The games’ soundtracks will no longer be available in the form of a DLC on Steam.
We’re fairly confident that this happened to you before: you were browsing Steam, and then found a game which you didn’t like, yet the soundtrack caught your attention. Gabe Newell stepped in at this point: until now, Valve‘s digital platform listed the soundtrack as DLC. It meant that if you did not own the base game, you could not acquire the soundtrack, meaning you had to buy the game to have the option to buy the music of said game! Also, you even had to install the game to download the soundtrack, which is a net waste of time and bandwidth… (And then we didn’t even go into how you had to find the music on your hard drive yourself, or go to the game’s properties window and then pick the DLC tab!)
As Valve saw that it was a terrible system (especially for those who happen to have a data cap on their Internet connection…), they announced that they will use a new, more customer-friendly system with new soundtrack releases. Quoting their list: „Customers can now purchase soundtracks without purchasing the base game. Customers can now download soundtracks without downloading the base game. Customers can browse and manage their owned and downloaded soundtracks directly from the new Steam library. Customers can configure a Steam “music” directory where all soundtrack content will be placed, rather than having to locate it in subdirectories of game content. Developers can upload and manage soundtrack content entirely through the partner site, without using steamcmd. Developers can sell soundtracks where the base game itself is not available for sale on Steam.” In short, content providers will also have a simpler approach to publishing soundtracks, including for games that might have been wiped from Steam since. (That’s going to be interesting…)
The standalone soundtracks’ standard format will be MP3, but there will be options to acquire them in FLAC or WAV formats, as well as „bits of associated content,” including album artwork or liner notes for the songs. The new user interface will also allow listening to music within Steam easily.
Some time is still required for the developers to convert the DLC into standalone soundtracks, but Valve will provide them with a tool that automates the process. „This is an initial release of these features for partners. We’re planning on launching these features in a wider way, including a sale event, on January 20th,” Valve said in the announcement. Either they are preparing for a soundtrack sale, or they hint at a Chinese New Year sale (the first day of the new Chinese year will be January 25).
Speaking of China, Valve‘s December Steam Hardware and Software Survey, which is completely optional (you can simply close its pop-up window, but if you wish to participate with a single click, it collects your system data – operating system, CPU, GPU, RAM, system language, free storage space, etc.), brought up an interesting change. Until now, 30-40% of users have used Steam in English, but the 2019 December survey results show a significant boost in Mandarin (Simplified) Chinese users, who took the lead with 37.8%, which is a 14.4% increase from November! The English users’ amount has shrunk to 30.4%. However, it might not be entirely true: in April 2018, Valve had to fix an issue that had Asian Internet cafe users participate in the survey several times, skewing the results. AMD’s Scott Herkelman also believes that Valve’s survey is not representative of the market share of AMD and/or Intel.
Still, what could be behind the surprising jump in Chinese users? The country mandates each game to have a license to be officially on the market in China, but the censors have technically frozen this process, and somehow, Steam seems to be unaffected, and guess where the Chinese players go to play some games – Valve’s platform. It explains why Chinese games (Chinese Parents, Scroll of Taiwu, Sands of Salzaar…) end up on the charts, too.
Steam continues to do significant improvement this year, too.
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