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Games

Way Too Many Games Were Released On Steam In 2023 (kotaku.com) 93

John Walker, reporting for Kotaku: Steam is by far the most peculiar of online storefronts. Built on top of itself for the last twenty years, Valve's behemothic PC game distributor is a clusterfuck of overlapping design choices, where algorithms rule over coherence, with 2023 seeing over 14,500 games released into the mayhem. Which is too many games. That breaks down to just under 40 a day, although given how people release games, it more accurately breaks down to about 50 every weekday. 50 games a day. On a storefront that goes to some lengths to bury new releases, and even buries pages where you can deliberately list new releases.

Compared to 2022, that's an increase of nearly 2,000 games, up almost 5,000 from five years ago. There's no reason to expect that growth to diminish any time soon. It's a volume of games that not only could no individual ever hope to keep up with, but nor could even any gaming site. Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting. Realistically, not even a tenth of the games. And that's not least because of those 50 games per day, about 48 of them will be absolute dross. On one level, in this way Steam represents a wonderful democracy for gaming, where any developer willing to stump up the $100 entry fee can release their game on the platform, with barely any restrictions. On another level, however, it's a disaster for about 99 percent of releases, which stand absolutely no chance of garnering any attention, no matter their quality. The solution: human storefront curation, which Valve has never shown any intention of doing.

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Way Too Many Games Were Released On Steam In 2023

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  • by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:04PM (#64128187)
    Its that they will let anything on their platform, assuming they pay a modest fee.
    So all the platforms just fill and fill and fill with low quality software.
    • by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:09PM (#64128209) Journal

      $100 is a much higher bar than the $0 that itch.io charges. Consequently itch.io hosts roughly 14 times as many projects (helped by the fact that they host more than just video game content)

      But since itch.io doesn't have a player marketplace to launder money though garbage digital assets, Steam remains the platform of choice for unsavory practices.
      =Smidge=

    • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:37PM (#64128547)

      Yes, and the fee isn't so big really, so you get the equivalent of the Amazon self-published books, the vast majority of which are extremely low quality. I see some youtube videos of "I try the 5 least popular games on Steam so you don't have to", and boy are there a lot of really shitty games clogging stuff up. I suspect some of these games make back their Steam fee by having youtubers and twitch players buy them just to show how bad they are.

      That's the thing with digital only products - storage costs are effectively zero, so it kind of screws with traditional market pressures. It costs nothing to keep crappy products around, because there's not shelf space pressure to remove them to make way for better products. Similarly, lack of shelf space pressure means that game costs decline much more slowly over time.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @11:12AM (#64131267)

        Yes, and the fee isn't so big really, so you get the equivalent of the Amazon self-published books, the vast majority of which are extremely low quality. I see some youtube videos of "I try the 5 least popular games on Steam so you don't have to", and boy are there a lot of really shitty games clogging stuff up. I suspect some of these games make back their Steam fee by having youtubers and twitch players buy them just to show how bad they are.

        That's the thing with digital only products - storage costs are effectively zero, so it kind of screws with traditional market pressures. It costs nothing to keep crappy products around, because there's not shelf space pressure to remove them to make way for better products. Similarly, lack of shelf space pressure means that game costs decline much more slowly over time.

        The thing that separates Steam is that it does a good job of filtering out the low quality crap and showing you the high quality crap. Personally I have little interest in the latest crapfest AAA game "Modern Snorefare: We've been remaking the same game for 17 years" or the "We spent more on marketing than development" DLC, however Steams low barrier to entry has allowed me to sample great indie games like Sapiens, AirportCEO or Car For Sale Simulator 2023 (it's not a high quality game but built on a solidly playable mechanic and the dev is active).

        I think this kind of thing ends up rewarding devs who are actively developing their games and especially those who interact with their community to improve the game (yeah, not everyone's wish can be fulfilled, especially when the dev team is 3 blokes doing it in their spare time, gamers need to be a bit less entitled sometimes). I think rewarding the good is better than putting up barriers to punish the bad.

        Also, whilst you might argue the storage costs are "effectively" zero (they realistically aren't), Steam (other stores are available, just not as good) also handles customer service, payment processing and a whole load of other things which cost money.

    • by samwichse ( 1056268 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:44PM (#64128571)

      There's even a name for it: Shovelware

    • by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @07:49PM (#64129323)

      No, the problem is they are literately not Nintendo. You know, Nintendo, of 1986. No curation without explanation.

      There should be two requirements for a game to have discoverability on Steam:
      1) It must have at least one of ESRB, PEGI or CERO
      2) It must have have a metadata list of all assets used (eg ISRC records for music, Unity asset lists for Unity games, Ureal asset lists for Unreal games, RPG Maker asset lists for RPG Maker games, etc)

      If it does not have a verifiable rating from one of those three rating systems, then it will disappear from discoverability any time someone searches for a rating.
      If it does not have a verified metadata asset list, then it can not be searched by metadata (including tags), because the metadata will determine the tags for the game, and for the assets, and any time there is a disconnect between the game's tags and the asset's tagged, the assets tagged will be used.

      If it has neither, than it can only be searched by title name.

      The reason you want a metadata list is so someone can search for "unity game" or exclude all unity games, and thus exclude 90% of the garbage that contains stock unity assets.

      The reason Steam and Itch.io are full of garbage has a lot to do with political agendas of the countries they are hosted in, and VISA (the payment company) trying to be a content censor by withholding payment access if the platform doesn't destroy discoverability of adult content.

      • 1) It must have at least one of ESRB, PEGI or CERO

        This would exclude the Australian, Brazilian, German, and Korean markets. Australia has ACB, Brazil has ClassInd, Germany has USK, and Korea has GRAC. In addition, Steam appears to be the only major western storefront not among those participating in IARC age rating for downloadable games [globalratings.com]. Would a developer need to publish its game on Microsoft Store or Epic Games Store to get an age rating before publishing the same game on Steam?

        2) It must have have a metadata list of all assets used (eg ISRC records for music

        Last I checked, the ISRC administrative agency for the United States was the Recording Industry Association of America. Yes, that RIAA, famous for scattershot lawsuits against suspected file sharers. I seem to remember several years ago when affiliating in any way with RIAA risked costing a band its street credibility, and several users in tech circles were promoting boycotts of all labels affiliated with the RIAA. In addition, would each sound effect need its own ISRC, at substantial administrative cost?

        Unity asset lists for Unity games, Ureal asset lists for Unreal games, RPG Maker asset lists for RPG Maker games, etc)

        I'm curious as to how your "etc" would work in a 1- to 6-person studio developing and using an in-house engine, such as a 2D game engine that runs atop SDL. How would the engine's developer go about getting a storefront to support the engine's asset list format?

  • by berchca ( 414155 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:06PM (#64128195) Homepage

    If you are a business paying staff to curate games, you will need to justify that expense (as in pay for, if not profit from). That eventually means monetizing the process (see Amazonâ(TM)s Kindle Marketplace), which will bring you equal or greater criticisms.

  • by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:10PM (#64128211) Journal

    Most of them feel like they are being cranked out by kits. Like the world building games, they all feel alike.

  • Reviews and Ratings (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lanforod ( 1344011 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:14PM (#64128223)
    Are user reviews and ratings not a good enough pseudo 'human curation' system? I don't think Steam already does this - but to improve this have reviews be restricted or can at least be filtered to those who are verified purchasers, and even better, to those who have played a minimum number of hours in a game.
    • by liquidpele ( 6360126 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:45PM (#64128337)
      That just incentivizes the developers to fake/flood the ratings and creates more problems than it solves.
    • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:50PM (#64128577)

      Steam has some curated lists. But I don't think that's the major focus of marketing. As with most anything, 99% is crap. With Steam games, it's more like 99.99% is crap, which is actually a lot better than things like Origin.

      The reviews are easily skewed too. Ie, trolls have been bashing and review bombing Starfield; while not the greatest game, it's certainly far better and enjoyable than the anti-Bethesda crowd are claiming. Similarly there have been cases where a game is unfairly praised early on.

      On the other hand, I do not head to reviews on Steam to figure out what games to buy. Like Yelp or Amazon, you can't really trust self-published reviews ("best pencil ever, changed my life!"). All reviews have to be taken with a game of salt. Games are too complex to really have someone else's opinion decide how you will like a game yourself ("this game had a plot, I hate plot!, 1 star").

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:48PM (#64128871)

        Starfield is absolute garbage of a game. Todd fanboys denying this are genuinely sad. Initial mixed score was clearly on expectations that "this is Bethesda, they'll fix this piece of shit in updates, surely". Then time passed, updates happened and everyone understood that garbage of the game... is probably not actually getting fixed. Even by modders. Hence the latest reviews.

        • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @05:15PM (#64128965)

          Why do you say this? I enjoyed it. Not as much as Fallout 4, but it does not stink. Maybe it's not everyone's cup of tea, but even if not I don't understand why the intense hatred for it, why they feel they must waste their time telling everyone else how much they hate it.

        • by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @07:58PM (#64129341)

          Starfield is a Bethesda game, and anyone who didn't expect Fallout in space was going to be disappointed. Because it is effectively Fallout with some random element thrown in for how planet point of interests are created.

          People can bash it all they want, but it's far more polished than all of the asset flip trash you find on Steam and Itch.io , and if you believe otherwise, you likely haven't played a game since 1993, when we last had the epidemic of CD-ROM shovelware.

          It needs to be pointed out, again, that the worst games have always been "reskins" of something popular and cheap to make that already exists. Asset flips are just acquiring the thing to reskin. Stick some marvel characters on it and call it "Marvel Fruit Mutations" and it'll play exactly like "Watermelon game" . Look at how many reskins of Puyo Puyo exist on the 8-bit/16-bit console era. This is nothing new at all.

          But to say that these asset flips are better than a AAA title that has familiar feel because Betheseda keeps clinging onto that garbage game engine they use, is just shoving your head really far up your behind.

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @08:28PM (#64129399)

            People aren't bashing it though. They just bought it, played it a bit and figured out it was really, really bad. But it's a Todd Howard game, so everyone expected that modders and patching would fix it in a few months.

            Few months have past, and it hasn't been fixed. Hence the change in reviews to overwhelmingly negative. It doesn't help the case that there's a fairly recent game that also launched in an awful state (but was still far better than Starfield) that is CP2077. There are in fact excellent side by side comparison videos of things like quests, exploration, character dialogue and so on in Starfield vs CP2077, and it really accentuates just how utterly awful Starfield is as a game.

      • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @05:52PM (#64129045)

        Ie, trolls have been bashing and review bombing Starfield; while not the greatest game, it's certainly far better and enjoyable than the anti-Bethesda crowd are claiming.

        Having played the entire main and all faction missions I can assure you that Starfield is unluckily exactly as dull and repetitive as the negative reviews say. Starfield is good in raising expectations early on, but fails to deliver. I was hoping to find something exiting in it, but now I kind of regret having invested too much time into it, and waiting through way too many load-screens.

      • by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @05:28AM (#64130313)

        Define "review bombing" in a way that doesn't literally boil down to "people I disagree with" or "peasants who don't think as they're told". Why is it not "review bombing" when a handful of incestuous websites collude to stage a mafia shakedown against a developer, but it is "review bombing" when actual customers speak up about ponzi schemes and other scams?

        Come to think of it pretty much the only time I ever see that and other derogatory terms against customers used is precisely when people come together to call out rights violating DRM, malware, false advertising, ripoffs, and defective products.

      • by not flu ( 1169973 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @07:29AM (#64130511)

        99.9% isn't crap, 99.9% isn't for you personally. I personally enjoy a good hentai puzzle game but most people will think those are categorically garbage. I feel the same way about narrative-driven psychological horror games but I don't mind if other people play and enjoy them. Let's just agree to disagree.

        You shouldn't read Steam reviews to figure out if a game is "good" because there's no objective metric for goodness in games to begin with, only player satisfaction. Because players of any game are a self-selected group, what Steam reviews actually accomplish is something much more useful: assessing how well a game met expectations set by the marketing material, including previous reviews, and pointing out what the sore points actually are.

    • by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:18PM (#64128781)

      User reviews and ratings are definitely not good enough, they're very gamable.

      The problem with human curated lists is the same as movie critics though: their opinion is usually for sale. Kotaku is the best example in the video game world, they're not remotely objective and generally I use them the same way I use Cramer's financial advice: do the opposite.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @06:03PM (#64129063)

      Are user reviews and ratings not a good enough pseudo 'human curation' system?

      Have you not seen the user/viewer ratings Marvel movies get? They're trash, and yet sometimes users rank them above the "barely watchable" level.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @08:30PM (#64129407)

      Are user reviews and ratings not a good enough pseudo 'human curation' system?

      It's a good and bad thing but only users who purchased the game can review a game. So you can't for example negative review bomb a game because you don't like it's message. You also can't review bomb a game like Sex with Hitler. https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com] which has a 77%-81% approval.
      You might think, filter out games with nudity or sexual content but there's nothing to stop users from tagging a game with any tag they like. Plenty of popular games have either or both of those tags. Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Mass Effect Legendary edition, Resident Evil Village and Devil May Cry 5 for example. The default steam setting blocks adult only games but there are still tons of disgusting games that don't have graphic depictions of sex.

      I also believe that expensive games tend to have higher than deserved ratings. The more a game costs, the less likely you're willing to try a game you're not sure about. Your certainly not going to buy a game you think is bad just to give it a bad review. For example, I bought RimWorld. A game with a base price of $35 and at most 20% off during sales. Its review range is 97%-98% positive. I played it some and after getting through about half the content, I realized that I didn't like it for one single reason. No multiplayer. I could record the variety of funny things that happen during a play through but it's not really going to be funny to anyone who wasn't there when it happened. I'd even go so far as to say what's great about the game is all the humor but it's lost because you can't really share it with others.

    • by not flu ( 1169973 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @07:06AM (#64130477)
      There's nothing "pseudo" about it, user reviews is the best system there is. There are cases of obvious fake reviewery on steam but it's relatively rare, more rare than in professional reviews, fairly obvious if you actually read the reviews, and not a significant problem in my experience. User reviews are a great indication of whether the expectations set by the marketing material were met or not. They tend towards Very Positive because buyers self-select out of buying something if they don't think they'll like it, and likewise will get swayed by an Overwhelmingly Positive rating even if it's obviously not a game they'd be into normally. Reading the reviews gives you information about what the sore points are and if they're relevant to your platform or preferences.
    • by not flu ( 1169973 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @07:17AM (#64130493)
      I forgot to mention, you already can filter reviews by playtime. Steam also shows playtime at review time as well as total. I don't like to get too hung up on play time because the shortest "games" I've bought and thought were worthwhile took less than 10 minutes, but it's absolutely relevant information to have and 200 more hours after review time always adds a lot of credibility to that review in my eyes.
    • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @11:24AM (#64131313)

      Are user reviews and ratings not a good enough pseudo 'human curation' system? I don't think Steam already does this - but to improve this have reviews be restricted or can at least be filtered to those who are verified purchasers, and even better, to those who have played a minimum number of hours in a game.

      The odd thing is, Steam is one of the few places where I'd remotely trust the user review system. It does a good job of filtering out both the vitriol laden entitled gamer posts and the slavish I'd praise the bowl they shat in posts and provides decent reviews, good and bad. Completely the opposite of most review systems but Steam doesn't ask for payola in exchange for good reviews (looking at you, trip advisor).

      You've still got to take reviews with a grain of salt, but not the shot of tequila and slice of lime that you need to stomach Amazon user reviews.

      As you've said, it states how many hours they've spent in the game at time of writing, if they own the game and if they got it for free, so it's as open as a system can practicably be. It also lets you come back and change your reviews as games can change after a patch or people learn the game better (this can be either good or bad).

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04, 2024 @11:53AM (#64131409)

      I'm replying to your post a second time. Look at the steam awards. Starfield won most innovative game play yet it was the lowest reviewed game on Steam for that category. More than 7,000 recent reviews, 27% positive. That's a huge disconnect between popular opinion (people who overwhelmingly don't own the game) and people who actually write reviews.

  • Marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bhcompy ( 1877290 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:21PM (#64128251)
    Steam is a distribution platform. While it does have a storefront, it's pretty simple. Valve doesn't do any marketing for you. That's your job as a publisher.
    • Re:Marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:30PM (#64128279)

      The author probably thinks there are way too many pages on the web too. Just take the top ten, delete everything else, and tell everyone the Internet is full.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:22PM (#64128499)

        Kotaku is a mouthpiece for those who see no harm in a world where there's a nice, tidy list of twenty-five "agency-approved" albums, movies, games, and miscellaneous cultural expression pieces per year. It's aesthetic-deaf philistinery for the 21st century, wrapped up in a phony layer of social activism (like all modern philistinery generally is).

        • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @07:02PM (#64129211)

          Kotaku is the sort that suffers from a hands-off numbers-based system.

          Kotaku is the sort who needs a nice tidy "agency-approved" list because it gives them a pressure point to shove their thumb into. It means a nice tidy lynchpin to tug on, to go Karen on, a human curator they can name to superiors as problematic if the "wrong" game is winning or the "right" game is insufficiently highlighted.

          If the "wrong" game is winning on actual numbers, who do you point the finger at for being ungood? That's a problem. Our arm-twisting needs a human we can mob around.

          We need human curators, not impartial metrics.

        • Not even that. Kotaku is a mouthpiece for those who want a world where your success is dictated by whether you paid off the right people in the right way, and where basic rights like owning things you buy and not getting malware or defective-by-design trash are considered "nazism".

          There's a reason they always pull out their worst smear campaigns for people who are trying to bring up serious issues like companies stealing or degrading already purchased products, false advertising, and outright fraud like lootbox scams and "native advertising".

      • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @03:33PM (#64128705)

        I'm guessing the author is also a Steam game dev and is upset his game isn't selling very well.

      • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @05:54PM (#64129049)

        >"The author probably thinks there are way too many pages on the web too. Just take the top ten, delete everything else, and tell everyone the Internet is full."

        OMG, *LOVE* this posting!!!

        I was kinda thinking the same thing. But seriously, more choice is generally a really good thing. But you can have too poor of a way of narrowing things down. That will come to reviews and other metrics.

        I can say from experience, at least in the physical world, it has been exceptionally rare I have had "too many" choices in the product I am looking for. 99.9% of the time I have to settle for the least worst of just a few things offered.

    • by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:50PM (#64128355)
      Agreed, so long as the game you saw advertised (on Kotaku perhaps?) shows up when you search for it then Steam's job is done.
    • by Stolovaya ( 1019922 ) <skingiiiNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:58PM (#64128389)
      That's not exactly true. Their front page is curated, so Valve is doing some very limited marketing.
    • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @11:27AM (#64131325)

      Steam is a distribution platform. While it does have a storefront, it's pretty simple. Valve doesn't do any marketing for you. That's your job as a publisher.

      This is not strictly true, Valve will advertise for you however I've never seen them pushing crap, well besides the latest Modern Snorefare. I'm assuming Valve isn't doing this for free.

      However they keep it low key, you either go looking for it via the store page (Steam defaults to opening your library) or a pop up that's easily ignored and I'm pretty sure can be turned off.

      Put simply, if everyone advertised like Steam we'd live in a much happier world.

  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:25PM (#64128263)
    All the unemployed programmers out there who have to find ways to pay off their student debts are trying to fill their portfolio in order to get a "real" job. For every GTA6, there are ten thousand shovel ware titles trying to get into the industry.
  • by CrappySnackPlane ( 7852536 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:34PM (#64128299)

    Shouldn't the games press be exploring this deluge of new offerings to report on the ones that seem interesting and worthy of extra attention?

    It's absolutely ridiculous to be whining that there's "too many releases", that's like a fishery complaining that there are too many different species of fish in a lake, or, hell, more on point, Entertainment Weekly complaining that there are too many DVDs and Blu-Rays on Amazon.

    Now, obviously, I'm feigning a certain level of ignorance here - in reality, Kotaku and most of the games press exists to serve the AAA titles and the "in-crowd" indie releases, and it goes without saying that both of those entities would rather a less competitive-- er, sorry, "more selective"-- sales platform where they can soak up a greater percentage of the spotlight. But that doesn't serve the interests of actual users/gamers, and it's honestly somewhat galling that the reader is expected to believe otherwise.

    • by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @08:52PM (#64129467)

      ... too many different species of fish ...

      Wow, I admire you: You've never complained there are too many cars on the road, too many shoppers at a Christmas-week discount, too many idiots campaigning for re-election.

      Talk about cherry-picking your data: Really, it's like you've never had to find something, ever.

      It's really easy to see the problem: There is a sea with 1 million fish. They total 10,000 species. Sounds good? Now, the important news: 900,000 are poisonous fugu puffer-fish. It's lucky there's no such thing as too many fish, you can spend the rest of your life eating fugu (literally).

      We've seen this overpopulation with Chinese counterfeiting high-priced fashion accessories (they don't do it so much now) and Amazon shopping.

      Now to software: The early ActionScript (Flash) and Java repositories weren't so troublesome because one had to learn a real language. The first deluge was Windows sidebar powered by JavaScript: Every script-kiddie took the tutorial source-code, changed the colour and owner attributes and uploaded it to the Sidebar gallery. Result: There were 10,000 clock applets in the Sidebar gallery, all with the same copyright banner in the source-code.

      For Android, the deluge didn't happen until in-app advertising became standard practice. Then it was, copy someone's source code, add your own images/artwork, upload to the Play Store and earn $20/week. It paid for itself and with the copy-pasta learning curve finished, there was much incentive to "rinse and repeat". Google changing the API multiple times means this drek doesn't work on the latest version of Android. Nowadays, copy-pasta crap can't compete with in-maintenance software.

      • by CrappySnackPlane ( 7852536 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @12:30AM (#64129831)

        Brother, you are absolutely straight-up mentally fucking retarded.

        It's really easy to see the problem: There is a sea with 1 million fish. They total 10,000 species. Sounds good? Now, the important news: 900,000 are poisonous fugu puffer-fish. It's lucky there's no such thing as too many fish, you can spend the rest of your life eating fugu (literally).

        A bad game is not going to kill you. A bad game is not going to destroy other, good games. And this might blow your mind, but a game which you think is bad may not even be bad to me.

        A bad game sits behind a seven digit numeric identifier that instructs a web server which entries in a gigantic database to use to populate a display page. If your game shopping experience is to add random numbers to "https://store.steampowered.com/app/" and keep on changing the numbers until you find a game you like, then maybe, perhaps, yes, the availability of bad games on Steam is leading to a significant amount of your time being wasted, but if that's the case the onus is on you to develop a way of checking out games that isn't pants-on-head.

        The rest of your post just gets more and more jaw-droppingly insane with every word and I can't really interact with it in any rational manner. Counterfeit Chinese Amazon knockoff something something blah blah script kiddy advertising something about copy-pasting source code or whatever rubbing my finger against my lips and going abippitybippitybappityblahhhhh. Even if the words resolved to coherent and correct statements, which is extremely doubtful, the logical link to allowing game developers to publish on Steam just isn't anywhere to be found. Straining the limits of my good faith to try and massage it into something that has anything to do with anything, it seems to resolve to "bad game listings clutter up the storefront with entries which nobody looks at or buys, which is a problem because ???, and also this somehow cuts into sales of good games that people would otherwise buy", which is a self-obvious contradiction.

        In the end, it all just reinforces my already-deeply-held prior that anyone who is not me who feels justified in deciding which games (/books/movies/albums) need to be hidden from me or made unavailable to me is retarded, insane, and overall not a very good person.

        • A bad game is not going to destroy other, good games. [...] Straining the limits of my good faith to try and massage it into something that has anything to do with anything, it seems to resolve to "bad game listings clutter up the storefront with entries which nobody looks at or buys, which is a problem because ???"

          You interpreted NotEmmanuelGoldstein's post the same way I did. I'll put it even more concisely:

          Too many bad games makes a release feed less useful.

          Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, once you've subscribed to a few genres on Steam, you get a feed of new releases in those genres. A flood of bad games means there are fewer good games per screenful of the feed. This means prospective buyers see fewer good games for a given amount of time spent scrolling through this feed, and good games that don't get seen don't get bought.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @06:38AM (#64130425)

      It's absolutely ridiculous to be whining that there's "too many releases", that's like a fishery complaining that there are too many different species of fish in a lake, or, hell, more on point, Entertainment Weekly complaining that there are too many DVDs and Blu-Rays on Amazon.

      You're missing the point. There's not too many DVDs and Blu-Rays on Amazon, and there's not too many different species of fish. The former is a library built up over decades with the rate of expansion small enough that a wikipedia page lists them by week, rather than day, the latter is a library which remains unchanged for years at a time.

      The issue here is that the games library is expanding at a rate that prohibits analysis of quality. The DVD review industry would complain too if movies were released at a rate literally 50x higher than currently (which is the difference between the release rate for new film content and release rate of steam games).

  • by Lije Baley ( 88936 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:36PM (#64128305)

    There are search features, lists by price, popularity/sales, etc. I've neither been annoyed by spam nor had trouble finding something. It's a platform to sell games, and it works. The garbage stays buried unless it gets popular, and promotion is accomplished elsewhere, on YouTube / social media / gaming "news" outlets.

  • by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:45PM (#64128339)

    It sounds like the problem has more to do with an oversaturation of content available and that the publisher may struggle to directly reach the consumer. This sounds more like the responsibility of the publisher to properly market their game, and not the responsibility of the storefront.

    As a gamer I have no problems finding games I like on Steam, and there are more that suit my interests than I have time to play. This isn't a bad problem for me to have, and I hesitate to even call it a problem.

  • by WCLPeter ( 202497 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:46PM (#64128345) Homepage

    Seriously, it's like a library then? I know when I walk into my local library I head straight for the Science Fiction section, that's what I'm interested in when I have time to read a book. There's tens of thousands of other books of all kinds of genres there, I don't give a crap about them even though I see tonnes of people milling about those shelves whenever I go.

    Wait until the author finds out about all the various video and music streaming services too! Way too much music, way too much video! There's thousands of movies, shows, and songs I've never listened to and who cares? Someone else hasn't bothered watching, reading, listening, or playing the stuff I like either. Choice is a good thing.

    My only major complaint about Steam, and the other online game stores, is the prevalence of games with an insidious volume of micro transactions designed to get me to spend real money to progress in the game; I can wait three, real time, days for this task to complete or I can spend 50 of the ingame microtransaction currency to do it now and hey if you buy the ingame currency now we'll give you an extra 50% as a bonus but of course we won't tell you that you'll burn through this stuff in less than an hour and now you gotta spend another $9.99 to do it again but you love that dopamine hit don't you?

    I miss the old days where you bought a thing and it was yours and the only time you needed to spend more was to get new levels / expansions that made the gameplay better.

  • What's the problem? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:53PM (#64128365)

    I don't see a problem, or at least, a problem that doesn't also exist for every other marketplace with lots of vendors and products.

    The problem can't be the number of games, since other markets (e.g., Google Play, Apple App Store) have far more apps and games.

    The problem can't be a lack of reviews or ratings, since Steam has reviews and aggregate ratings like other markets.

    Maybe the OP is suggesting that there are too many games for editors to review each game individually. If that's a problem, isn't it even more of a problem for other markets?

    Maybe the OP is suggesting that a good market should inherently have a built-in mechanism for marketing "good" games. That would be nice and would be a seminal innovation.

  • by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:54PM (#64128371)

    This:

    Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting.

    Is completely in opposition to this:

    And that's not least because of those 50 games per day, about 48 of them will be absolute dross.

    If 48 of the games are "absolute dross", then a reviewer should be able to identify that fact within, say, ten minutes. Say you've got a staff of five people to review new games; that hardly seems unreasonable for a storefront the size of Steam, so each one would have to review ten games per day. Determining which games of the ten are total crapware should take no more than a couple hours, which leaves you six hours during the working day to give a fair shot to those that have some promise.

    • I'd figure you could have one person filter the deck overnight writing 1-2 a quick paragraph ea.

      Then you'd have 4 people with 2 days to review a game that's not complete dreck.

      I'm not sure a staff of 5 is supportable for articles that will get mostly no views, but I concur 5 people could do it.

      But it probably wouldn't get much views, a daily article of "new games from yesterday that lists 2 that will get more full preliminary reviews and 48 that are garbage.

      Then on Monday you can release the "maybe worth playing from last week".

      It may require an extra person to go through the 48 games though.

      And definitely an extra person to give the longer games real playtime.

    • by toxonix ( 1793960 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:40PM (#64128837)
      Who's going to pay these five unfortunate souls to manually filter out the 1 or 2 games from the firehose? It used to be hard and expensive to develop a new game. No the gaming media only pays attention to the big publishers because they're the only ones actually producing games of any worth. And not many of them..
    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @06:40AM (#64130431)

      If 48 of the games are "absolute dross", then a reviewer should be able to identify that fact within, say, ten minutes.

      If your purpose is to one-word games then sure. But reviewers do more than that. That's before we get into the weeds of finding out which games are worthless after only playing for a significant time.

      • by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @12:36PM (#64131593)

        If your purpose is to one-word games then sure. But reviewers do more than that.

        I was responding to the claim that "Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting." Exactly what "write about" means isn't defined, but as I've demonstrated it is certainly possible to do better than "one-word games". With their numbers, after you've weeded out the trash, you're left with 2 games per day. It should certainly be possible for a competent team to play that many games for a few hours and write a short review.

        That's before we get into the weeds of finding out which games are worthless after only playing for a significant time.

        If you had to play for a significant time to discover that it's "worthless," then the game isn't "absolute dross," so it doesn't matter for the purposes of their argument.

    • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @11:36AM (#64131347)

      This:

      Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting.

      Is completely in opposition to this:

      And that's not least because of those 50 games per day, about 48 of them will be absolute dross.

      If 48 of the games are "absolute dross", then a reviewer should be able to identify that fact within, say, ten minutes. Say you've got a staff of five people to review new games; that hardly seems unreasonable for a storefront the size of Steam, so each one would have to review ten games per day. Determining which games of the ten are total crapware should take no more than a couple hours, which leaves you six hours during the working day to give a fair shot to those that have some promise.

      Aside from a few high budget releases, most reviews are now post facto, meaning the game is out and purchasable, even if just as an early access. Even then to get your early access game (or full release) reviewed you need to have a good USP (Unique Selling Point). A magazine, even one that will give paid for reviews won't waste their time reviewing dross (unless it's EA/Ubisoft AAA dross, in which case publications like RPS will still call it dross). So as for game reviews, the cart is now before the horse as users get the games before the reviewers. When it comes to looking at 100 games on Steam, it's pretty easy to sort out the ones that would be worth playing, not just from reviews but also just from screenshots and descriptions, in about 2 hours (and even then, if the game is not as advertised, 5 mins per game). Steam is no exception to Sturgeons law (90% of everything is crap) and Steam makes it easy to filter a lot of that 90% out, I'm a bit more discerning, out of 50 or so games I can look at on Steam in 2 hours, I might buy one, maybe two but I'm not a professional games journalist (or even an amateur one), so I'd expect professionals to be better at quickly sorting the wheat from the chaff.

  • by invisiblefireball ( 10371234 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:58PM (#64128391)
    Sounds exactly like the music industry, the art industry, and (let me just check) yep, all creative endeavours. In fact, i'd go so far as to say that it's the same problem on some level. But is "the problem" the internet? Is *money* itself the problem? It cannot be the case that "overproduction" of minor art is an actual problem unto itself...
    • by dvice ( 6309704 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:43PM (#64128565)

      As work gets automated and big companies increase their market share, more and more people will be pushed into entertainment as it is pretty much only place where you can try to complete with others without big investments and a big company.

      This is good and bad at the same time. It creates better entertainment, but it creates even more trash,and gems are really hard to find. At the same time, there are thousands of people who try hard and still make nothing.

  • by kwerle ( 39371 ) <kurt@CircleW.org> on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:32PM (#64128529) Homepage Journal

    "On a storefront that goes to some lengths to bury new releases, and even buries pages where you can deliberately list new releases."

    Steam front page:
    Secondary heading: "Your Store"
    Subheading includes: "New Releases Queue"

    Secondary heading: "New & Noteworthy"
    Subheading includes "New Releases"

    This is just a crap article.

  • by Tyr07 ( 8900565 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:35PM (#64128545)

    That's the article? A complaint that we have thousands of more games we want to put in front of eyeballs and we don't have an effective means of doing so?

    I do not want to be flooded with whatever new game everyone wants to put in front of me.
    I love the creativity of games, and a lot of the games out there, but I will go and search for the games I want, I'll look for a particular genre that I'm interested in, and I find new games all the time.

    If anything just make sure you tag them well and appropriately. It's getting harder to find what I want since people will take every 'this game sort of kind of has that ergo I'll tag it with it'. You know, you could look for a space simulation game, and it's like space mcdonalds simulator. While technically, it's simulating something 'in space', it's bull, it's a tycoon game with a space setting. Back in the day when words had meaning and were used correctly was better. That's probably their worse enemy, because games that are really space simulators are over saturated with content that by common sense isn't. I just picked a random genre, this applies to any genre

    I'm sorry if there are 50 others that are new and want my attention to but my god, it's called being oversaturated, that's your real problem. Human curators means we want steam to put a system in that people are paid to test our games and rate them for us to generate attention, turning it into a game review site to advertise games and that's front and center for everyone.
    Yawn.

  • by PJ6 ( 1151747 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:44PM (#64128569)
    It had something like over a hundred thousand games.

    To be fair a lot of them were crap, but some were real gems, many of which I doubt would never have existed if there wasn't such a low barrier to entry.

    Steam's search is so elaborate I don't think this is such a big deal. If you put your game into the genre and categories it belongs in it'll be found.
  • by LionKimbro ( 200000 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @03:30PM (#64128691) Homepage

    I do not get it.

    I love that there are so many games. I love games from AAA to A to B to C, there are even some D grade games that I love. The attitude is: yes it is trash, but it is MY trash.

    What is the problem that the author has? He cannot play EVERY single game?

    Just wait until he discovers how many books people are writing.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:19PM (#64128785)

      What is the problem that the author has? He cannot play EVERY single game?

      No, some games push out other games that "should" be at the top of the list, in his opinion. He would rather that those low grade games simply don't get mentioned or preferably that they not exist.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:57PM (#64128895)

      His point is that there's a discoverability problem for most people on Steam. Finding the next thing you'd enjoy has gotten harder for most people. That is true.

      • by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @06:24PM (#64129111)

        This is not the problem Steam is trying to solve, though. It's like complaining that your car doesn't tell you where would be a fun place to go on vacation.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @07:30PM (#64129267)

          Reviews. Genres. Tags. "Based on what you played in the past, you may like these games" suggestions.

          Steam isn't just trying to solve this problem. It's desperately trying to solve it, because offering you games that you might like next is how they increase their profits.

      • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @06:34PM (#64129149)

        Quite seriously. Of the 50 titles that come out every day, 40 are utter garbage that you can filter out with halfway decent filters. Just filter out all clickers, all free-to-play and all "visual novel" games and you probably catch most of them.

        Of the remaining 10 games, simply by a law of distribution, 80% are not of any interest to me due to being of a genre I don't care. Anything sport, anything racing, anything platformer, anything zombie. And we're down to 2 games.

        So 10 games a week. I think I can manage that.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @07:28PM (#64129261)

          Honestly, all the real gems are in the first 40. Vampire Survivors comes to mind as an excellent example that started a genre. It has all hallmarks of shovelware, like simple graphics, store bought generic assets, early access and so on.

          AAA is utter garbage today. Pretty much all the good "forever games" are not on steam/mainly not on steam other than counter strike. (DOTA 2 is all but dead, LoL won, deal with it). There's maybe a couple of genuinely good AAA games every year nowadays, and most of them launch as an awful and buggy mess and only become good after patching (hello CP2077), or are just hopelessly shit with patching being unable to do anything meaningful (hello Starfield). AA has some more gems, but even then it's usually hit and miss.

          I suspect "discoverability" problem is at least as much about the fact that there are actually very few good high budget games along all high budget games released, just like there are very good indies among all the indies. Steam can't really fix that without just straight up blocking access for most game makers again. And even that isn't going to fix the problem.

          • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @02:55AM (#64130049)

            And those "gems" will already be dug up by someone and they will go, as it is called today, "viral". Don't you worry, you won't be missing out on anything since nearly every game is today released in Early Access and by the time it gets some traction and you hear about it, it's at least already in a halfway playable state. So all you really missed is being a beta tester and paying for the privilege.

            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @09:54AM (#64130957)

              A lot of the VS genre games tend to be very good even in early stages, effectively offering you a different game as it is developed. Not better or worse, just different. Because VS genre games are primarily about balance and using correct weapons in correct ways to become massively overpowered at the end of the run. And that's what changes during early access.

              For example, I really liked Time Wasters, and having bought it early, I played through I think at least four different stages of the game where it played very differently. Fun, just a different way to break it to make yourself OP at the end. I really like Halls of Torment, 20 Minutes till Dawn was actually kinda better in early access because they streamlined some things they really shouldn't have at the end. And current "in development" game in that genre that is going viral because it's actually really good is Death Must Die. Same thing, there have already been at least one clearly differentiated phase where different things were overpowered compared to now at the end of the run.

              This is why catching these gems in this specific genre early improves their value. This is probably the only genre where early access model actually provides additional value to the customer, rather than simply make you prepay full price for an early alpha. Because basic game mechanics wise, these games are typically feature complete with early access release. Everything after that is features added on top and balance changes.

              Where you are completely correct is that pretty much all other genres are not like this.

              It's really a stark contrast to other genres "early access", where it's almost universally "pay for the privilege to do free work". I'm not going to even mention star citizen, because that would be a cheap shot. But for example all Owl Cat games. I absolutely love Rogue Trader. First game that is actually lore accurate to 40k universe in a long time. "Good guys" are the ones who spoon the brains out of the living convict and eat it, because it helps them "taste the corruption better to be a better judge for the next suspect brought to their court of law". Everyone else is much, much worse. And their business model is about outsourcing beta testing to early access people, and since those are plot based CRPGs, they release a couple of acts into early access, and those tend to be relatively bug free at release. And then you move on into latter half of the game and jesus fucking christ does everything melt down. I had to use a "kill all enemies" function from a mod to resolve quests now, because they're visible in the log, but clicking their log entries takes you where they should've been and they're not there. Just one example of a progression stopping bug. There have been several so far, and minor bugs are just everywhere. For example, once your characters get enough perks, they're very obviously not calculated properly in combat. And on top of that, since every shot has a predicted damage range and chance to hit, it's hilarious to see that both predicted value and actual outcome are wildly in conflict with one another... and both are wrong if you do the math by hand (at least for damage).

  • by h0m3rs1mps0n ( 6457364 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:24PM (#64128795)
    And problems specifically for those whose actual job it is to review games. Itâ(TM)s a problem for no one else. I donâ(TM)t care about âoe50 new releases per dayâ. I donâ(TM)t particularly care about new releases, period. I care about finding good games that I can invest my time and money into. If some worthy ones fall through the cracks, so be it.. my steam backlog is large enough anyway.
  • "On another level, however, it's a disaster for about 99 percent of releases, which stand absolutely no chance of garnering any attention, no matter their quality. The solution: human storefront curation, which Valve has never shown any intention of doing."

    I'm not quite sure how this is intended to work: if "human storefront curation" is intended to provide better recommendations it's quite possible that it would be successful, though the automated similarity/people-like-you-bought ones already aren't terrible; but that wouldn't really change the fact that the majority of releases die in obscurity. There are just so many that they cannot all be visible at once; only some relatively more visible than others.

    If "human storefront curation" is intended to mean tougher reviews; then isn't the effect the same? Roughly the same games that today languish in obscurity will instead just not get listed.

    I don't mean to defend Steam's curation and discovery as the gold standard, there's definitely room for improvement; but I just don't see how even an arbitrarily good curation and discovery mechanism, with downright omniscient understanding of what each buyer wants and what each game delivers, will substantially change the fact that there aren't enough man hours available for 14,500 games/year to get enough attention to keep most of them from selling basically nothing. Especially when so many of them are just bad, or OK-ish but a direct clone of a strictly better game. There probably are some undiscovered gems that are tragically unknown and undersold because they fall into some sort of algorithmic blind spot; but there are also overdiscovered messes that probably deserve more obscurity than they get, so curation improvements would cut both ways.
  • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @05:36PM (#64129003) Homepage
    Big whoop. Are even 1/10 of those games not just other games with something minor changed to make another sale?
  • by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @06:23PM (#64129107)

    Steam is not a platform for marketing. It's a platform for distribution.

    I don't know people who go to Steam and click around on their storefront to try to find a game to play. Instead people learn about games by other means, go to Steam, and buy them.

    Steam doesn't really suffer from having sub-par games on there. If the people who upload them pay for the cost of keeping them around (that $100, I guess), what's it to me?

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @06:29PM (#64129129)

    So there's like 50 games a day coming out. Of these, 40 are shovelware garbage that gets filtered out by the filters I set (pretty much "eliminate all clickers, all free and all visual novel "games"). Leave 10 games. Of those 10 games, 8 are from genres I don't give a fuck about.

    So 2 games. Or 10 a week. So if I walk down my "suggested" list once a week, I get to see every game released that is actually of interest to me? I think I can manage that.

    But let's imagine I cannot, I'm absolutely certain that very soon (if it doesn't exist yet, I can't be assed to check because, frankly, I don't care that much about it) there will be a YouTube channel that makes a video per week for every genre of game out there to showcase it. Hell, I'd be very surprised if there isn't already at least 10 people on Patreon begging for money to do just that.

    And then of course there are the various "curators" on Steam itself that you can follow. Once you found one with a similar taste of yours, you're pretty much set.

    So what exactly is the whole thing about? Who wrote that POS?

    John Walker, reporting for Kotaku:

    Ahhhh... someone is pissed that indie games take away the limelight from the AAAs that pay them. Ok, got it, nothing to see here, carry on.

  • by SendBot ( 29932 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @10:57PM (#64129679) Homepage Journal

    "The solution: human storefront curation, which Valve has never shown any intention of doing."

    Steam has had a curators for many years. This feature is not obscure. Why the misinformation?
    https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @01:08PM (#64131725)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
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