Comment by elthran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elthran | Hacker News Reader

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I think the author wants to suggest a solution where anyone can submit a game, but there is still some sort of quality check before it goes on sale.

Currently, we have floods of garbage hitting Steam, with no curation at all. Pre-Greenlight, Steam was a closed shop that was hard to get into.

What is needed is a healthy balance, that doesn't have zero chances for an indie game to be seen because it's buried under all the AAA titles, yet doesn't allow trash like Slaughtering Grounds to be sold.

The article suggests getting Valve employees to playtest any submission - however, I feel this still wouldn't work due to Valve's 2 main issues. Their flat structure, where people work on what they want - who wants to look after content curation? Secondly, they take a cut of every game sold - regardless of how awful it is. They are financially incentivised to keep subpar (or even scammy) games on the store.

I'm not going to pretend I have a solution, but I feel all the issues with the Steam store currently are issues of Valve's own making - the problem is, they don't (seem to, at the very least) care.

But back in the day people used to hate on Steam because they were a closed shop that was hard to get into. So from their perspective they have to go from being unpopular one way to being unpopular another?

different people want different things you cannot satisfy everyone at once.

People would be more willing to put money down if they knew they weren't getting garbage in return. A little QA can improve sales.

Their flat structure, where people work on what they want - who wants to look after content curation?

Are you asking, who wants to play video games for pay?

One expects that someone could be found...

Well, I was attempting to frame it in the context of the current, free-for-all situation.

So, more "who wants to wade through potentially piles of garbage unity-based asset flips made by one guy in his garage, while potentially stumbling across a couple of commercially viable games"

Personal Anecdote from a former videogame QA tester and min-spec discoverer: Playing video games as a job is not playing video games. It's software testing a GUI.

Basic "does it run on X platform" is even more boring (but more automatable).

They are a multi-billion dollar a year company, they can hire a third party to play test game before they release them on steam.

They are destroying their own brand by not doing it.

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