Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

I'm an applied researcher in search science. This is a very typical domain specialized search problem. These days it uses Big Data, Machine Learning, constant experimenting / prototyping, A/B testing. I get to geek out each and every day. It is my dream job :)

I consider it one of the main reasons Apple lost so much content market share to Amazon despite Apples first mover advantage - Amazon has better search and you can actually find the stuff you want. AFAIK Apple tried to start up an applied research group to fix the problem but they refused to pay enough and ended up with the dregs. They tried to hire me 3 years ago for $130K. It highlighted that they didn't understand the importance of the problem and we're likely to fail. I typically make ~$240 as FTE and more as a contractor. Apple also has a culture of secrecy where as search science is pretty open.

Anyway; I checked out Steam. The search there is clearly very poor and can easily be improved. The overreliance on tags is usually a good indication that they are not digging into their usage data for their recommendations.

Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed):

1. Steam receives dozens of releases a day and it's difficult for developers/publishers to make their title stand-out without performing marketing.

2. Author perceives that Steam's display algorithm results in display of outliers (very good/bad).

3. Very low quality titles are released/being sold by Steam.

4. Reviews are a very poor metric as reviewers can be shills or rate content poorly out of pettiness or malice.

5. Author thinks that staff-curated titles are the solution.

My responses:

RockPaperShotgun is a game review site. Reviewing games is how they manage to make ad revenue (well, besides click-bait articles). If the defense is that more content comes out than RockPaperShotgun can review, then RockPaperShotgun should hire more people. If that's cost prohibitive, and there's market demand for it, then why are they asking Steam to do it?

1. Welcome to selling anything.

2. I don't know if this is true; I'm not rejecting this claim, but I'd love to see the data.

3. Quantifying "good enough to sell" is a risky game. I'm okay with spending $5 (most of a beer at a bar) on something kind of buggy if it's amusing for 30 minutes. For someone else, that amount may be double or $0 on principle.

4. If this subproblem gets solved without background checks on reviewers, you have a serious business that Amazon/Yelp/etc would love to buy from you.

5. Beyond catching content that simply _does not do what it says on the box_, this is all personal taste.

And as an aside, there's a "curious" market that exists in low-quality games that have DLC/content that ends up on the Steam Community Market (Steam gets a % of each transaction), so the "how did a broken game end up on Steam?" question has more depth than a casual observer would guess.

I've been using Steam for many years and I play 5-10 hours a week. I simply find it great, to purchase games and play them (unlike EA origin and all it's clones out there, last time I checked)

The way I decide to purchase a game is simple: 1) I see/read a review about a game 2) If it piques my interest I go check out some videos and read a few more reviews 3) Add it to my wishlist 4) Purchase it when it's on 'special'

Finally, I almost never buy games unless they are at least 1 year old (save a few exceptions). This article seems mostly to have a contention about new releases and the 'suggestions' made by Steam (which I almost never look at anyways).

Hope this can help others with their Steam purchases.

I understand that the reviews and discoverability are legit problems for smaller developers trying to sell their games, but I have to wonder what percentage of people using Steam are simply "in and out" customers who are looking for the known titles anyways. Those people (like me) don't care so much about user reviews or discoverability.

I'm an "in and out" customer - I love games but I basically only buy big name titles (old behaviour from my console days). I know I'm missing out on some other great titles, but I only have a limited number of hours to put into games.

The only time I might get a lesser known game is when it got a lot of buzz outside of Steam, but the most likely scenario is via a heavily discounted bundle that contains a big name title that interested me.

Of the ~100 games in my Steam library, only about 20% are games I specifically wanted the buy. The rest were basically freebies that came along for the ride.

Uhhhh... Steam needs a decent startup time. I only play computer games about once a month. When I click on the link on my desktop, Steam always takes 5-10 minutes to update itself.

This is ridiculous. I never have this problem with games on my Nvidea Shield.

I'd rather Steam get back to the core business of selling games, rather than trying to be some sort of oddball social network.

Drop the achievements (do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?), drop the trading cards (I still don't know WTF those are for). Drop everything that isn't about selling a game to a player. Then hire some competent UI people to simplify and clean up that abhorrent interface that tries to do too much.

In fact, separate Steam from Valve entirely. Let Valve focus on producing games and let Steam focus on selling them, but put a wall between them.

The problem with Steam is Valve.

Valve is famously organized as a place where everybody gets to pick the problems they want to work on (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there...). Manually reviewing dozens of (mostly crappy) games every day in the hope of finding a few that are worth recommending is the kind of dull, grinding work that nobody would ever pick for themselves to work on.

I don't get what the ask is. Steam should be even more heavy handed? They should hire people to playtest other people's games? I don't see any alternative reality where they have already taken these actions and are less hated for them.

I think you could use Steam Achivements and playtime to recommend games to people.

If I've played a game to completion on the highest difficulty presumably I like it. Find me other games that people with the achievement also play and have the equivalent achievement on and you've got something basic.

Honestly I have been thinking more and more about the problem with steam, and I realized that even as a foss, anti-drm proponent, steam is one of the few things I have bended for on those positions because of the quality of the marketplace. If they continue to fail, I truly hope something like Lutris or Desura or GoG steps up to the plate and open sources a game store (bonus if DRM free like GoG is). I mean, does anyone remember the days of hating games that required you to have a CD in the tray so you would get a noCD warez just to play? Steam solved those issues, which is what propelled it to it's current state. I don't think that's a problem with modern games though, so perhaps steam is weaker than Valve realizes if people ever actually thought about it. Now it's main function is as a game library stored in a cloud.

That makes me really sad to realize too, because I feel like Valve is one of the only companies that has the resources to really push linux gaming into a new zone, but this hasn't been delivered on yet. I highly suspect they are waiting for Vulkan, but the time can't come soon enough to offer many people the last reason they need to switch to linux from windows: gaming.

I have also noticed this sort of let the customers do the work for us attitude far too often lately. For example, I am loving working in Unreal Engine 4, but they promised a native linux editor and then ingored it for a long time, only once linux native users submitted enough patches to their own fork(s) before Epic finally spent some time to push those changes to the official repo. I think sometimes open source users who want things do work to get them but some companies abuse this process. In Epic's case, we still don't have a marketplace launcher on linux, and there are tons of editor bugs, such as I can't even edit skeletal animations/rigging without crashing the client.

There is a balance to be had between user help and the companies that need it, but that pendulum seems to have swung far too far over to the user lately, and it needs to readjust.

People love to demand that Valve or Google hire lots of people to do manual curation or phone support. Yet that costs money, and people would buy their games elsewhere it it's two cents cheaper.