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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

It's all Steam's own dumb fault for having no refunds, turning Steam games into lottery tickets. My Steam library is made up of 90% junk I wasted money on and 10% good stuff I got a fair value from. That means I have to pay less for every game just to get a fair value out of Steam as a whole. THAT is why people want to pay $20 for games that truly are worth $60.

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That, plus with Steam's DRM, they could steal my collection any time they decide they don't like me for some reason, or something causes them to go under.

I'll never pay full price for a game until I can be assured that 50 years from now my grandkids can piece together a PC emulator and start playing my old game collection.

You can't use metacritic? I find it to be pretty reliable.

The problem is with older games. For instance, the first Bioshock doesn't have sound on Windows 7 and up. You have to play it in XP mode to get the sound working.

Some games don't work at all. That's why GOG.com became so popular actually, because they make sure their games work on newer versions of Windows. Steam, however, doesn't care.

I can't use metacritic. My tastes lie way outside the norm. The majority of highly-rated AAA games are extremely boring to me. The ones I do like tend to be sequels to games I already know I like (Elder Scrolls, Total War, Civilization).

Better reviews and player feedback would help; Valve recently started showing user reviews on game pages, which might be useful. Previously all you had was a metacritic score (nearly useless) and the utterly meaningless 'friends who own this game' UI, which has been broken and displaying incorrect data for years.

Steam also has virtually zero discovery features, which makes it hard to find games that actually fit your interests. The new tagging feature might solve this eventually, once it stops being complete noise.

Steam also has virtually zero discovery features, which makes it hard to find games that actually fit your interests.

So, is this like a requirement for having an app store? Rotten discovery features?

User game reviews are pretty worthless due to the trend of angry users spamming bad reviews to punish the developer whenever they're upset about some small thing.

It shows how many hours the user has played, which is a very effective mechanism for filtering reviews. It was suggested on HN that this could be used for the mobile app stores as well and my own experience is that reading a review and rating from someone who has provably put a lot of time into a game is invaluable.

Yeah. In my opinion, Valve should be using statistics like time played and number of achievements to try and measure player engagement so they can at least get a rough idea of how popular a given game is (along with things like how long an average playthrough is, whether it has replay value...)

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