With tonight's update, we will be releasing our first version of Steam Workshop for games. This means when publishing a game on our platform, it'll go on the workshop.
What’s good about this change
You can subscribe to your favourite games, and they stay updated and ready to play
You can filter the menu to show only your subscribed games
It's familiar to users
You can play your games and maps entirely offline
Some gotchas
A game has to be downloaded before you can set it up (if it has properties to change, like lobby setup) - The menu flow is changing over the next few weeks to accommodate this.
A collection of games may use more disk space than before - we can’t use our asset deduplication system with Steam Workshop.
A few notes for developers
When you publish a game, you’ll be asked to publish to workshop
The publisher moves your media, description and other details over to the Workshop for you, to make the migration period easy
Only the Workshop item’s author can publish new versions. Collaborators can’t do this yet
yeah i don't really see the point. a necessary evil for what? lots of games will not be reuploaded, do players care where the games are downloaded from?
nothing was wrong with asset.party, it actually worked really well, and I think it's a shame FP was pushed to adopt workshop and have all of that foundation work having to be ripped out.
imo, no use arguing or crying over this - They're trying to get players back on the platform, and many of them won't even entertain the idea of even trying a "moddable" platform, if "moddable" isn't achieved via Steam Workshop. I agree, there's little logic to be found here, but it is what it is.
We can either keep the system we like as creators (asset.party) and have nobody to play our games, or FP can send a good and warming message to potential players that "see, we listen to your feedback, come try the mods out!". I know I'd rather give up asset.party if that means that we could get more player retention, personally.
To be devils advocate, asset.party did bury the mod platform discoverability a little bit - You'd either access it via web, or you would have to launch the game to access cloud assets. I think that majority of casual modders just default out to modding by looking for mods via the steam workshop client page, and if they can't find it, they give up.
Devultj, is this obligatory to do for game developers who plan to export and publish their games as standalone? Is it really required to put our individual assets on Steam Workshop?
for server-dependent games (external services on the dedi, server-side persistence), is there a way to flag a package as dedicated-only so it can’t be launched offline/as a listen host? or is the expectation that we detect it at runtime?
Part of me is hoping a couple months from now, this will all be revealed as a joke and Terry returns better than ever. On the other hand, exploring the other side might help find the best of both worlds...
I can already see how overcrowded the workshop is with games being mixed in with maps, and models. I can also imagine how annoying it will be for people to have a bunch of games subscribed and then having them get updated every 5 minutes, in which case steam will then download it even if you aren't really playing that game actively, don't say "You can unsubscribe from games" because the workshop experience has always been subscribe to a bunch of shit and forget about it
I seriously don't understand the logic behind this thought process.
You can subscribe to your favourite games, and they stay updated and ready to play
Okay, so games can stay updated without launching the platform. Overall it's a positive.
You can filter the menu to show only your subscribed games
Why could this not be a feature implemented into the current system? What was stopping us from being able to like/favourite/subscribe to games on the website or from inside the platform?
It's familiar to users
Enshittifying the experience for the sake of nostalgia instead of building a better system. If familiarity is so important why not remake the main menu for the 46th time so that it looks like the Steam Workshop instead of a Netflix homescreen?
You can play your games and maps entirely offline
Why was this not something the platform is able to support without the workshop? I still need an internet connection to download the content in the first place, it doesn't matter if it is from Steam or inside the platform directly.
There is one true positive here; that we can download and update content without launching the game - that's it. The list of 'gotchas' really doesn't feel like it really covers all the downsides that people have mentioned over the last few weeks either.
Organizations are now more or less useless - individual users now need to upload to the Workshop, which means uploads are linked directly to your Steam account. Look at Facepunch's games - How am I supposed to know that Block Party is a Facepunch game? How am I supposed to know which Sandbox mode is the Facepunch made one? Developers and teams that want to develop under a company/studio name are now forced to either make their Steam account their brand, or now have to advertise under different names?
How is Discoverability expected to work? Are we really going to lose things like reviews, categories, and recommendations that the platform currently has just to have it replaced with 'Most Popular' and 'Most Subscribed'?
We had really nice features like higher resolution textures downloading while you played - which will no longer be supported with the Workshop - and instead it gets replaced with a system that can't handle duplicate assets and bloats the file size of games. Having a really hard time justifying this change.
It really feels like a huge step backwards - instead of building on top of the system you already had and making it great you're now tossing it all out just to have the same limitations that a 10 year old game has just for the sake of nostalgia and the 1% who's internet connection relies on a hamster wheel. Why do we need to now suffer with a system that is out of Facepunch's control instead of improving on the one that you had control over?
Yeah I'm a bit confused as well, were people really leaving reviews that specifically mentioned they wanted games on the steam workshop? I can understand addons for s&box, being able to launch up the familiar workshop menu and subscribe to those, but was there really friction with games existing on sbox.game?
The experience is exactly the same for the player as well, they'll launch up s&box, get fed a bunch of games, click on it to install/download, then starting playing. Unless you think people are going to start using steam workshop to discover games to play?
I seriously don't understand the logic behind this thought process.
You can subscribe to your favourite games, and they stay updated and ready to play
Okay, so games can stay updated without launching the platform. Overall it's a positive.
You can filter the menu to show only your subscribed games
Why could this not be a feature implemented into the current system? What was stopping us from being able to like/favourite/subscribe to games on the website or from inside the platform?
It's familiar to users
Enshittifying the experience for the sake of nostalgia instead of building a better system. If familiarity is so important why not remake the main menu for the 46th time so that it looks like the Steam Workshop instead of a Netflix homescreen?
You can play your games and maps entirely offline
Why was this not something the platform is able to support without the workshop? I still need an internet connection to download the content in the first place, it doesn't matter if it is from Steam or inside the platform directly.
There is one true positive here; that we can download and update content without launching the game - that's it. The list of 'gotchas' really doesn't feel like it really covers all the downsides that people have mentioned over the last few weeks either.
Organizations are now more or less useless - individual users now need to upload to the Workshop, which means uploads are linked directly to your Steam account. Look at Facepunch's games - How am I supposed to know that Block Party is a Facepunch game? How am I supposed to know which Sandbox mode is the Facepunch made one? Developers and teams that want to develop under a company/studio name are now forced to either make their Steam account their brand, or now have to advertise under different names?
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How is Discoverability expected to work? Are we really going to lose things like reviews, categories, and recommendations that the platform currently has just to have it replaced with 'Most Popular' and 'Most Subscribed'?
It really feels like a huge step backwards - instead of building on top of the system you already had and making it great you're now tossing it all out just to have the same limitations that a 10 year old game has just for the sake of nostalgia and the 1% who's internet connection relies on a hamster wheel. Why do we need to now suffer with a system that is out of Facepunch's control instead of improving on the one that you had control over?
I hope you all reconsider.
How is Discoverability expected to work? Are we really going to lose things like reviews, categories, and recommendations that the platform currently has just to have it replaced with 'Most Popular' and 'Most Subscribed'?
This is my biggest worry. I know things have to change and I do not mind the workshop as a backend as I can see the benefits, but using the workshop for discoverability is a major downgrade that I cannot see working well.
The blog does that though
Discoverability is still backed by our own workshop... Eventually when we migrate fully to the steam workshop
