Valve Explains How It Decides Who's a 'Straight Up Troll' Publishing Video Games On Steam (vice.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Wednesday, Valve, the company that operates the huge online video game store Steam, shared more details about how it plans to control and moderate the ever-increasing number of games published on its platform. In the post published Wednesday, Valve shared more details about how it determines what it considers "outright trolling." "It is vague and we'll tell you why," Valve wrote. "You're a denizen of the internet so you know that trolls come in all forms. On Steam, some are simply trying to rile people up with something we call 'a game shaped object' (ie: a crudely made piece of software that technically and just barely passes our bar as a functioning video game but isn't what 99.9% of folks would say is "good.")
Valve goes on to explain that some trolls are trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items (digital items that can be traded for real money), while others are trying to generate a small amount of money through a variety of schemes that have to do with how developers use keys to unlock Steam games, while others are trying to "incite and sow discord." "Trolls are figuring out new ways to be loathsome as we write this," Valve said. "But the thing these folks have in common is that they aren't actually interested in good faith efforts to make and sell games to you or anyone. When a developer's motives aren't that, they're probably a troll." One interesting observation Valve shares in the blog post is that it rarely bans individual games from Steam, and more often bans developers and/or publishers entirely. [...] Valve said that its review process for determining that something may be a "troll game" is a "deep assessment" that involves investigating who the developer is, what they've done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more.
Valve goes on to explain that some trolls are trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items (digital items that can be traded for real money), while others are trying to generate a small amount of money through a variety of schemes that have to do with how developers use keys to unlock Steam games, while others are trying to "incite and sow discord." "Trolls are figuring out new ways to be loathsome as we write this," Valve said. "But the thing these folks have in common is that they aren't actually interested in good faith efforts to make and sell games to you or anyone. When a developer's motives aren't that, they're probably a troll." One interesting observation Valve shares in the blog post is that it rarely bans individual games from Steam, and more often bans developers and/or publishers entirely. [...] Valve said that its review process for determining that something may be a "troll game" is a "deep assessment" that involves investigating who the developer is, what they've done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more.
Just charge a $5K "listing fee" (Score:5, Interesting)
98% of the total garbage disappears (as well as a few percent of the good). Of course "not terribly good games" will still appear, but it gets rid of the absolute garbage.
Or if people are appalled at paying to appear on Steam, allow spending $10K for a Steam "check-mark of marketing", and allow users to filter to show only check-marked games.
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Oh yep. 5k should do it. Facepalm.
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"Choices"???
Thirty-five (35) games were released on Steam today alone.
Go fuck yourself.
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Of course! Money is the answer! It's not like people would ever be paid to troll and just add $5K to their asking price!
Oh, right, you didn't pay the $5K "listing fee" to Slashdot, so you must be a troll.
No one has claimed that it's a complete solution. Even if it just removes 10% of the garbage, we're still 10% better off.
And, you could perhaps also get a $5k cashback when the game has reached $50k sales (or $25k, or $10k ...).
/Not a steam user
Steam wants the garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, a lot of good devs get their start making trash.
Re:Steam wants the garbage (Score:5, Informative)
because there's no accounting for taste, and if you took away garbage there'd be no Goat Simulator. As the saying goes, one man's trash is another's treasure.
I'm sorry, but anyone with a functioning brain would see that infinitely more effort and polish has been put in to games like Goat Simulator than any of those garbage "asset flips" that litter the Steam store.
Yes the difference between a good and bad game is subjective, but broken zero effort trash is much easier to agree on...
Goat Simulator _was_ an Asset Flip (Score:2)
The difference between Goat Simulator and most Asset Flips is that it had a clever angle on the assets it flipped. But Valve doesn't want to be the one to judge what's a clever angle and what's run of the mill garbage. Hell, there's a one man operation that made a co
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Goat Simulator started out as a broken mess and got that polish when it hit it big. It was just somebody playing around in the Unreal Editor and they posted the "game" as a joke. It took off with Streamers and the rest as they say is history.
You just got literally everything wrong about Goat Simulator. It was an internal game jam entry from one of Coffee Stain Studio's staff members that they posted on YouTube and became a viral video hit before they (as a company) polished it and released it on Steam.
It was never released in a non-finished state on Steam.
Another good example is Surgeon Simulator, a game released as a prototype outside of Steam and was only released on Steam after it was finished.
Steam is not the Apple App Store of PC, if you
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Will never happen. There are way too many games like PUBG that would've never become Steam hits if they had such a policy. It only needs to be enough to make the trolls miss it/lose out with their scams; $100 would likely be enough.
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It's already $100, the bar is too low, $100 hasn't stopped asset flips and achievement spam. I looked last night though and there does seem to be an improvement in new release quality.
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Yes, the $100 yearly fee plus recurring hardware costs are the reason why I stopped developing shareware for Apple. (Technically, I'm still selling it, but not on the app store so discovery is down to zero.)
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> Yes, the $100 yearly fee plus recurring hardware costs are the reason why I stopped developing shareware for Apple.
And that's reasonable response. There's no doubt listing fees would exclude a few "worthy" developers. But the question is how many? And how many compared to the number of junk developers?
After all, it's *critical* to understand that published game has a cost to consumers (makes it harder for them to find things) and cost to other developers (makes it harder for potential customers for
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Either would shut a lot of starting indie games developers out of the system, thus preventing said developers and the gaming industry in general from making future hits. Basically, all new games are either essentially reskins/clones of existing games, or trying new mechanics and/or interactions, and sometimes (rarely) stories and characters. Given the typical indie level production values are garbage, in general, only the ones that try to innovate actually do have some value for the industry. However, first
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Let's be honest, junk games (and not "bad" games that failed to hit the mark - truly "junk" games) have a cost to everyone involved.
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Right, make it harder for indie developers to compete and make it easier for EA Games to compete. Brilliant. /s
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Steam is a town square of sorts. And if enough people are throwing their garbage in the town square because it costs them nothing to do so, then people will stop going to the town square to discover new developers. Instead, they'll rely on big names, and on indie developers that can spend the tens of thousands necessary to get media attention.
EA and the rest of the big names are happy to see Steam become a dumping ground. No-one will ever have trouble finding *their* games.
It's the serious indie develope
Best New Feature (Score:2)
A second set of changes was focused on improving how you can ignore things you're not interested in. In the past you've been able to ignore individual games or product types (like VR, or Early Access) you didn't want to see again. But now we've added ways for you to also easily ignore individual developers, publishers, and curators.
Imagine how much easier browsing Netflix would be if you could filter out whole franchises and showrunners. Of course, that might make it obvious how little on Netflix actually interests you.
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Then they could charge a fee to shows that don't want to be filtered by you
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Sounds like Amazon, and the Kindle Library. No matter what you search, every 7th listing is a 'Sponsored' listing, and even if you specify a particular author or absolute title, you always get 10 or 12 additional 'bonus' items listed.
Early Access Garbage and abandonment (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm sure the type of developer who does that would simply abandon their old label and create a new developer account to carry on.
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"I'm sick of development, so here's version '1.0'."
Also define 'forever' in a timescale that doesn't apply to Notch, Rockstar or Valve.
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Wait. I see what you did there.
You mentioned three developers.
CONFIRMED: Half-Life 3 is being produced by Notch and Rockstar!
Great Yet Another Meaning For Troll (Score:1)
Already May well be the most overloaded operator in the English language. As it seems to mean anything anyone anywhere takes objection to, or otherwise makes them feel bad.
Re: Great Yet Another Meaning For Troll (Score:2)
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I'm partial to the number of puppeteers who have crammed their hand up Hacker's ass and doomed the population to eternal ambiguity. Special thanks go to lobbyists, clickbait, talking heads, etc.
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Furthermore, unlike console and mobile platforms, Steam has very little switching cost. An end user can always just up and switch to Itch or Origin or GOG or Humble or wherever else.
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Furthermore, unlike console and mobile platforms, Steam has very little switching cost. An end user can always just up and switch to Itch or Origin or GOG or Humble or wherever else.
An end user who does that will find that a percentage of their Steam games cease functioning.
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Through what mechanism does purchasing a license to play a video game from a service other than Steam cause Steam games to cease to function? And is there any related documented policy?
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Furthermore, unlike console and mobile platforms, Steam has very little switching cost. An end user can always just up and switch to Itch or Origin or GOG or Humble or wherever else.
An end user who does that will find that a percentage of their Steam games cease functioning.
Through what mechanism does purchasing a license to play a video game from a service other than Steam cause Steam games to cease to function?
That's not what you said. You said switching. That means you stop using one thing, and start using another. If you stop using Steam, then your Steam DRM games will stop working. If you meant that a user can easily use multiple services, you should have said so, but you didn't.
Play old Steam games on Steam; buy new elsewhere (Score:2)
Perhaps I wasn't entirely clear that I meant switching for new purchases from Steam to the other markets, and continuing to use Steam only for those games already purchased through Steam. I thought it would have been implied in a comment on an article about which games are and aren't available for new purchases on Steam.
Steam's progression (Score:5, Interesting)
So Steam started as "shove it down their throats" Counter Strike 1.6 launcher. Evolved into highly curated game store over about a decade.
Then decided to suddenly drop all curation and allow anything and everything on the platform. Got flooded with garbage. Added weird "meta gaming" shit like trading cards. Got games that literally existed just to allow people to get cards. Allowed some trading and other meta gaming of the system. Even got pressured by some SJW types to drop politically controversial games like Hatred and even had their recent porn games brouhaha.
And now, they're doing this. I guess there's just too much pressure from all directions, and they really just decided that no, we're not bending to various pressure groups, and instead just making sure that asset flips and such are not on the store. If true, good on them.
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Facts tend to be on "conservative" side, or more specifically on the side that isn't crazed puritans who just can't handle other people having fun in a way they don't approve of:
https://www.gamespot.com/artic... [gamespot.com]
Which nowadays is predominantly the far left progressive movement, who's activists carry the moniker SJWs.
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I guess getting caught peddling a lie in such a brazen way with no way out caused you to instantly shift topics to "but it wasn't good!"
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What makes you think he's lying "for" them? So far, his actions are completely in line with "being" one. Lies, deceit, baseless accusations. All modus operandi for this particular crowd.
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The mention "I forgot" is literally there, couple of posts above. Which you conveniently missed in your spinning of yet another brazen lie. I think we're done talking.
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"Last you checked" being the key part. Gabe Newell himself personally apologised for its removal and it was reinstated.
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How's that redefining of words working for you so far?
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This was actually a thing that happened.
https://www.themarysue.com/steam-greenlight-hatred/
https://www.cinemablend.com/games/Why-Hatred-Was-Removed-From-Steam-Greenlight-68961.html
http://nerdreactor.com/2014/12/15/hatred-steam-ban/
Gabe Newell himself stepped in to unban the game.
https://metro.co.uk/2014/12/15/mass-murder-sim-hatred-banned-from-steam-4988684/
Capcha: murders
Early Access (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh, all I really want from Valve is a filter that blocks all "Early Access" games from ever appearing, as I'm browsing for games on their web site.
Re:Early Access (Score:4, Informative)