Blow wouldn’t say what he saw at Valve, but he did say one of Steam’s problems is that it’s hard to have a limited number of people looking at the games being submitted and still make sure games that deserve it get through. The submission pipe is filled with games that barely work, as well as a flood of submissions for re-skinned versions of popular, existing games. A common trick is to change the title and loading screen of Call of Duty and submit it as a new game. It takes a significant amount of time to wade through all the cruft. “In that noise, some really good games get lost. Indies e-mail with games, demos, videos, and sometimes it’s actually a good game, and the indie community knows it’s a good game, or someone in the press knows it a good game, but Valve doesn’t know it’s a good game,” Blow said. There are plans to help with these issues, and Steam has a few other tricks up its sleeve for the future.
