I'm just annoyed that unfinished products are listed alongside everything else on the front page. I don't browse anymore... If something interesting comes out, I'll find out about it eventually, through other means.
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.