Steam's new low game listing rules have led to some changes...

[A Black Falcon]

Now you can buy amazing games such as this one straight from Valve!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnzN-3N_0xw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYArgbWVtGc

Yes, this is a real game. :barf: For those who don't know, this year Valve completely abandoned all previous attempts at quality control on Steam. Now you can pretty much publish anything there. The result is that there have already been more Steam releases this year than there were in all of last year, and the numbers keep increasing quickly. Valve also added a thing called "Early Access", which lets people sell games before they are finished, on the promise that, really, someday we will finish the thing! Paid alphas or betas of games which may never be finished, mountains of terrible games clogging up Steam... this is the new Steam store.

And I should note, the game in those two videos up there is not Early Access; even many Early Access games aren't that atrocious. But it is in no way finished or even remotely competent. Still though, based on that second video... man is that game hilarious! I laughed more than I have to a game in a while.


So what do I think? Well, allowing more games isn't all bad. There are lots of PC games, and Steam had probably been too restrictive in the past. But Valve now has probably gone too far in the opposite direction. And also, they need a better store! Of course I have never liked Steam's interface much, but with so many more game releases its problems show even more now. Steam's very basic game listing system in the store doesn't work well with so many releases! And they need to categorize stuff, too... there should be some way of sorting out awful garbage like Air Control there from actual decent games. So yeah, Steam has issues, and it's getting even worse. That people who used to defend Steam now have problems with it now shows that...

[Great Rumbler]

Nah, I still pretty much just don't care. Sorting through even a dozen releases in a day is hardly some awful, time-consuming task and it's pretty easy to spot the kinds of games that should be immediately disregarded. Some people are upset, whatever, they can be if they want to be.

[Dark Jaguar]

Sorting through "a dozen new games in a single day" isn't the reality. It's more like sorting through "a thousand new games every six months when you actually decide to peruse the store". No one constantly visits Steam's store every day, that's not how people use it.

Abandoning quality control... Well, that could become a problem if people can't find the good ones. Could be...

So long as I'm able to peruse items on the store as judged by other players, as in "high ranking" games as voted on by people playing them, I should still be able to find quality stuff, or at least popular stuff. "Hidden gems" become more difficult to find though, and that's the shame, those small developers that released something at a bad time and got "hidden" in a deluge of other big name releases won't have much of a chance of finding a niche if it's just one in a flood of garbage released that month.

I can see how it would be problematic, is what I'm saying. There's also the very basic fact that without SOME quality control, eventually we're going to see something truly offensive and terrible like "Godsmita: Destroy All Muslims" sneak through onto the store. (I just made that up, racists are fairly predictable.)

[Great Rumbler]

Sorting through "a dozen new games in a single day" isn't the reality. It's more like sorting through "a thousand new games every six months when you actually decide to peruse the store". No one constantly visits Steam's store every day, that's not how people use it.

If that's the reality for some people, why should I be bothered? I can set aside a couple minutes to check Steam's latest releases, and that's what I tend to do.

No, for me, the bigger problem is that I have a Steam wishlist with 300 games on it and a Steam backlog of games I already own and haven't played yet that's about the same length.

[A Black Falcon]

So long as I'm able to peruse items on the store as judged by other players, as in "high ranking" games as voted on by people playing them, I should still be able to find quality stuff, or at least popular stuff. "Hidden gems" become more difficult to find though, and that's the shame, those small developers that released something at a bad time and got "hidden" in a deluge of other big name releases won't have much of a chance of finding a niche if it's just one in a flood of garbage released that month.

Yeah, this is a very good point. Finding the "hidden gems" under such a mountain of awful of mediocre games is much, MUCH harder than it was before, that's for sure... and for people used to Steam actually being a place where you could find interesting games, that's kind of a problem. Now what, just ignore all of that stuff? That's one answer, but as you say, it comes at the cost of missing out on some interesting games. And no one really could research and know a lot about every single one of those games, not when Steam is getting, like, hundreds of games a month now or something like that...

[Great Rumbler]

What about all the hidden gems you miss by Steam having a restrictive admission system that makes it hard for those games to get on Steam in the first place?

[A Black Falcon]

Steam is not the only place that sells PC games, you know. The PC is not like a videogame console.

[Great Rumbler]

That argument kind of undercuts your complaint, though, that hidden gems will get lost because Steam lets too many games get released. If it's easy to just pop over to the game's website, Amazon, or some smaller service like Desura, than you could have just as easily found the game on Steam, as that implies that you already know about the game to begin with. But if you don't know about it? Steam's a good place to start looking given how diverse its library is. Getting more games on Steam is not a problem, allowing some shoddy garbage [like Air Control] to slip through the cracks is a problem, though, I agree with you there. Even less stringent control should be able to spot something this obviously bad and keep it off, but it's not like Steam has suddenly become clogged with cheap, half-finished, nearly-unplayable garbage [or at least segregates it from finished games with the Early Access section].

[A Black Falcon]

On the note of Early Access, though, paying for an unfinished game that may or may not ever become a finished product is very questionable... it's like Kickstarter, but without the known names that back most of the more successful Kickstarter games.

[Great Rumbler]

Literally dozens of games from unknown people have been released through Kickstarter already. But it's the same way regardless: buyer beware. Don't put in money you're not willing to lose completely.

[A Black Falcon]

There is kind of a difference, though -- Kickstarter is supposed to be a place for games which wouldn't happen otherwise, or at least not in the form they're funded for. Early Access, though... isn't that more, basicaly, 'we want to start making money off of our game before we're done, so we'll put it on Early Access and rake in money first, and decide if we want to bother finishing the game after that'?

[Great Rumbler]

A lot of developers use it for a lot of reasons. inXile is currently using it to gain feedback for Wasteland 2, Double Fine used it to gain additional funding for Part 2 of Broken Age. It's a way to put an in-development game in people's hands, sometimes it doesn't work out, though, but I can only think of one major Early Access game that actually crashed before being completely finished. It happens, and that's why you don't throw your money at a game without looking into it a little and deciding that you're willing to lose that money to support an interesting game that might not ever be fully completed. I view Kickstarter the same way: don't spend your money if you aren't willing to lose it. Although in the case of Early Access you still get something to play right away.

[A Black Falcon]

Jim Sterling's Youtube channel has been QUITE entertaining ever since Steam did this, there are so many horrible, horrible Steam games...