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Software Games

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.

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Valve Explains How It Decides Who's a 'Straight Up Troll' Publishing Video Games On Steam

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  • by west ( 39918 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @07:51PM (#57266938)

    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.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @09:46PM (#57267296)
      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.

      Plus, a lot of good devs get their start making trash.
      • by AC-x ( 735297 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @10:04PM (#57267350)

        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 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.

          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
          • by AC-x ( 735297 )

            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

    • by mentil ( 1748130 )

      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.

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        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.

    • 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

      • by west ( 39918 )

        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.

        • They are at tax on you as Steam consumers as they force them to spend their valuable time sifting through them to get to something that has some hope of actually being pleasing.
        • They are a tax on other indie developers as they push people away from actually actually engaging in personal discovery. Instead developers now have to spend tens or hundreds of thousands marketing the
    • by ( 4475953 )

      Right, make it harder for indie developers to compete and make it easier for EA Games to compete. Brilliant. /s

      • So adjust the bar, make the median quality game EA produces the "troll" standard. EA producing crap should not be exempted.
      • by west ( 39918 )

        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

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Then they could charge a fee to shows that don't want to be filtered by you

      • by Archfeld ( 6757 )

        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.

  • by shendar ( 674986 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @08:17PM (#57267010)
    How about if a developer starts a EA Project and walks away (takes forever with no progress) they are banned from further EA? How about if they are banned from the store entirely?
    • by AC-x ( 735297 )

      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.

    • by mentil ( 1748130 )

      "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.

      • by Calydor ( 739835 )

        Wait. I see what you did there.

        You mentioned three developers.

        CONFIRMED: Half-Life 3 is being produced by Notch and Rockstar!

  • 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.

  • Steam's progression (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @10:59PM (#57267476)

    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.

  • Early Access (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tylersoze ( 789256 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:05PM (#57267492)

    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.

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