Aura

I'll write a more fully fledged post on it later but I will say that re IGF stuff I am increasingly incredibly enamored with Time Bandit, aka "What if you mashed together Metal Gear Solid, Animal Crossing, Sokoban, and Marxism"

it's really good

Valve launched the Publisher Homepages "open beta" on the 18th of June, 2018. Shortly afterward, on the 29th of June, they launched Franchise homepages.

Those home pages started out with this little button on them, denoting that it's an open beta:

Fast forward to the 3rd of December, 2022, and they instead show this:

Huh, CSS changes aside, this feature is still in the same Beta! period? Hmmmmm. That seems fishy. Well, let's dig into it a bit, shall we?

The first time the Wayback Machine captured the relevant Steamworks documentation, it said this:

Open Beta

Feature Currently in Open Beta

This feature is currently in an open beta, which means we're still working on it, but it's open to all developers and publishers and visible to players.

Known issues and work in progress:
These are the bigger issues that we are currently aware of. If you encounter others, please give us feedback or ask questions in the beta group here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamCreatorHomepageBeta

1. Do not drop a community group that you assigned a custom page URL as it will continue to belong to the dropped community group.
   
2. Newly added games do not automatically add to your creator home page. You need to redo 'Associate your games' in the 'Setting Up' section below for each new game you add. We are looking to make this automatic in the future. 
   
3. What else? Let us know.

As of the 3rd of December, 2022, the Steamworks partner documentation says this:

Open Beta

Feature Currently in Open Beta

This feature is currently in an open beta, which means we're still working on it, but it's open to all developers and publishers and visible to players.

Known issues and work in progress:
These are the bigger issues that we are currently aware of. If you encounter others, please give us feedback or ask questions in the beta group here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamCreatorHomepageBeta

1. Do not drop a community group that you assigned a custom page URL as it will continue to belong to the dropped community group.
   
2. Newly added games do not automatically add to your creator home page. You need to redo 'Associate your games' in the 'Setting Up' section below for each new game you add. We are looking to make this automatic in the future. 
   
3. What else? Let us know.

As you can see, aside from some minor stylesheet changes, in the five years nothing about the feature's status has changed.

My hypothesis:

The people who worked on this worked on it until the 29th of July, 2018, at which point they moved to some other part of Valve and nobody ever looked at this again.

While on the developer/submitter side, steam/console keys for IGF submissions are simply thrown into a sheet... on the judge side this isn't the case, and as such, things need to be carefully handled to allow judges to play builds easily.

The image at the top here shows the judge-side interface for receiving a game key. Judges are assigned one key from the list at random. This has a few important implications:

• There should be no arbitrary text in the key list, as judges could end up being "assigned" the text as a key.
• Keys must not be mixed between platforms or judges may end up with keys they can't use
• Keys must not be mixed between region (where consoles/stores are region based) or judges may end up with keys they can't use

This means that if you have a game where you have keys for switch NA, switch EU, and steam, each of those should be entered as a separate Build in the IGF interface and have its own key sheet.

This means that if you have a game where you have keys for switch NA, switch EU, and steam, each of those should be entered as a separate Build in the IGF interface and have its own key sheet.

Most submittees get this right, but indies who are less familiar with the interface (or are less fluent in english) seem to have trouble with it, so it's worth calling out IMO.

surprising and weird blunder that a TON of devs made this year submitting their games to IGF: marking their game's platform as "steam deck" but not adding any additional platforms, like... "windows"

as a result, these games only get assigned to judges who have steam decks.

it's really easy to fix, you can modify your platforms for a build at any time. But I'm really surprised how many high profile releases made this mistake in particular.

I get IGF's system is kind of opaque so here's a quick summary:

• The Platform field is inclusive - adding more platforms makes the game available to more judges
• The Hardware field is exclusive - adding more required hardware removes judges who don't have that hardware (e.g. a VR headset) from eligibility to judge it