Evolving Steam
steamcommunity.com
steamcommunity.com
I hope they make the entrance price high. Steam is already clogged with a lot of subpar stuff. Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel.
If you are a manga artist trying to release the 100th iteration of a 'game' based on suggestive images, it may slow you down.
Not suggesting that $1000 is the perfect price point, just that $100 is far too low.
So as long as a game sells even reasonably well they could get the fee back in full while low quality shovelware gets discouraged.
Please not, the 37th is the best of all!
Seriously, you are arguing that developers should be hindered from making software so that you don't have to make a selection from so many titles.
Alternative solution for your problem: Replace the generic ratings with ratings calculated only from my friends' and my ratings (or with people matched via ratings of games I played and rated as well).
There's also the argument that other providers are out there, too itch.io. This compels me to think that the problem isn't really that these software engineers/game developers aren't really hindered in terms of how they're exposed.
Which app store 'gets it right' and how close to do you feel it's use case is to Steam's?
If I cared enough about solving "all cases of the problem" I'd probably not post my solution here but patent it and live off royalty fees for the remainder of my life ;)
Honestly, my solution collides with the aim of any game provider: I want recommendations based on trust, games providers want to sell games. If steam implemented my solution, it might work out, but it also might lead to a decline in sales (because I suspect most people to buy stuff based on some arbitrary "rating").
> Which app store 'gets it right' and how close to do you feel it's use case is to Steam's?
None, because the store's and my goals are mutually exclusive (at least as far as "app stores" work for now): I want stuff I like, the store wants my money. There is no incentive to implement my solution because, as of now, there is no evidence that the store makes more money by not pushing unwanted apps into my face.
PS: Thanks for your feedback, it forced me to reflect upon and spell out things I usually take for granted because I live in my own filter bubble.
It reminds me of when Facebook was testing a redesign of the site. Users reported how much they liked it, and Facebook found that users had an easier time navigating around. But this also reduced the amount of time users stayed on Facebook, by quite a lot, so they never went forward with the new design.
Yeah, that will result in only pre-established games making it onto the store because no one will even risk having to pay that fee for a game there is no market benchmark for.
Have fun seeing only AAA titles and clones thereof in the store. But hey, at least you can be lazy and not have to put a little effort into finding cool new stuff!
Greenlight is a muddy mess of copycats, but imposing a barrier like this to all indie devs universally is a terrible idea. Most likely, it will never even work since indie devs will just move to the next platform where they can actually do their job; Steam will lose all its interest and become a sort of playstation store for PC
I used to be a compulsive Steam game buyer, but at some point Steam started showing me tacky anime-dating-visual-novel-high school-crap. I don't get it, what happened? I've bought a few Japanese shmups and a few fighting games, but that's the closest I can get to any possible reason why Steam wants to shove this sh*t down my throat that I'm clearly not interested in.
The store really has become useless for me, unless I know exactly what I want beforehand.
For example, if you don't like anime games, just add "anime" as a tag in the discovery queue customization dialog.
Unfortunately, they only seem to allow a maximum of 12 such tags. But it's far better than nothing.
I'm dismayed there is scarcely any mention of the quality of works entering Steam. It's patently obvious that quality is the major issue now, not the usability of the platform or developer features.
It seems pretty clear to me that their plans are to rely on the market to moderate this stuff.
My second concern is that Greenlight and shovelware will turn into a malware channel. Some of the anti-cheat utilities have deep access.
This is a case where the developers had a vision (and still do), but early access to a mode that was initially just for testing allowed them to discover their test mode (aka "sandbox") was actually a fine game in and of itself.
Early access, I think, allows developers with perfection obsession to go ahead and ship something. Instead of developing it forever, hoping to achieve their goal, and never shipping.
It's true that there is a lot of garbage in early access, but I don't think it's a worse ratio than most indie games.
In the old model, the way to get your game onto Steam was to put it through Greenlight, where if it gathered enough support it could get promoted to the main storefront. You had to pay a fee to Valve to submit games to Greenlight, but it was a one-time fee ($100, IIRC), after which you could submit as many games to Greenlight as you wanted.
In the new model, Greenlight goes away; you just submit your game directly, and after you pay a publication fee, the amount of which is still up in the air (anywhere from $100-$5,000), it goes into the storefront. But, and this is the wrinkle, now you pay the publication fee for each game you submit rather than just paying it once. So if you submit ten games for publication, you pay the publication fee ten times.
So why the change? My guess is that Valve has decided that the essential premise of Greenlight -- that community curation would surface the gems within the vast pile of dross that gets submitted -- has been comprehensively broken by tactics like voting rings and giving out free keys in exchange for votes. So this represents them abandoning that idea and replacing it with a more blunt filter: a per-title publication fee. In the old model it cost the same to submit a thousand games as it did to submit one, so developers just threw lots of things against the wall and prayed one would stick. Now there will be a financial incentive for developers to put more wood behind fewer arrows, as the saying goes.
The big question is whether this will improve the overall quality of games on Steam, or reduce it further (if that's even possible). I'm honestly not sure. A lot will depend on where precisely they set that publication fee -- too high will drive off cash-starved indie devs, too low will mean the crap merchants will just swallow it as the cost of doing business.
Bad games don't make much money before it's discovered and Steam has a 14 day-ish refund policy. It might force them to automate it, like Google Play does for 2 hours after purchases.
Careful usage of categories can make up for some of it, but even that is clunky and not something I want to spend time on.
I have like 10 categories, but as I'm only actively playing (i.e. have installed) like 5, the rest is still a collapsed bunch of categories...
Valve definitely does not seem to have a clear vision for the future.
Finish the HL2 story arc for crying-out-loud. Or just cancel it so your fans can move on.
This is a gaming company that hasn't really done anything major for gaming in nearly a decade. How is that even possible?
Steam on Linux hasn't ushered in "Linux on every desktop" but it's done quite a bit for Linux gaming.
Dota 2 came out 4 years ago and is huge.
Greenlight was launched 5 years ago. That achieved nothing for indie game devs I guess.
Anyone of those was a pretty major event in "gaming".
I stand by what I said. The Orange Box was the last great hurrah for Valve gaming.
Dota 2 is pretty much the only game that can keep my attention, everything else just falls by the wayside after a while.
Also, Portal 2 was an incredibly polished, fun game.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Also in the last decade: Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2.
My main competitive game I play now is overwatch. They took a winning idea, and improved upon it with many more classes than TF2, and took elements from other genres (ie dota and 'ultimates')
Steam probably has a ton of such demographic information that would make for some really interesting articles and research.
It's all about control and stopping real indie development. "low as $100 to as high as $5,000." That's _per title_ ! and it will whatever they can get away with. $5000 to publish a game is not indie anymore.
This is a matter of competing pressures. We want indies to be able to publish as easily as possible, but customers don't want to see lots of bad games.
The easier you make it for indies, the easier you make it for people pushing out crap. This is clearly a response to people's complaints about the lowering quality of the average content in the Steam store, after their attempts at providing better game discovery methods and curation systems haven't solved the issue.