Steam; committing to the dumpster fire?

At least that game knows what it is and has an amusing storefront, not that I doubt the validity of those claims; it’s just that I’ve seen titles with less.

Teach me your ways! I filtered out the FPS tag and still get FPS games in my feed.

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guessing yours have too many other tags you are “fond” of? :man_shrugging:
my “anti zomboids” screen-door seem to be working fine :thinking:
(the vr one is doubly effective since it’s down right “removed” from my store feed in the “featured settings”)
it does say it won’t “completely exclude them”-just “lower the chances”, but i can’t recall the last zombie game i saw that wasn’t only/directly on the midweek/weekend sales page/tab (since those are unavoidable regardless of any settings -how steam promote sales)

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My front store page minus friend and curator recommendations are utterly useless. The main problem I have with this is that it’s going to push a lot of good indie devs to Nintendo and Sony and never put their games on steam or PC due to the visibility issues that they will face.

I also like how they think by saying things on steam do not reflect their values that they are distancing themselves from the fallout of less than reputable “games.” However, that’s not the way the real world works. In the real world stores are responsible for the stuff they sell.

While I agree that it is not in any way an endorsement of any game, valve’s reputation is going to be impacted by any “game” that becomes a controversial issue. Especially in mainstream media circles and government bodies who know next to nothing about games. If they don’t step in and actually curate the games they sell, it opens the doors for someone else, like a government regulatory body, to do so and no one wants that.

But who knows, maybe this is just me being silly, paranoid and just frustrated with Steam itself coming out and everything will be fine and dandy in time. Just please, please, please Valve, give me the tools to better fix my store page, I miss when good games were actually recommended to me.

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This is what I meant when I said…“Fahrenheit 451 Dumpster fire”. Someone will complain…Steam is in the States…Correct??? If so…Connect the Dots…

That will be the last game we get to play…:weary::fearful::sob:

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I don’t even have the store preferences button on my store front page anymore ;(

Can’t start setting up my filters at all

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If you click Store–>drop down to Explore.

Scroll down, there’s a Customize your queue function:

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Those bastards hid it from me!

Time to block all these visual novels :laughing:

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aeh… is your steam somehow different to “ours” ? :thinking:
in the “featured” tab, when you mouse over a panel, you can see a drop down arrow in the top right corner of the “large” window, that takes you to preferences
alternatively you can click on your acc “name” to go to the account page and then go to store preferences from there
remember there are diff/separate filters for queue+new releases

edit. dang it! @YQMaoski beat me to it again :confounded:
:wink: :smile:

“Truly; heresy intensifies” :triumph:
:rofl:

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side note: I have played like 20+ in the past 4 hours :laughing:

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I asked how he was 100%ing games at the speed of light… :rofl:

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I remember last yr during the Summer sale. I kept getting “free to play” games because i had gotten some DLC from GGOTD for some Free to play games. I was going nutz. Finally had to use a filter.

Between FOLLOWING all my games…or most, The Chronie recommends/reviews, RSS feeds, and gaming feeds I get on my News pages, I very seldom look at the main steam page.

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I feel like Steam is confusing quality control with censorship. Steam is taking a “we want to allow everything on our platform, even if it’s controversial” stance, while not addressing the real issue of garbage asset flips and achievement farmers. I’m not really worried about controversial content on Steam, I’m worried about the overall quality of Steam’s games.

I know curation is a really difficult to balance out, since you want to keep out the trash while making sure nothing valuable gets thrown away, but with an “anything goes” attitude, there isn’t much difference between Steam and the wild-west that is the internet. I mean, imagine walking into a store and having to sort through hundreds of half-empty beer cans to get to an actual unopened six-pack.

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@delenn13 Oh great, now I’m actually agreeing with points from Rock Paper Shotgun. My day has been absolutely terrible.

Only partially, of course-- as usual, they’re hyperbolic, clickbaity, bringing up irrelevant nonsense, and purely trying to start a ruckus for attention… but even partial agreement with them disgusts me. I’d be willing to put milk in the bowl before cereal if it meant defying them.

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It could always be worse… you could be agreeing with Kotaku.

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@Twistedgerm Shh, there may be children browsing this forum! Use some consideration!

ᶦ’ᵐ ᵃᶜᵗᵘᵃˡˡʸ ᶜʳʸᶦⁿᵍ ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ⁿᵒʷ

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Are you implying that children read Kotaku! :open_mouth:

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@Twistedgerm No, they’re blessed to not know about them. Keep it that way.

We don’t need to send them down that dark road.

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I’m a tiny bit surprised with us here - within this thread I’m seeing fearmongering, blaming, word twisting, and outright lies. I’m not sure what’s expected from Valve - if they heavily curate an indie gem might get blocked because they overpruned (like graphic novels as @CptMold mentioned), but if they open the floodgates and let us curate it ourselves (with favorite streamers, YouTubers, wishlists, etc.) Valve still gets attacked.

How did you find those “tiny indie gems” in the first place, @Twistedgerm? Was it through a curator on Steam? Steam user reviews? Steam search? Or was it one of your favorite YouTubers was playing it and it got you interested to check it out? See, that’s the thing about an “indie hit” - by definition it’s a small game that becomes a viral sensation no matter the marketing budget or how deep it’s buried in a pile of garbage.

We will find good games to play, it will just require adapting our methods somewhat if a deluge of trash rains down around us because there will always be reviewers and game enthusiasts with more time than us to go test this stuff out.

One of the primary reasons I avoid all consoles nowadays is the extreme vetting required to get onto their storefront. Everything feels too…staged. Too perfect? That’s not really a thing, but it’s hard to put into words, you get a cookie cutter storefront with a few token indie games selected by Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo to shove in our faces and it’s more than enough to claim they’re giving the little guy a fair chance, but we all know there are 1000’s of decent indie games for every one that the Big Three allow onto their console. It’s just not viable for a smaller studio to pull it off, they need to make tens of thousands of dollars on some other platform before they can even consider a port (even if they are amazing programmers and can code the port themselves). There are some truly great games that would be a ton of fun to play on the console but they never make it there simple because the bar is so high. I really dislike that.

TL;DR - as a (former) programmer, I see Valve embracing the chaos that is open source and proprietary software development in the form of games. They’re willing to host everything, warts and NSFL Poo games and all, so that we as the consumers have the absolute most power and the developer has the absolute most opportunity with Steam being the no-questions-asked middleman to connect us.

When you look at them as a company you shouldn’t be asking Valve “what’s a good game I should play?” because that is the wrong question for them. Feel free to ask your favorite YouTuber or streamer or Kotaku writer that…even Cracked.com has quality articles about video games sometimes. You should be asking Valve to provide a stable platform that runs on any hardware (Celeron 133MHz with 32mb graphics card, anyone?), almost every OS, and should connect you to a repository of nearly every game that exists for a PC, and you should trust that none of those games will install a virus (do I worry that someday Valve might miss a genius hacker’s virus injection? yeah, that’ll make the news…). That’s it. Steam is a fancy webpage, nothing more. I don’t love or hate their curation; it’s a non-factor because it has so little impact on what games I will play or what games my friends will play or what games will become popular.

Huge backend point for developers too - the Steam API provides so much data to help developers learn pricing trends (when to discount, when not to discount), how to properly update, how to track their players for useful info, etc. And they are constantly tweaking it so the most relevant information is absorbed as quickly as possible straight from your game’s dashboard on Steam. Most other platforms obscure their own game’s data from the developers themselves and it’s frustrating to have to build those types of tracking points into your game if the digital distributor doesn’t help you.

Sidenote - I may not own VR, but if Valve suddenly had a bunch of quality 18+ adult-only NSFW games myself and a lot of other gamers might start considering $399+ hardware a lot more seriously. Someone has to host it…Let Gabe have his 30%. If you don’t like it, guaranteed there are/will be filters to make sure your virgin eyes can avoid the smut. :wink:

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I’ve read (ok, ok…I admit it, I skimmed) this topic and whilst my initial kneejerk response was similar to disgust, on consideration I’m actually ok with the stance of consumer choice. When I go shopping for stuff I want to go to a shop which has ALL the products there are and allows me to select those that appeal, rather than a place which has a much more limited range. Valve say that they’ll reject games that blatantly cross the line of law, and I think that we just have to trust them on that, as after all the world has become a slightly more sensitive place of late.

But allowing the end user the choice of what remains and what goes is not a simple task. I don’t actually think that they’re doing it now, and until they have a more formal and structured system of registering user opinions (or at least looking like they’re listening) then this statement does indeed look like a lazy step. As far as the recommendations go, it’s mostly my own fault that I had a period of rubbish foisted in my general direction as I just idled for cards…if my gaming habits accurately reflected by my true taste then those freebies and trash tier games wouldn’t ever be in my library.

Steam doesn’t have to be a recommendation service for me. I want an open store front and ease of access, but also ease of feedback, and obviousness of actions taken. Until they get that transparency up and running then there will forever be issues. It’s really that which I think people want. I can get recommendations from random looking around online, and whilst I might miss some gems, so be it, I’ll miss out as long as I have more advanced filter options available to me.

Valve just needs to do something to prove that this can work rather than sit back and let chaos ensue, only taking action when it tips over into dangerous levels.

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ive always viewed steam as a game graveyard where games go to die, or are dead already, or junkyard or whatever you wanna call it. from its early days this bug ridden unintuitive ugly platform was on my avoid list (its gotten more polished these days but still i dont enjoy using it). every time i wanna play a game thats on steam i first check if theres a nosteam version.
so this is nothing new to me.

p.s. im not saying there are some great games on steam, but my opinion of the platform was always that its a steaming pile of :poop:

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