Steam; committing to the dumpster fire?

1

I would like to prelimit this to the very specific frame and not about the broader/“political” aspects, and should this turn in that direction/too political the thread will just be shut down instead, since this is not about censorship or such

So, steam made the “grand announcement” Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store? (given how they had to powder their bums after recent backlash)

however, given how steam has transformed over the years, to become almost an entirely free for all sht show in some regard to “quality”, (meaning tangible quality here) first from greenlight’s manipulation and then the steam direct floodgates
a few paragraphs have me greatly concerned to whether or not this might actually be steam going “full retard” and committing 110% to their dumpster fire trash bin model, and maybe fully drowning out “real” games completely going forward

these are the concerning points i took from all of this, (politics/censorship nonsense aside please)

“what even constitutes a “game”, or what level of quality is appropriate before something can be released”

+

“Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this”
“If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make”

+

“With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling”

to me it sounds like, that apart of not wanting to take a stance on/control the censorship/“political” aspects of quality control/product curation, they are basically coming straight out and saying
“we’ve heard people complaint about fake games, card farm games, asset flips etc -and we don’t care, we don’t want to even remotely QA the products on our shelves that flood the store”

granted i tend to read into things sometimes,
but with valves past statements/lies and actions, this really just seem like them almost admitting the cards/bots are worth too much for them to give the most remote flying fuck about assuring the sht on their store even works, or is a “game”, and not some asset flip or straight up clone/reupload…
-with intentionally wanting & opening the floodgates even more, to allow more of the shovel and vaporware to drown out the store pages
(with the minor excuse of “tools” -which given usertag systems etc i’m already seeing can’t work and so on)

how do you look at this/the quotes? -even taken in/out of context like so
curious what your sentiments towards this, quality, aspect would be :thinking:

(keep it politics free please folks :+1:, -this is merely about the potential quality aspects of the announcement)

13 Likes
2

Man, this is sad.

I completely agree with you.

@onLooSe and I just had this conversation earlier. I had no idea that they had this announcement, just to tell everyone to start making shovelware so that Valve can earn more money from it…

Seriously, it’s an announcement about pure profit and how this is the stance they will take so that they maximize money into their own pockets.

How else can we look at it, it’s disgusting, it’s vile, it’s nonsense.

They should upkeep quality, so that we as players can spend our time playing quality games, not shuffling through pages and pages of garbage to get to one or two quality games.

The Steam game list is exploding these days, so many new releases every day.

I just counted the pending release list, there are 134 games unlocking on Steam in the next 7 days.

How can we possibly engage enough time, energy, money to shuffle through all of these?

Now they are going to take more of a hands-off approach? WTF…

I will revisit this in the future and keep my eyes open to see if there are going to be more and more junk on a daily basis… Not that there’s not enough already.

6 Likes
3

this was my thoughts/concern exactly as i read it (when reaching those paragraphs of the post)
which seems so counterproductive, to make it harder for your customers to find products, with 7000+games released in 2017 alone, (guess how many of those might actually be “real”) :roll_eyes:

5 Likes
4

Well, some of the games at least I hope nobody buys, like this one:

image

image

If I worked at Steam/Valve, I would ashamed at having these pieces of garbage in the store front…

15 Likes
5

games like that, memes or not, is exactly why i take 0 stock in this part

“except for… - straight up trolling”

since with their past “stance” it didn’t matter at all, i mean, ffs, they let game on the store without even an exe, or games with an exe but no files to run… :man_facepalming:
-how the fck am i/we to take a “won’t allow troll games” remotely srs then in the rest of the new company policy

9 Likes
6

And that was before the new “policy.”

I think we are watching this boat named the U.S.S.Steam being purposefully driven into an iceberg named Valve’s Revenue and all of the Public Consumers on board either going down or paying for rescue with our lives’ savings. While on the Land of Reality, the Developers on deck are being asked to fight their way through hoards of Zombie Revivals (a.k.a. Asset Flips, Shovelware, Cash Grabs) with baseball bats made out of human brains.

How is this okay?

4 Likes
7

A lot of it really is down to the fact that, between trying to take down Hatred and committing to “Operation: Your Waifu is Trash,” Valve can no longer police their store. Regardless of their own opinion, the same people that preach about quality control to Valve turn around and attack them the moment that they try to take any stance. This reaction is a mix of both genuinely concerned developers and YouTubers just trying to start an outrage to get behind, and Valve doesn’t stand a chance against either, let alone both.

Mostly, I don’t think what Valve is doing by opening the gates to anything that doesn’t cross certain non-negotiable lines is necessarily a bad thing. They’ve even stated that things like visual novels would have definitely been cut altogether had it been up to them-- Valve didn’t see its audience. They know they’ve been wrong before, and they’re afraid of potentially stifling the next great indie game. They know that people will be mad if they try to set a barrier, because inevitably some good will go out with the bad.

They want to leave finding good games and filtering out the bad ones up to their algorithms, and for the most part, that actually works well enough. If they can smooth out the rough edges, I don’t see any problem with this. The important note: IF THEY SMOOTH OUT THE PROBLEMS WITH THEIR ALGORITHMS.

7 Likes
8

i’m not talking about their bs tip toeing around the matter of taking a proper curation stance on X politics/rating/censorship
i’m referring specifically to the insane impact their bs lack of curation has already had on fake games, that has no bearing to exists on a “store” where they serve to do nothing but clutter it up to the point pc dev is now a risky business for indie devs
-and pc “releases” has exploded unparalleled year by year, merely to serve some bs bot farms, (to take advantage of a dumbass feature anyway)

not, remotely, possible… (especially not for valve), +usertags serve to just futher conflate that problem

6 Likes
9

@Gnuffi I mean, they already have done a good job of sweeping these games out of the public eye, at least from my view. They’re not necessarily gone, but I just wanted it out of my sight-- whether it’s actually thrown out or under the rug just isn’t something I care about. I want to scroll through the store, and potentially find new games I’m interested in. If I can do that without running into too much trash, I’m fine, and in the meantime, a developer that is highly incompetent when it comes to marketing can still put up their dream project on Steam.

I don’t GET these kinds of games in my feed, and I think the ultimate irony is that people such as Jim Sterling see it everywhere because they deliberately seek it out for their channel. Unless it’s a fairly competent indie game, pretty much everything I see is at least under a publisher at least as high-profile as Focus Home or another AA contemporary.

That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. “Works fine for me!” helps no-one. That said, I do think Valve has the right idea. They’re letting games on willingly, and force people to buy nothing. At the same time, they watch for exploits, such as when bots were using games as trading card money farms. I don’t really care about the games that hit Steam as long as it doesn’t get in my way, and so far, it isn’t-- it was a problem back in the early Direct days, but since then Steam has learned what I like and stuck to the kind of games I actually WOULD consider buying. I just hope they do a better job in expanding this careful algorithm to the general audience.

6 Likes
10

I think the statement made was overall a good one. I do not see this as a “cash grab” or shovelware greenlight thing. The statement made doesn’t say that the steam direct process is being dismantled to allow anyone to post anything, there’s still the $100 entry fee that was the only thing really limiting card farms as far as I’m aware and no mention of removing that. They also straight up say that games need to work and they subject them to basic tests still.

If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create.

This is the sentiment that I see here and it’s one I can fully get behind. This is steam doing the opposite of what youtube did when the “adpocalypse” came rolling through town. Youtube decide that they WOULD accept responsibility and associate themselves with the opinions and ideas they would serve ads beside. This is steam saying we do not condone or support any opinions or ideas professed through our platform or through the products we sell.

That is in my opinion the only sane way to do it.

If they then also, as they mention they want to, put all their efforts into building new and improved tools available to the user to filter what we want and do not want to see then that’s just a bonus.

10 Likes
11

i still get them from time to time, and sometimes worse than others (no idea why since i’m far from seeking them out)
and like Mao pointed it, makes it damn near impossible to discover new games that aren’t directly “recommended” to you, because there is just not time to go through a fraction of “indie” releases when 7000 gets released a year now
the problem with me then filtering them out “manually”, is the tags are all encompassing, either you filter out “a” game specifically and that title wont show, our you filter out a tag, which then affects all games, high, mid low/good or bad regardless, which just doesn’t help (tried then when i got tired of getting spammed with zombie flips because i played Nation Red)
i even learned just by filtering out “VR” it straight up stopped showing me normal games, that got added a VR patch or was “vr” secondary, simply because i got annoyed with getting tossed 90% of VR_exclusive_ released in my feed for a while
which is just dumb, because that wasn’t what i wanted/intended when i wanted to filter it out “then”…

sure the algorithm has gotten better, no doubt, but it’s far from perfect
-i still get decades old shovelware recommended here and there("reputable publisher don’t matter much there either), still get the low effort or even asset flips at times. Hell i still even get games i already own suggested a couple of times :man_facepalming:
but worst of all, i keep getting the same bs cycle of repeating games “suggested” - over and over, where the only option to not show those same games again, is to completely discard them/or wishlist them “now” (either which is not what i want), instead of the store just “moving on” to a new selection
thankfully after adding a bunch of chronies with like-minded games interest some of those things above got alleviated a bit too then,
but still not to where i’m satisfied with how the steam store is “now” vs how it was a couple of years ago… and it frustrates me a ton, to where i often browse the store without being signed it, because that helps “some” of my issues, but far from all/close enough to what i like, or the enjoyable browsing experience it once was… :man_shrugging:
to me it’s not about “censorship” here, but basic quality control, /making sure your customer can walk through your store in a manner where they easily go through the isles/products on shelves in a manageable way, +knowing hollow asbestos shells wasn’t “accidentally” put up for you to pay for -because basic fcn store curation/quality control
my local supermarket/warehourse might have twice the amount of product than steam does, but going shopping sure as sht isn’t remotely as tedious/awful an experience, nor do i have to worry about some “employee” popping up and suggesting me a bag full of empty boxes of some phony brand

steam not only shouldn’t be a “come all”/"git"hub/nexus of digital products, it’s a store, a business, and should damn sure as sht qa their offerings as such,
but most importantly, it doesn’t “need” to be the “open source/flow platform” for games/“basement projects”, the internet easily takes care of that
-no this is straight up purely because of bonus $, and getting “everything” on, -so they can fuel the community market place, (which probably has become their biggest earner with all those microtransactions… ← pure speculation since Valve don’t release earnings)

7 Likes
12

agree, my problem with the statement is not a "opening steam direct up for “free”, -it’s that it seems like an admission of 0 effort qa against the release flood/“quality” that’s been rising year by year

as mentioned my problem with that is it was bs enough before, given some of the games that got released that “somehow” manged to circumvent this “process”… it’s not that long ago a game managed to get up without even a basic freakin exe included to even run… :man_facepalming:, there is no excuse for that, it simply shouldn’t be possible, at all, and displays the complete lack of effort on valves part of “control”

4 Likes
13

I’d say this thing was the expected result.

Valve are not there to help game devs or gamers, they’re there to sell games and make money. They’re not a huge company and they’re not into the science/research stuff. They do not go for perfect solutions, they go for passable stuff. I’d say they demonstrated it with tag-based recommendations already. System is far from elegant and yet they consider it a success.

Doing good quality control is hard, it takes serious resources and some mistakes are bound to happen anyway. So they are not going to even try.

4 Likes
14

@Gnuffi well I do not see how what they are saying here in any way actually makes anything worse for you. All the controls that is active today looks to still be there. While we can probably agree that they’re not the best and could do with an improvement that’s not what this is even about. This is about Steam not wanting to be held responsible about the “sensitive” content of the games on their platform, so that they don’t have to come under flack from people with an axe to grind about [whatever] and spend a lot of time trying to placate people or defend anything.

Card farms, asset flips and other shovel ware is still as limited as it always has been and I don’t see how this changes it.

5 Likes
15

i don’t know, since the flood of 3k games, 5k games, 7k games released year after year, -even if i didn’t “know” the “amount” then, i definitely felt my store “experience” get worse and worse :man_shrugging:
(and i totally get the function as an escape clause/“cover our ass” tactic with what’s been going on, tho it sadly also has potentially far worse/reaching consequences)

problem is, after steam direct, they weren’t limited, quite the opposite, and the charts supposedly display that -even if it doesn’t directly impact each user’s store experience ofc,(but the release (+steam market) explosion definitely tells its tale i think :thinking:)

agreed, but basic fcn product control is not, especially not when we know exactly how many games/“wares” gets released day by day, -it’s saying valve cba to even give a fck about spending 150minutes a day “confirming” their inventory, before making it available to paying consumers
if this was physical retail such disregard would be almost insane, -they only get away with it because it’s digital and there is basically 0 liability or consumer protection with such products/“quality” (unless you’re in AU ofc apparently lol)

which has always been my guess why valve took the hand’s off approach with so much of their store(+business), not so much “greed” as “pinching every penny” where possible, why pay for it yourself when you can put it on your customers/community to do it for free :man_shrugging:

4 Likes
16

Looking through the comments on the news post and spot this one.

You need to work out what your values are as a organisation and make sure your store reflects those values, you have that responsibility. Excluding games because they don’t reflect your values is not censorship and people can obtain them elsewhere. If some of your employees don’t agree with those values then maybe Valve isn’t the place for them to work

See this is the exact sort of nutcase that Valve does not want to and should not have to deal with. No they do not in any way have a responsibility to shore up some sort of unified ideological front to operate their business under. People who want you to do that are the same who are looking to lambaste you either for not holding their specific stances on a thing or for perceived failures in purity or lacking devotion to their ideological stance.

I for one am hugely grateful Valve saw reason and decided that putting themselves in a position where they can be beholden to these people was a terrible idea. Quite frankly I think the continued flood of shite games is a price worth paying if this is the trade off to be made.

6 Likes
17

i agree about the result of this against “censorship” (tho it’s not exactly a “stance” on Valves part from this)
but i can’t stress enough, imo, the huge difference there is on “quality” control, like shovelware or the extremely obvious low effort/card games vs “politics”/censorship or “allowing” X/Y/Z game content
the last part i don’t care about in the sense it doesn’t bother me much if things aren’t “censored” because of views or politics even if i’d find X distasteful or despicable
(my only problem with that point is the reach and effect it will undoubtedly have later down the late in regards to ratings boards that do and will censor things and try to find someway to enforce it/governmental oversight stepping in worst case scenario)

since those games are no doubt the “minority of games”, either releasing to ride an attention wave/“memes”/deliberate trolling
the one thing i’ve been annoyed with most over the years browsing is the low effort or asset flip games, that is 100% purely, obvious, only there for trading cards
-now, ofc that problem would have been (partially) “easily” solved if valve would just have implemented them as market “swapable” instead of trading for $ (tho ofc they would never contemplate such because of the “passed up $” that would entail)

so then it becomes a basic qa “issue”, in my eyes. Hell even if you literally can’t bother to have a physical human spend 5minutes on each new product (which then only amounts to 150minutes btw), -then at least make the fcn algorithm, or something, “scan” the packs, (which would also remove the “no exe”/“no files/content packs”) and then have it flag them if X identical lines of code/data/files/whatever appeared… at least it would stem some of the asset flips so a “dev” couldn’t upload wholesale flips, or the same freaking game 1million times :man_facepalming:
but no, that’s how low effort valve is willing to commit to, not even bothering with having a person spend 5 minutes on each game, not even scanning the games for basic details in the “folders” or whatever else they don’t wanna bother to do with the products they are willing to charge money for…(/“upset” their customers store experience over…)
i think that’s the part that just make this so frustrating and seem like a complete “no win/why bother/give up” discouraging situation going more and more down the drain to me i suppose

it’s like “we are willing to do absolutely nothing, and that’s a good thing for you, -because “choice” :+1:”, idono, i’m just finding it hard to see it that way,
(even despite the zealots chanting on the other/“main” side for whole other type of control) :grimacing:

4 Likes
18

“It makes us money so we happy.” -Valve

4 Likes
19

This move by Valve makes me really sad because I may never find the tiny indie gems that I’ve grown to love like To the Moon, Darkest Dungeon, Stardew Valley, Life is Strange, SteamWorld Heist and many more with all these shovelware games going up.

Yes I could sort through it all but I honestly don’t have the time or patience to do so. Thus Steam is going to lose out on people like me purchasing games that are great in favor of mindless people purchasing shovelware games.

TO THE NINTENDO SWITCH WE GO!

5 Likes
20

I’ve never understood why Steam doesn’t just do a featured list i.e. games releasing this week (Sun-Sat).

On all the pirate movie sites I go to they all have a featured section, which are the big releases, not just AAA but the ones with decent interest, sure sometimes a movie gets added to the featured list that everyone is questioning how it got there and I’m sure some titles don’t get on there when they should but it saves a butt load of time from searching through the recent uploads, which can be quite a lot because it includes stuff from many years ago that has only just been uploaded digitally for the first time and even fan stuff (I have seen posters for so many fan made Star Trek films, seriously)

It wouldn’t be perfect and maybe there is a reason they haven’t done it, not wanting to be the arbiters of what is good/bad isn’t a good enough excuse because all the other games are still there. And that is where recommendations from friends and curators come in.

I’d find it useful, I liked the bit on the co-optional podcast when they went through releases and just picked out the ones that looked decent.

Whatever Valve, you do you.

5 Likes