Imbarkus
As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
Just bear with me for a sec' on this...
App stores and digital marketplaces has brought about the invention of crowd-sourcing and automation of content selection and notice-ability (and ratings) for game releases in these systems. Steam has instituted Greenlight, curation systems, tags, and various other systems to automate, by technology or by crowd-sourced opinion, the selection and visibility of its product. iOS App Store "democratizes" the entire process with open submission and various metric ratings for visibility, as well as user ratings for quality control.
So of course there are squads of people devoting just as much human effort to cheat these systems with worthless rip-off products as there seems to be exerted to making good games. And so many garbage ripoffs are coming through. But also, and perhaps more worryingly, so many perfectly forgettable average and ubiquitous gaming experiences are flooding all these marketplaces in greater number.
This race to the bargain bin has happened before. In the early 80's there were so many crap games for the Atari 2600, identical in name and nature, the entire industry struggled through the massive devaluation of its product, until Nintendo's choosy licensing decisions reversed this devaluation years later.
The thing that was lost at the time was consumer trust in software. It was disastrous.
Then, ironically, Nintendo themselves seemed to take the success of the Wii and allow nearly every type of low-quality party game to be released for it. The flood of low quality Wii software, and the kids who played these titles and desperately wanted to move on to a platform of quality, must have been forgotten by Nintendo when they seemed genuinely surprised that the public had no burning need for further Wii branded experiences.
The thing that was lost at the time was consumer trust in software. It was disastrous.
Now I see an industry lying to itself that its software is not devalued, because the people with enough financial backing to enagae the required infrastructure have found new backdoor revenue streams below the "floor" of free, by giving away software on storefronts and adding renewable item and other sketchy revenue streams into them. And even as they admit this approach is affecting the way game software is designed, to make it more effective at manipulating in-game spending because of how difficult it is to motivate pre-game spending, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of concern that the storefront automation effort is still the unquestionable way to go. And to save how many hours of labor, in the end? How many people could it take to curate and evaluate games just enough to make sure its worth "stocking" them?
I can't think of any other retail business that expects to automate its "buyer" process. It is, of course, the digital nature of the goods, and the deep relationship with technology of the industry itself, that allows game storefronts to believe it is even achievable. And it is. But at what cost, long-term, in consumer trust in the software you offer on your storefront?
There are many better possibilities than this set of over-automated solutions and what they are doing. Obviously the sheer volume of software submitted to the App Store is too much to be personally evaluated. But think outside the box for a minute and look at the whole ecosystem. Do you buy random videos on the Google Play from just random people? No. In terms of video distribution on the platforms, content is offered in silos. YouTube, also owned by Google, is a walled garden for content from just-anybody. Paid content and content on the various paid subscription services is curated, professional content, produced through that whole video/TV/movie production industry. Music, very similar, to my mind. The label choosing you for release brings some legitimacy, the label represents a brand and an idea of quality, because there's no shortage of hopefuls with albums they'd like you to hear. Amazon's self-publishing book platform has been some gamed and manipulated it no longer pays by book sold, but by page actually read.
Did Steam, by crowdsourcing curation, admit it doesn't even know how to curate something anymore? Would a "Steam Seal of Quality" mean something similar to what the Nintendo Seal of Quality meant, if a bunch of games from just-whoever could also come out on Steam, without the seal?
The last walled garden I remember was XBLIG, which turned into a kind of a mess, admittedly. I want indies and their innovation, all over my storefronts. But that doesn't mean I wanted the App Store and Steam to become as much of an impenetrable mess as XBLIG.
Is it such an inconceivable concept that "buyer" (curator) remain a human-staffed job at some level on digital-only storefronts?
Lots of jobs make sense, to be automated. I don't understand why judging the worthiness and potential of creative output for a storefront is one of them. It seems to just erode the perceived value of software, and human trust in the storefront.
App stores and digital marketplaces has brought about the invention of crowd-sourcing and automation of content selection and notice-ability (and ratings) for game releases in these systems. Steam has instituted Greenlight, curation systems, tags, and various other systems to automate, by technology or by crowd-sourced opinion, the selection and visibility of its product. iOS App Store "democratizes" the entire process with open submission and various metric ratings for visibility, as well as user ratings for quality control.
So of course there are squads of people devoting just as much human effort to cheat these systems with worthless rip-off products as there seems to be exerted to making good games. And so many garbage ripoffs are coming through. But also, and perhaps more worryingly, so many perfectly forgettable average and ubiquitous gaming experiences are flooding all these marketplaces in greater number.
This race to the bargain bin has happened before. In the early 80's there were so many crap games for the Atari 2600, identical in name and nature, the entire industry struggled through the massive devaluation of its product, until Nintendo's choosy licensing decisions reversed this devaluation years later.
The thing that was lost at the time was consumer trust in software. It was disastrous.
Then, ironically, Nintendo themselves seemed to take the success of the Wii and allow nearly every type of low-quality party game to be released for it. The flood of low quality Wii software, and the kids who played these titles and desperately wanted to move on to a platform of quality, must have been forgotten by Nintendo when they seemed genuinely surprised that the public had no burning need for further Wii branded experiences.
The thing that was lost at the time was consumer trust in software. It was disastrous.
Now I see an industry lying to itself that its software is not devalued, because the people with enough financial backing to enagae the required infrastructure have found new backdoor revenue streams below the "floor" of free, by giving away software on storefronts and adding renewable item and other sketchy revenue streams into them. And even as they admit this approach is affecting the way game software is designed, to make it more effective at manipulating in-game spending because of how difficult it is to motivate pre-game spending, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of concern that the storefront automation effort is still the unquestionable way to go. And to save how many hours of labor, in the end? How many people could it take to curate and evaluate games just enough to make sure its worth "stocking" them?
I can't think of any other retail business that expects to automate its "buyer" process. It is, of course, the digital nature of the goods, and the deep relationship with technology of the industry itself, that allows game storefronts to believe it is even achievable. And it is. But at what cost, long-term, in consumer trust in the software you offer on your storefront?
There are many better possibilities than this set of over-automated solutions and what they are doing. Obviously the sheer volume of software submitted to the App Store is too much to be personally evaluated. But think outside the box for a minute and look at the whole ecosystem. Do you buy random videos on the Google Play from just random people? No. In terms of video distribution on the platforms, content is offered in silos. YouTube, also owned by Google, is a walled garden for content from just-anybody. Paid content and content on the various paid subscription services is curated, professional content, produced through that whole video/TV/movie production industry. Music, very similar, to my mind. The label choosing you for release brings some legitimacy, the label represents a brand and an idea of quality, because there's no shortage of hopefuls with albums they'd like you to hear. Amazon's self-publishing book platform has been some gamed and manipulated it no longer pays by book sold, but by page actually read.
Did Steam, by crowdsourcing curation, admit it doesn't even know how to curate something anymore? Would a "Steam Seal of Quality" mean something similar to what the Nintendo Seal of Quality meant, if a bunch of games from just-whoever could also come out on Steam, without the seal?
The last walled garden I remember was XBLIG, which turned into a kind of a mess, admittedly. I want indies and their innovation, all over my storefronts. But that doesn't mean I wanted the App Store and Steam to become as much of an impenetrable mess as XBLIG.
Is it such an inconceivable concept that "buyer" (curator) remain a human-staffed job at some level on digital-only storefronts?
Lots of jobs make sense, to be automated. I don't understand why judging the worthiness and potential of creative output for a storefront is one of them. It seems to just erode the perceived value of software, and human trust in the storefront.