heart We’re Still A Game Developer”

As Steam continues to push on as a platform, you’d be remiss if you’d forgotten Valve’s role as a game developer, too. Some of the biggest esports titles like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike (now re-launched as CS2) are Valve-made and published, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Half-Life 2 and The Orange Box all having all been instrumental in driving players to the platform.

“A lot of people at Valve are working actively on games, so I think at heart we’re still a game developer and a lot of the features that we make on Steam are features that we’d like to see for our own games”, he clarifies.

“So I think an example of that would be like our event feature that we recently launched on Steam in the last few years, which if you see Level Up uses the Our Event feature to build their own landing page where that they can localize and feature different games dynamically change it and these sorts of things”.

“Some of the catalyst to create that was actually from our own game teams: So if you looked back a lot of the big updates to Counter-Strike a lot of the operations, a lot of the Dota 2 large updates we would be creating these very complicated web pages for all of these updates.

He explained that the driving force behind this was giving devs features they’d otherwise need their own website for- helping bring events like Level Up KL to life with the ability to highlight their own selection of games.

This also allowed them to use one of Steam’s biggest threats to customer wallets- the Publisher Weekend sale.

“We went to like other games and publishers doing like Publisher Weekends. “Hey, what would you like to see?” And we just kind of created this huge feature set and then we just built started building that over time”.

“I think that we’re a game developer at heart and that’s and I think that comes across in the way that we build Steam is always focusing on ‘what are features that would be great for us as developer, great for other developers, and then how do we put time into those features and then ship them to everyone?’ “.

Of Localization And Player Needs

Interestingly, another of Steam’s strengths is its language support. Head of Business Development Erik Peterson previously explained that there are more non-English Steam users than English, and that the platform had recently added Indonesian support.

“We’re honestly kind of learning with you part of the catalyst to support Indonesian language was we were seeing some trends in players in Indonesia, but we also were seeing a trend in localization efforts from game developers Indonesian language and so for us looking just at those two things alone we said ‘hey, we should we should focus on Indonesia and make sure that the steam store make sense right to a user there’ “, he says.

“Cuz it’s kind of weird if you land on Steam and you’re like alright, I’m gonna go play a game in my native language but Steam doesn’t support that native language okay, then to you it looks like this isn’t a place for me”, he says. “So for us localization is one of those key pieces that I talked about earlier of like how we would approach growth and also meeting gamers where they’re at. It’s an extension of that but I think we’re gonna learn a lot in the next few days as we meet Indonesian developers [at IGDX]”.

He also said this extends to their support of Simplified Chinese- there are people who want the language, ergo Steam should be supporting it.

“For us it’s again meeting them where they’re at making sure that you can play a game in the language that you want to play. And then for us, we’re looking at some of those stats as we see them in Steam and then just trying to make sure that we’re talking to developers and saying, ‘hey, this is important like look at this chart of growing languages’ ”

Of course, the real appeal is localized pricing. Having game prices adjusted to local spending power is generally pro-consumer, though the bogeyman often parroted is the fear that people will start store-hopping to find lower prices. Nathaniel says the data doesn’t back this claim up, however.

“We try to get pricing right wherever we can with our recommendations. But ultimately it’s up to developers to choose their price on steam, which we feel really important. We think that’s really important that they have their flexibility to choose their own price”, he says.

“We’re looking at people buying games and playing games different languages in different regions in the world and it’s very healthy across many different countries, right? So I think if you if that fear was real right that map would have looked a lot different right, would have been just glowing in a few countries right? In reality, we see people playing all over the world with their games”, Nathaniel continues.

Controller Support

Interestingly enough, Erik’s presentation earlier had also yielded data about the Dualsense and Dualshock controllers- Steam would be working towards separate icons, letting more games communicate if they have support for specific controllers. He also praised PlayStation’s efforts to bring their games to PC, as well as the popularity of the devices for PC gaming.

“It’s also a testament to [PlayStation], right? Like them being excited about PC gaming and bringing so many great games to PC gamers. So they’ve been very supportive and we’re really excited about not only their games on Steam, but also the support of the controller and how well it works”, he says.

There’s also Steam’s overall controller support. Nathaniel says Steam makes sure to support as many controllers as possible, which makes it a boon for both regular users who might not have the latest game pad or niche communities like the FGC- who have a habit of building their own controllers to play games on the platform.

“We’re supporting hundreds and hundreds of controllers. I mean, really are. We have a dedicated team that is passionate about just collecting every controller they can possibly find and then s and then providing support”, he says.

“I think some of our Steam Input APIs and sort of the system that we have where you can customize your controller layout within steam and some of the UI that we’ve worked on there is sort of our approach to gamers, which is if they have a certain controller that they want to use in a certain way, they want to play a game or a game is better with this controller or they have just a preference, we wanna try to support it if we can”.

“That’s an extension of that all of those controllers that we support and then the cool thing about that is then we get it to just watch and see what the real demand looks like for those controllers because Dualshock is a great example of being a great controller and people are super excited about using it and playing PC games with that controller and therefore we’re seeing those results that we talked about”.

How Early Access Is About Helping Developers

Finally, Nathaniel also talked a bit about the Early Access program on Steam. For those not in the loop, Early Access allows games to be sold while also still being in-development: think of it like a public beta for games, with many titles iterating massively throughout their time on Steam. According to the platform’s own metrics, 30% of top games on Steam would be either entering or leaving Early Access- a resounding success for the platform.

Like everything else in Steam, Nathaniel says this feature was born of communicating with developers- specifically ones who wanted to be more transparent about the state of their games when people buy them.

“So at the time there’s a few games like Prison Architect, Kerbal Space Program a few of those games were in a development cycle where they were building it building a game that was already very fun to play”, Nathaniel recalls. “They were actively asking for community involvement sort of the features and how they would build that game, but they didn’t feel like that they could sell that game without some sort of description disclaimer sort of Q&A about what where is this game at? What are the goals for this game around pricing ,around content input, feed features and all these things”.

“So a few of those games actually just were like, hey, we’re not gonna ship our game on Steam unless there’s some some way to treat our game the way that we’re talking about it over here on our website, for example”, he says.

“We worked with them to figure out what would Early Access look like”, Nathaniel continues.”It was really just an extension of the discussion and relationship we were having with those developers at the time. It did definitely came out of an indie development community and then we launched it and lots and lots of games continue to use it”.

The popularity of Early Access doesn’t go both ways, however- Nathaniel warns that just because 30% of top games on Steam are on Early Access, doesn’t mean that you should put your game there thinking it’s a formula for success.

“It’s not a feature that you use to get extra marketing, that you could launch in and not really have the intent of using the community’s feedback”, Nathaniel explains. “You just are using it as a mechanism to sort of pre launch your game unfinished and then launched later”.

“It really is about communication with your fans and asking them for input on development of the game and then through that, hopefully making a better game at launch. We really focus, for example, a lot of our marketing efforts on Steam are focused on launch day. But we see, every day we see Early Access games doing very well as well”.

At the end of the day, Steam’s overall success is born of a solid foundation- knowing where they want to go and then executing on it with informed action. Nathaniel did a great job of highlighting that process, covering everything from language to controller support, to even their motivations behind the Steam Deck.

Our thanks to Nathaniel Blue for taking the time to talk with us about Steam and its progress in the past decade- a fitting way to celebrate one of the most prolific platforms in games.

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