I get so irritated at the complaints that steam had the gall to allow you to buy a bad game. I'd much rather have an open market of goods than a closed censored market.
If you're risk adverse, wait for the reviews.
If you're risk adverse, wait for the reviews.
This complaint, while understandable, is not taking into account all of the reality in play here.
Steam was a curated trickle before, representing only a fraction of the flow of game creation, increasing chances at (but not guaranteeing) a certain level of quality, as well as a certain level of income for anyone making it in. It did however also leave out a lot of the total amount of creation. It was not a faithful representation of the entire market.
By opening the gates Steam now represents a bigger (though not total) part of the market, and now works more similarly to how the markets for books, audiobooks, music albums or movies work. Creators in these markets have been laboring under much more strenuous conditions, successfully, for many decades.
The "clogging" you decry is not useless, as it increases the breadth of content people can access (to give one example, Brigador would probably be dead now, given that it's ignored by media, despite being an excellent game, if it couldn't claw out a solid reputation on Steam month by month) and it's not unfair, as it's just how all other media creators had to live for a long time.
You could however blame Valve for not providing more solid search and filtering tools.
With a normal book or an album you at least have to put in the effort to make it yourself. Steam does not need the equivalent of a robot's print-on-demand wikipedia article compilation.
> With a normal book [...] you at least have to put in the effort to make it yourself.
Not so, Amazon has plenty of algorithmically generated books in its store, and even in bookstores, which are curated by default, you can find plenty of outright shit.
Also keep in mind i was responding to the complaint about the "what's new" list, which is something that was, is and remains useless in any store giving access to a huge market. (Steam's Discover Queue is really useful though and replaces it with an appropiately personalized What's New list.)
Valve could pay a couple people to check games to make sure they're not 10-developer-hours trash. It's not a choice between "allow everything" or "super-popular games only".
> Not so, Amazon has plenty of algorithmically generated books in its store
That's why I said normal book, and explicitly gave an example of how Amazon can be worse.
> even in bookstores, which are curated by default, you can find plenty of outright shit.
That's okay. I don't want steam to protect me from merely 'bad' games. I want it to reject games that don't even try, or aren't even half done.
To their credit Valve does show a pretty prominent "Early Access" message at the top so I dunno what the fuss is about.
The problem is: Valve's UX is so terrible that I accidentally came across that setting once, and I've never been able to find it again. But it does exist.
... and of course 3 seconds after posting I can't find it, I managed to find it. See if this URL works for you:
https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences/
Apparently you can also filter-out certain tags, so I can shove RPGMaker in that field and never have my time wasted by those ass pieces of JRPG shit ever again. Nice.
This seems to be working well for them.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103810-Good-Old-Ga...
Fuck Gog. I don't care about their listing quality.
Not that Steam is significantly better, but at least they never pulled a moronic stunt like that.
Apparently it doesn't need to have any quality, be minimally functional, actually be your own work, be accurately advertised, or even be the game originally approved, though.
The last two should surely bother you. How can consumers make an informed decision when a game can have outright misleading advertising? How can consumers make an informed decision when the reviews are for a different game prior to a bait-and-switch?
There's a lot of crap on Amazon too, but reviews help to smooth things out. Not perfect, but definitely a strong signal
Are you serious? You have the entire internet at your fingertips and you can't make an informed decision about a game?
The amount of Let's Play and user reviews on Youtube should be enough information, but there's plenty of other opinions all over Steam forums and reviews to help you figure out whether you'll be asking for a refund or not. And that's the thing... you can simply get a refund if you don't like the game.
Seems like there's a few babies around here who want to be spoon-fed "high quality games only" or else they throw a tanty.
The trash flood has made Steam as nigh-unusable as any other app store. It used to not be the case.
- search by tags
- get recommendations based on your interests
- get recommendations about popular new games
- get recommendations based on what your friends like to play or want to play
- get recommendations based on what curators you choose reviewed
The "new stuff" list is useless, but the store is okay, and improving constantly.
- Tag searching isn't applicable to how I look for games because genre doesn't matter to me most of the time. I'm searching for something new (and because of this I have to use the "new stuff" list, which is a tire fire) and interesting and potentially worth talking about. That's not really expressed in tags.
- I have enough varied types of games in my library that the recommendations based on what Steam thinks my interests are is really, really bad. I don't like all or, probably, most of the games in my library; tons are bundle trash.
- Don't care about Valve telling me about popular new games. I'll find those through other sources if I care about them.
- Don't really care about what my friends are playing. They're my friends because occasionally we play multiplayer games, not because I follow their lead on the vast majority of games I play.
- Curators are, in my experience, functionally dead. Most are a joke, the few that aren't are rarely updated because they have no benefit to the people who could curate them--like, my interests tend to track Giant Bomb's, but they gave up on curation forever ago (not even sure it's run by GB staff, and barely has any new games that they've covered on it) because it was worth nothing to them. Maybe there are rando curators with taste, but kicking the problem down to "surfacing creators worth following" is not really any better, yeah?
And any automated recommendations fail a very important test: does this actually play? Because a whole lot of the trashflood currently all over Steam is barely functional. I'm not setting the bar high here--I can find something interesting in a game that's incomplete or even a game that's bad. But basic quality standards have fallen off a cliff in the House of Valve, and refunds don't give me back the time that nonworking stuff costs me.
Steam used to have a pretty decent guarantee: it might be a bad game, but it's gonna work. That's gone now.
Also, re:
> does this actually play
Never seen a recommended game not play. And i have a silly huge steam collection: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Mithaldu/
> - I have enough varied types of games in my library
So do i and it still works perfectly fine, you only need to exclude tags on trash type games.
Mind, one concession i need to make: I use EnhancedSteam and have a few thousand games marked as "not interested", which means they are filtered from almost all views. Maybe that would help you, since you sound similar to me.
To reiterate though: Usecases like yours and mine are not "the norm". On average people care for the features i mentioned and derive use from them.
If we were talking about the Android app store or whatever I'd agree with you as far as that I am totally a power user and I have power user needs. But for Steam specifically, I question what the norm is. I have yet to hear anyone--like, literally, anyone, not just "anyone in my power-user circles"--praise the Steam recommendations for what they are. My hunch is that Steam's userbase tends to be more engaged than a mobile app store's and that mobile app store experiences, and mobile app store quality bars, don't necessarily suit a Steam user. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants the Unity-game-skeleton-thrown-on-Steam titles. They are not a benefit. They can be excised.
(I've had multiple recommended games just totally fail-to-launch on both Windows and Mac, FWIW. Nothing underspec, just pfft, crash.)
I agree and grump a lot that Steam doesn't have a single global trigger to just hide all owned or not interested things.
> I have yet to hear anyone--like, literally, anyone, not just "anyone in my power-user circles"--praise the Steam recommendations for what they are.
Do you hear many people complaining about them? I suspect many people simply don't have an opinion and just use them as they are. I may be wrong though. What's your experience with that?
> Unity-game-skeleton-thrown-on-Steam titles
I mean, maybe it's me, the one falling into the "works for me" trap. I've literally never even had Steam try to show any of those to me.
> fail-to-launch
I'm fascinated, remember a few titles that did that?
I hear the people in my circles complaining that they can't find good stuff on Steam. They can find stuff when they're pointed at it, but...well, you can do that on any app store. Steam was better. It has regressed.
> I'm fascinated, remember a few titles that did that?
The outright launch-fails were a while ago, but one case of buying a pig in a poke that sticks out to me is Conquest of Elysium (one of them, I forget which). The game technically launched, but had no idea how to deal with a retina Mac and rendered to a backbuffer at full pixel resolution, which was then rendered to the display at double pixel resolution--unplayable, obviously. It's still in my Steam library because there were no refunds at that point. And refunds are nice, but they put the burden of proofing shit on the consumer when they should be on the platform and the vendor.
If you want to sell something that is in the development phase, I fully demand folks be upfront about it. If It isn't obvious from the description, you no longer have a honest, open market - you have something built to defraud me. Especially if you have a return and support policy tha seems complicated on purpose to deter refunds.
This really isn't about a "bad" game. I'm fine with a game that I simply don't like. I'm fully irritated when the controls make things nearly impossible. I'm irritated when the story doesn't make sense and seems like clips from other games (hello, Alone in the Dark for the Wii, you have all this). At least that last game is, technically, finishable, but the truth is it also hits the line between passable and not.
And some of the games? They don't even score that highly. This is what folks complain about. Not because steam let them buy a bad game, but because some of these aren't games. They aren't well-labeled enough, and so on and so forth. Then on top of that they have this horrible customer service that disallows refunds.
Steam allows refunds now. They have for quite some time. They also clearly label early access games. They have for some time. They also offer many different ways to unleash your dislike on a game for all to see, via their forums or reviews. You can even comment on reviews, or rate reviews. You can watch videos of games you're not sure about. You have the tools and information at hand to make an informed decision about the games you download on Steam.
Be honest, you don't really have anything to complain about do you?