By Andrew Dodson on November 3, 2016 at 7:35am
Changes are coming to the Steam store, and they are good ones. Right now, you could go to any number of Steam Store pages, check out a game's screenshots and....maybe have an idea of what the game looks like. All too often, developers use the screenshot sections on their games' store pages to show off concept art or pre-rendered graphics that aren't reflective of what final gameplay will actually look like. Sometimes, this is fine but as Steam grows ever more popular as a platform for selling games, it's becoming more and more difficult to actually know what you're buying when you just consider the screenshots.
Well, Steam has recently taken a stance on using non-gameplay images as screenshots and is pressuring developers to actually show the game in these sections.
They're quick to point out that they too are guilty of using concept art for some of their titles (they use "DOTA 2" as the example) but if we check out the "DOTA 2" store page now, we see that they've already made the changes and the screenshots now show actual gameplay. Valve is definitely leading by example in this regard.
Of course, if you look at the language of the announcement, it doesn't seem like Valve is going to be forcing any developers to make changes and is simply "asking" that they follow this newly defined guideline. It will be interesting to see if this will be a point that Valve will actually enforce on games that use it's platform or if it's just empty talk.
