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.
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.
Isn't that the problem with all app stores (Score:4, Insightful)
So all the platforms just fill and fill and fill with low quality software.
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$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=
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A pain to get if you have no money sure, but it isn't an unobtainable amount.
And the people doing unsavory practices on Steam, would, to me, be the same that would be able to obtain that modest $100 thru other unsavory means.
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You're thinking US/other wealthy Western nations quality of life.
Most of the shovelware is made by people in very poor nations, who're trying to do something to improve their lot beyond what their immediate physical circumstances allow. In those conditions, 100 USD is a pretty decent barrier to entry.
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itch.io is an enthusiast marketplace. steam is a mainstream marketplace with relatively permissive policies, so i guess it can be mistaken for an enthusiast marketplace... but it isn't.
the gateway of enthusiasm is the best gateway but not everyone is cut out for that i guess. and should they be? it's video games; their original market was to replace gambling machines and make money. if anything, it's the ones who think they're artistic, or whatever, that are the weirdos, and we have itch.io.
money breeds cor
Re:Isn't that the problem with all app stores (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 solidl
Re:Isn't that the problem with all app stores (Score:5, Informative)
There's even a name for it: Shovelware
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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 ratin
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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
Human curation has a cost (Score:3)
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.
So many are the same (Score:3)
Most of them feel like they are being cranked out by kits. Like the world building games, they all feel alike.
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Oh they are essentially kits. Grab the latest version of a game development framework (even expensive ones have cheaper variations, or may only charge you based upon sales). Then experiment with it and you've got a game, even if it's unplayable. Ie Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, etc.
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Is the situation that different from say packaged hyper-card stacks back in the day?
There were some top titles that at least, started that way.
Reviews and Ratings (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Reviews and Ratings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Reviews and Ratings (Score:2)
I would hope if a game is so bad I refunded it in a few minutes of play I could review too (negative only).
Maybe some limit on how many of these negative refund reviews you can post to stop people from tanking competition?
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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 t
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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.
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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.
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>Todd fanboys
"But I loved past Todd games!"
Damn did I hit a bullseye there.
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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
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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
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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.
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Is "fails to deliver" the same as "awful"? I played it all, I found it engaging. Good in parts, average in other parts, some parts may be dull. Not engaging enough to do NG+, but that's true for most games.
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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 t
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I said "bombing" because it did seem to be coordinated. Identical wording, repeating the same falsehoods (such as there being no white males), and so forth.
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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
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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.
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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
Marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Coming from Kotaku, I wouldn't be surprised. (Score:1, Interesting)
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).
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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 loo
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I'm guessing the author is also a Steam game dev and is upset his game isn't selling very well.
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>"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" cho
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Is it curated, or is it based on algorithms that basically say, "Tons of people are buying these games. Are they something you're interested in?"
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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.
Part of the overloaded tech industry. (Score:2)
Isn't that your job, Kotaku? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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
Games that don't get seen don't get bought (Score:2)
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'
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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
What problem? (Score:2)
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.
Is the issue for consumers or for producers? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So it's a library then? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
Argument does not make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 pl
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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.
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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 a
Cart is now before the horse (Score:2)
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
yes everything's broken, glad you noticed (Score:1)
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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.
Bury new releases (Score:2)
"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.
Seriously? A lack of advertising complaint? (Score:2)
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. I
Reminds me of Kongregate back in the day. (Score:3)
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.
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I think Kong had about fifty new releases some days too, but just by looking at the thumbnails you could tell which ones had had some effort put in to them.
What is his problem? (Score:1)
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.
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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.
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We're talking Kotaku here. It's pretty much their business to hawk and peddle crappy AAA games that can't sell otherwise.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 mana
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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 laun
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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.
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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 pla
First world problems (Score:1)
Not sure the math works, or what is being asked. (Score:2)
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 te
SO the signal to noise is higher. (Score:2)
How is this a problem? (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
What platform for marketing should devs be using instead?
Care to point out the problem? (Score:2)
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
Steam Curators (Score:3)
"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]