Valve has announced that developers will soon be required to use in-game screenshots for their Steam store pages. Now I know that some of you are jumping around like crazy overjoyed rabbits, however it appears that bullshots won’t be affected by this new policy.
Instead, game developers won’t be able to use concept arts, pre-rendered cinematic stills, or images that contain awards. Which… basically… is not what most of us were hoping for.
As Valve claimed:
“We ask that any images you upload to the ‘screenshot’ section of your store page should be screenshots that show your game. This means avoiding using concept art, pre-rendered cinematic stills, or images that contain awards, marketing copy, or written product descriptions. Please show customers what your game is actually like to play.”
So, this basically means that developers and publishers will still be able to use bullshots. Which kind of sucks as all triple-A games will look better in their screenshots.
Still, this is a step towards the right direction, so here is hoping that a new/future policy will force developers/publishers to use actual screenshots that represent their games and not bullshots.
In case you’re not aware of, bullshots are screenshots from games that are: a) produced in-engine from different angles and rendered at really high resolutions or b) produced in-engine/in-game from different angles that are afterwards edited via Photoshop or other similar programs so they can look better/more vibrant/crisper.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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