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Daniel Pacheco · Jan 3, 2019

Hi NeoGaf,

I was not sure about create this post, but I think that many people have the same feeling that I have when I see what Steam is becoming.

Some years ago, publish a game on Steam was hard, there were a lot of filters that ensure that your product was good for their costumers. Later of that Steam Greenlight allow people to vote which games they wanted to see on their platform and that was something nice too. But later that Steam Greenlight becomes a joke and every single project passes the filter if only wait for a couple of months.

At this point in the time the situation was bad, a lot of products that even aren´t games started to be released on Steam. Community votes didn´t work for nothing and Steam was sinking among first bad project games, school project games, and Unity demos. That´s when Steam reacts and announced Steam Direct!!!

Steam Direct was like the salvation of Steam... They told everyone that now you must pay them to publish your project and that means that many "deveshits" will refuse to pay the tax because they know that their projects were trash.

But all of this dream actually was a nightmare. Steam announced that Steam Direct Tax only cost $100 and would be redeemable if the game reach the $100 of sales. So... everybody had $100 to put their poo into Steam.

So now, Steam is a place in which around 50 games are released per day. Is really difficult to find something good among so much bad games (the most of them are not games). This is bad for developers and for the costumers I think.

1- Developers have a lot of visibility problems and need a lot of marketing support to get some visibility into Steam (platform in which you can´t pay for ads)
2- As a costumer I feel like browsing into a piece of shit, Steam only offers to me painful titles and I feel like be into APP store.

This is excepcionally bad because there are appearing a lot of publisher who vomit thousands of $1 games per month. Since Steam Direct release these publishers published a couple of games per week... Even I suspect that games had been created by bots! The filter in Steam is nothing! I catch publishers releasing exactly the same game with the same trailer but only changing the name of the product! Is a shame and Steam let people like that destroy their platform and the platform of thousands of us.

Mate, how could you release hundreds of games that are in Early Access and cost less that $1? Why?

Why Steam let this kind of publishers release in their platform?

https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/blendergames (this one relase even 5 games per week)
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Nekyau
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Dexion Games
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=nonPareil Institute

Do they even check any of these games?

Bullet Club · Jan 3, 2019

People have been saying for a while that there is too much shovelware and garbage being released on Steam. Valve don't really seem to care as long as they are making money from the games.

J-Roderton · Jan 3, 2019

Just really got into PC gaming for the first time and I was pretty damn surprised to see all of the crap that's on Steam. Can't just click a list of games and browse due to how many damn weird games are all over the place.

As far as Steam listening to community, I have no idea. Haven't been involved long enough to tell.

GamesAreFun · Jan 3, 2019

I'd rather Steam allowed everything in their platform, rather than trying to gatekeep some form of quality control. Consumers are wise enough to find the good games from the bad.

Regarding browsing the store, the search is powerful enough to filter for your preferences.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 3, 2019

GamesAreFun said:
I'd rather Steam allowed everything in their platform, rather than trying to gatekeep some form of quality control. Consumers are wise enough to find the good games from the bad.

Regarding browsing the store, the search is powerful enough to filter for your preferences.

Not agree with you.

I have no problems with the search filters, works well, but with all of those shit sinkiong Steam, your preferences are full of shit too.

What happens with games as this for example?

- SINNER: Sacrifice for Redemption

Other of the problems of this massive shitty releasing is the arassment that media channels and press suffer. Their mailbox recieve hundreds of press releases of shit everyday so they leave a lot of good games in their trash, because they have too much to check.

Airola · Jan 3, 2019

Personally I get some sort of morbid enjoyment out of thinking that anyone can try to get money from whatever game they have been made and that these games basically exist in the same shelf as games like GTAV and RDR2 exist in

By the way, I've noticed oddly specific types of games appearing on Steam lately. Now as it's ok for anyone to release games with nudity in them, there have been lots of these "sliding puzzle" games with a nude or scantly dressed girl as the picture you have to assemble. These games seem to be all exactly the same, but only the image has been changed. I assume there is a template for a sliding puzzle game somewhere and people take that template, change the picture involved in the game and sell the game as a new game.

DeliciousDoc · Jan 3, 2019

I'd rather get this so called sea of garbage than be subject to gatekeeping. I don't know why people get upset about steam curation. I am only exposed to random games I don't already know about during seasonal sales and it doesn't affect me. I just click next so I can get my card. If a game could potentially be interesting there are reviews baked right on the store page.

Alexios · Jan 3, 2019

It wasn't good for the customer when it was hard for things to get on Steam, plenty quality indies were excluded and everyone in the know about them was complaining about that and how evil Steam was for favoring the big names only and making it harder for indies to get anywhere by being excluded from the biggest store and needing to get a publisher to get their games on Steam losing revenue in the process, then they made greenlight so they could self publish after being voted, then there were complaints about that shit too, now they complain that the fees are high and visibility is worse and so on.

People will complain no matter what because there's simply no perfect system for this sort of thing and there's always room for improvement, just as Steam continuously improves its presentation and feedback and information and filters provided to the user as the situations change and people abuse whatever system is currently in place. If however you want curation and someone else, whoever, with whatever abstract qualifications or lack of, to decide for you what game is good enough and what isn't good enough and what should be censored prior to getting on the platform so that you can somehow blindly buy any game on the store and not even look at its critical and user overall reception, then home consoles controlled by the first parties are still there for everyone who wants them (and I still don't recommend blindly buying on them, lmao, so if you can't show me any store that has ZERO trash and has ALL good games then proposing that for Steam is useless, I don't want to miss ANY good game to curation).

On Steam vote with your money and ignore them or vote with your money and buy them or use the filters appropriately to never see them/only see them, whatever works for you. If you only want things favored by people then only look at those that already have enough positive reviews to get the thumbs up for example, investigate them alone further to see if it's real or fake or to your liking, use more specific filters like ignoring the x rated stuff if you're flooded with it, ignoring games that only cost a couple bucks, maybe ignore those that have descriptions with English as broken as yours or whatever else you think signifies something not worth checking out based on your particular needs and tastes. I don't want less choice because you don't wanna make the effort of some extra clicks and extra minutes of research into what to buy as anyone should do for any product to begin with as far as I'm concerned. If you leave Steam over it, so be it, enjoy Origin/Uplay/Epic/Gog/PSN/eShop/Oculus/Microsoft Store/Humble/whatever...

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 3, 2019

Bullet Club said:
People have been saying for a while that there is too much shovelware and garbage being released on Steam. Valve don't really seem to care as long as they are making money from the games.

That´s the question.

They really make more money doing that shit. I know many people that leave Steam because of this and in the other hand, I guess is much better let good developers make money here. If you let that good developers make money in your platform, costumers will be used to buy good games there and spend more money on you. Now a days, I am not sure to spend money in games because all is shit, and if a good game appears and I am able to find it, I will doubt about spend my money on it because all is shit.

I mean- If you give to your costumers the best products they will be confident with you and will spend more money on your brand, and of course you will attract more costumers.

Jroderton said:
Just really got into PC gaming for the first time and I was pretty damn surprised to see all of the crap that's on Steam. Can't just click a list of games and browse due to how many damn weird games are all over the place.

As far as Steam listening to community, I have no idea. Haven't been involved long enough to tell.

Yeah, you´re right. I get angry checking some projects. Now I would like to know if there are over there any community who tries to contact Steam in that way.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 3, 2019

Airola said:
Personally I get some sort of morbid enjoyment out of thinking that anyone can try to get money from whatever game they have been made and that these games basically exist in the same shelf as games like GTAV and RDR2 exist in

By the way, I've noticed oddly specific types of games appearing on Steam lately. Now as it's ok for anyone to release games with nudity in them, there have been lots of these "sliding puzzle" games with a nude or scantly dressed girl as the picture you have to assemble. These games seem to be all exactly the same, but only the image has been changed. I assume there is a template for a sliding puzzle game somewhere and people take that template, change the picture involved in the game and sell the game as a new game.

This is so bad. Steam allow things like this:

Is the same game! There´re no differencies. Even they maintain the same trailer.

I totally respect your enjoyment, also I like to see shitty games, but in Itch.io not at Steam.

I try to say you with this that the template that those games are using for make those puzzle games are one of the more regular things that could be happening. They can spend 1 day to change the images of the game and release a game per day, and actually they are doing it.

wzy · Jan 3, 2019

I've not purchased anything on Steam since they opened the floodgates and I won't even bother browsing the store, now. Part of it is a matter of principle, part of it is just that there are better platforms and nothing particularly interesting is happening on PC now except for god awful VR crap. Another part is that the glut of indie games is catastrophically bad for the whole medium and I don't want any part of it.

I don't really care about gatekeeping or censorship, here. What I object to is this typical Valve shit where they trick their users into working for free and act like they're doing you a favor. It's actually a huge pain in the ass to cooperate with their recommendations and they have no respect at all for your preferences anyway. There's no control exercised over the tagging system so it's impossible to accurately filter based on keywords, the genre sorting is a joke that regularly features CSGO in the "Strategy" section, and the discovery queue is a fucking full time job on a platform that adds hundreds if not thousands of titles per month. The defacto rulers of the curator system are YouTubers and journos, two groups of people who are guaranteed to have dramatically worse taste than any single Valve employee, and half of them are running protection rackets with their extra leverage. Valve pays no bounties on the only useful store information they display--the reviews--and as always people seem to think that working for free is just a delightful privilege bestowed upon a dedicated fanbase, despite the fact that the company makes more than enough money to actually hire people to do all this grunt work and their salaries wouldn't even make a blip compared to their power bill every month. Every single step they took to make this situation feasible has failed catastrophically at every level and since they don't make any fucking games anymore there's no reason other than inertia to stick with the platform. What's that? Oh, yes, this does sound like an ideal status quo for a rent-seeking monopoly. Huh.

AlanAwake · Jan 3, 2019

I think their current strategy is fine. Valve should not be the only curator deciding which games you can or cannot buy. Instead, Valve added a curators feature, that allows you to choose which curators you want to follow based on your own preferences. They've also created several features to find the games you may like based on several personalized criteria. Last but not least if you end up buying shovelware anyway, you can refund it without questions asked.

Daniel Pacheco said:
also I like to see shitty games, but in Itch.io not at Steam.

Itch.io sells Steam keys afaik.

Angry_Megalodon · Jan 3, 2019

If you want publishers to have a fair chance you cannot make a tight quality control. That goes against visibility. To me Steam is, by far, the best platform both for buying games and social stuff related to videogames. I have purchased a lot of indie games through Steam suggestions and how well the filters with my preferences were applied.

dorkimoe · Jan 3, 2019

I like that they allow everything. I would like to see a better variety popping up on the home page based on reviews/players/purchases etc. Help me find hidden gems

Holammer · Jan 3, 2019

I'm a lurker and I haven't had a GAF account since Gaming-Age, but I had to register to respond to this thread.

Your average Steam user will never see most of the games OP listed. Why? Because Steam is a curated service. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but let me explain. Valve decides what games get exposed to users based on a multitude of factors including:
- Developer/Publisher pedigree.
- Sales, Preorders & Wishlist amounts (Devs ask you to wishlist for a reason).
- Engagement on store page/forums/community hub and user reviews.
- Data mining Youtube/Twitch/Twitter/Google trends etc.
- Discovery Queue.
- Chemical X.

This is the stuff we can infer logically because a trained hamster can develop the API for it and I further suspect that users with good standing, ones with older accounts and amount of games owned weigh heavier in the algorithms to make it difficult to game the system and Valve have banned publishers for just that.
So I repeat, your average Steam user won't see the garbage because it gets "disappeared" by this process. If you want to find the shit you actually have to go elbow deep and muck around. Most people don't do that, except for masochists and outrage merchants like Jim Sterling looking for easy Youtube material.

The garbage will disappear into the void, maybe become filler in some Indiegala Monday bundle and the nuggets will find their audience. OP's listed examples actually shows how the system works because he lists a bonafide hit; the game in question is Granny, a mobile game with a 4.5 score, 1.9M ratings and 50M installs on Android. Yes, the game is basically jump scare streamer trash, but there are YT videos with 71M views for it. The game is a phenomena and there will surely be sequels, a Switch version (perfect for switch!) and Game Theory videos about it at this rate.
It's still rather new on Steam and its current user score is 89% with 122 user reviews, that's aprox 5-6k sales and there will be more. Expect Steam to give it exposure on the store hero etc. Now, the point I'm laboriously working my way towards is that Granny might not have been able to survive manual curation, OP and myself would have shitcanned it immediately, but the 'wisdom of crowds', or 'marketplace of ideas' made it find its audience. So I, for one, welcome our curating computer overlords.

While I'm at it, love OP's other thread and are John Mambo and War of the Three Kingdoms really that bad? They look reasonably competent compared with your average unity asset flips. Pixel Fishies? That one looks like it could become popular like Agar.io if streamers gave it exposure.

Kdad · Jan 4, 2019

I'm getting whiplash.... do we want the stores to be able to dictate content or not? I can't keep track.

LegendOfKage · Jan 4, 2019

Holammer said:
I'm a lurker and I haven't had a GAF account since Gaming-Age, but I had to register to respond to this thread.

Your average Steam user will never see most of the games OP listed. Why? Because Steam is a curated service. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but let me explain. Valve decides what games get exposed to users based on a multitude of factors including:
- Developer/Publisher pedigree.
- Sales, Preorders & Wishlist amounts (Devs ask you to wishlist for a reason).
- Engagement on store page/forums/community hub and user reviews.
- Data mining Youtube/Twitch/Twitter/Google trends etc.
- Discovery Queue.
- Chemical X.

This is the stuff we can infer logically because a trained hamster can develop the API for it and I further suspect that users with good standing, ones with older accounts and amount of games owned weigh heavier in the algorithms to make it difficult to game the system and Valve have banned publishers for just that.
So I repeat, your average Steam user won't see the garbage because it gets "disappeared" by this process. If you want to find the shit you actually have to go elbow deep and muck around. Most people don't do that, except for masochists and outrage merchants like Jim Sterling looking for easy Youtube material.

The garbage will disappear into the void, maybe become filler in some Indiegala Monday bundle and the nuggets will find their audience. OP's listed examples actually shows how the system works because he lists a bonafide hit; the game in question is Granny, a mobile game with a 4.5 score, 1.9M ratings and 50M installs on Android. Yes, the game is basically jump scare streamer trash, but there are YT videos with 71M views for it. The game is a phenomena and there will surely be sequels, a Switch version (perfect for switch!) and Game Theory videos about it at this rate.
It's still rather new on Steam and its current user score is 89% with 122 user reviews, that's aprox 5-6k sales and there will be more. Expect Steam to give it exposure on the store hero etc. Now, the point I'm laboriously working my way towards is that Granny might not have been able to survive manual curation, OP and myself would have shitcanned it immediately, but the 'wisdom of crowds', or 'marketplace of ideas' made it find its audience. So I, for one, welcome our curating computer overlords.

While I'm at it, love OP's other thread and are John Mambo and War of the Three Kingdoms really that bad? They look reasonably competent compared with your average unity asset flips. Pixel Fishies? That one looks like it could become popular like Agar.io if streamers gave it exposure.

That was a really good post that did serious justice to your side of the debate.

Kdad said:
I'm getting whiplash.... do we want the stores to be able to dictate content or not? I can't keep track.

Different people on a website are different people on a website. And curating for quality is different then censorship due to personal values. Take your pick, really.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

DeliciousDoc said:
I'd rather get this so called sea of garbage than be subject to gatekeeping. I don't know why people get upset about steam curation. I am only exposed to random games I don't already know about during seasonal sales and it doesn't affect me. I just click next so I can get my card. If a game could potentially be interesting there are reviews baked right on the store page.

Actually not. They problem is not the games that you are exposed. The problem is all the games that press is recieving every day because Steam let them to publish there. Press are saturated, and indie companies who make awesome games has not enought strenght to fight against all the saturation.

Al3x1s said:
It wasn't good for the customer when it was hard for things to get on Steam, plenty quality indies were excluded and everyone in the know about them was complaining about that and how evil Steam was for favoring the big names only and making it harder for indies to get anywhere by being excluded from the biggest store and needing to get a publisher to get their games on Steam losing revenue in the process, then they made greenlight so they could self publish after being voted, then there were complaints about that shit too, now they complain that the fees are high and visibility is worse and so on.

Greenlight was better! Overall in the first steps of Greenlight. Greenlight was the first step to start the work with your community, Greenlight was a good KPI for your marketing campaign. The only think of Greenlight is that the developer must had to know that that step had to be set up as a task in his marketing campaign, not like just a step to stop your product.

Al3x1s said:
People will complain no matter what because there's simply no perfect system for this sort of thing and there's always room for improvement, just as Steam continuously improves its presentation and feedback and information and filters provided to the user as the situations change and people abuse whatever system is currently in place. If however you want curation and someone else, whoever, with whatever abstract qualifications or lack of, to decide for you what game is good enough and what isn't good enough and what should be censored prior to getting on the platform so that you can somehow blindly buy any game on the store and not even look at its critical and user overall reception, then home consoles controlled by the first parties are still there for everyone who wants them (and I still don't recommend blindly buying on them, lmao, so if you can't show me any store that has ZERO trash and has ALL good games then proposing that for Steam is useless, I don't want to miss ANY good game to curation).

Filter doesn´t work at all mate, just read the answer of W wzy I am totally agree with him.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/neog...s-publishing-politicy.1470543/#post-253689052

Al3x1s said:
On Steam vote with your money and ignore them or vote with your money and buy them or use the filters appropriately to never see them/only see them, whatever works for you. If you only want things favored by people then only look at those that already have enough positive reviews to get the thumbs up for example, investigate them alone further to see if it's real or fake or to your liking, use more specific filters like ignoring the x rated stuff if you're flooded with it, ignoring games that only cost a couple bucks, maybe ignore those that have descriptions with English as broken as yours or whatever else you think signifies something not worth checking out based on your particular needs and tastes. I don't want less choice because you don't wanna make the effort of some extra clicks and extra minutes of research into what to buy as anyone should do for any product to begin with as far as I'm concerned. If you leave Steam over it, so be it, enjoy Origin/Uplay/Epic/Gog/PSN/eShop/Oculus/Microsoft Store/Humble/whatever...

I have a thread here to do this stuff. I cost a lot of time:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/what-deserves-our-attention-in-steam-this-week.1467723/

If people follow al like this topic is because people have not time or is not easy to find good stuff at Steam.

Who knows where the curators are setting up at Steam? For example in my Steam page doesn´t appear anywhere the curators.

I am subscribed in around 10 curators accounts and my feed is full of shit! Curation sistem doesn´t work.

And I told you the same that I told to D DeliciousDoc

"The problem is all the games that press is recieving every day because Steam let them to publish there. Press are saturated, and indie companies who make awesome games has not enought strenght to fight against all the saturation. "

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

Holammer said:
I'm a lurker and I haven't had a GAF account since Gaming-Age, but I had to register to respond to this thread.

Great to see that my post forces you to make an account haha!

Holammer said:
Your average Steam user will never see most of the games OP listed. Why? Because Steam is a curated service. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but let me explain. Valve decides what games get exposed to users based on a multitude of factors including:
- Developer/Publisher pedigree.
- Sales, Preorders & Wishlist amounts (Devs ask you to wishlist for a reason).
- Engagement on store page/forums/community hub and user reviews.
- Data mining Youtube/Twitch/Twitter/Google trends etc.
- Discovery Queue.
- Chemical X.

Totally agree with your factors exposed. I am a fan of algorithms and try to track any algorithm that Steam uses to position your game.

But Steam also makes uses their own criteria to positioning games as they did with "They are billions". They just liked ask wrote the developer to say: Hey I like your game, let me help you.

So Steam decision still being a reality there.

Holammer said:
This is the stuff we can infer logically because a trained hamster can develop the API for it and I further suspect that users with good standing, ones with older accounts and amount of games owned weigh heavier in the algorithms to make it difficult to game the system and Valve have banned publishers for just that.
So I repeat, your average Steam user won't see the garbage because it gets "disappeared" by this process. If you want to find the shit you actually have to go elbow deep and muck around. Most people don't do that, except for masochists and outrage merchants like Jim Sterling looking for easy Youtube material.

I would like to share this als with

I love indie games, I am not into online games, MOBA games and only few AAA games catch my attention. That´s why I have to check on the list of releases which good games has benn puiblished. And here is where I found all the shit. Why?
- Because the "super accurate filters" of Steam are showing me that it wants.

I follow curators with my same interests in indie games and the games that I purchased are the 90% indie games from the best indie publishers in my opinion: Raw Fury, Tiny Build, THQ, Devolver. Alawar, Good sheperd, Another indie, Paradox or some more similars...

So my feed in Steam must be great for me. Only indie games, no online, no MOBA, no F2P. Well.. my feed is the next:

Oh AAA games and Terraria!! The most typical indie game.

An Online F2P Game? Really? -I don´t play similar games

The fucking PUMG???? - I don´t play similar games

Oh God! One inde that seems good... oh God! Is VR, bad.

I hate these games!

A card game? I hate them, I´ve never play one.

Yeah! The first one that I like! Good!

And the next games are my qeue of discovers...

Wow awesome: Shit, AAA games and Online games, with the PUBG again!- This is my list of discovers.

Where are games similar to my interests? It isn´t. I have to take time for my self to discover new games, because Steam filters and curation are bad. I don´t know which kind of games you play guys, but this don´t work for me.

Holammer said:
It's still rather new on Steam and its current user score is 89% with 122 user reviews, that's aprox 5-6k sales and there will be more. Expect Steam to give it exposure on the store hero etc. Now, the point I'm laboriously working my way towards is that Granny might not have been able to survive manual curation, OP and myself would have shitcanned it immediately, but the 'wisdom of crowds', or 'marketplace of ideas' made it find its audience. So I, for one, welcome our curating computer overlords.

While I'm at it, love OP's other thread and are John Mambo and War of the Three Kingdoms really that bad? They look reasonably competent compared with your average unity asset flips. Pixel Fishies? That one looks like it could become popular like Agar.io if streamers gave it exposure.

Yeah, could be some exceptions. I am not particulary agree with Granny and I have bad feelings with this game. Is a very low quality game, but has the community suppport, and that´s why Greenlight was good. Wit hits community this game would be in Steam anyway.

With the others... You´ll see how they not sell even a copy, specially John Mambo... You can´t make a game thinking about only that your game will be reasonably competent compared with your average unity asset flips. If you make a game do it for create a good product for the costumers. That´s why the most of the companies that publish on Steam never publish another game.

I rather hundred of companies making good stuff than hundred of thousands of companies making poo on the store.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

AlanAwake said:
Itch.io sells Steam keys afaik.

Because Steam allows to sell trash.

ROMhack · Jan 4, 2019

I don't think you're wrong. Their store is practically a training ground for algorithms to filter out unwanted content and they probably see it as a virtue that there's so many terrible games, similar to how Google doesn't expect you to browse through YouTube to find content.

I've personally worked for an online marketplace and have seen companies benefiting from all this junk. Often it comes with a premium subscription model that pushes paid content to the top but in the case of Valve, I think they're happy working with more tech-orientated methods (similar to Google's PageRank system). There's a lot of user generated content given to them for free that means they don't have to do any work with the customers (e.g. reviews and community boards fixing game issues).

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

ROMhack said:
I don't think you're wrong. Their store is practically a training ground for algorithms to filter out unwanted content and they probably see it as a virtue that there's so many terrible games.

Hahahahaha, really good.

ROMhack said:
I've personally worked for an online marketplace and have seen companies benefiting from all this junk. Often it comes with a premium subscription model that pushes paid content to the top but in the case of Valve, I think they're happy working with more tech-orientated methods (similar to Google's PageRank system). There's a lot of user generated content given to them for free that means they don't have to do any work with the customers (e.g. reviews and community boards fixing game issues).

Good point. But does any company that could take any benefit form this?

ROMhack · Jan 4, 2019

Daniel Pacheco said:
Good point. But does any company that could take any benefit form this?

I think so as it presents the possibility that they might sell content. Joke content is especially good for it.

Of course nine times out of ten Steam know a game won't sell but so what? They've got $100 from the developer already. They're not making a big loss.

It also means they can use statistics to say 'We have the BIGGEST gaming store on the planet!' or something.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

ROMhack said:
I think so as it presents the possibility that they might sell content. Joke content is especially good for it.

Of course nine times out of ten Steam know a game won't sell but so what? They've got $100 from the developer already. They're not making a big loss.

It also means they can use statistics to say 'We have the BIGGEST gaming store on the planet!' or something.

That point of view is really interesting.

This is a huge problem, as I said the $100 quote has destroyed the feed of Steam but this issue that you exposed is diabolical hahahhah.

Just this publisher you exposed is shit:

https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/GhostRUSGames

This publisher just published 51 games since Steam Direct. But as these guys there are hundreds that are destroying Steam- And disturbing other developers that really try to make games.

Helios · Jan 4, 2019

Daniel Pacheco said:
snip

Games aren't defined by one characteristic. One of your examples is Slay the Spire. Maybe you haven't played any card games but you have played rogue-likes which StS falls under. Maybe you don't play MMOs but you play RPGs, which is why it recommended you MHO and BDO . It also depends on what your friends like. Steam is very open about why it recommends you certain games
Also this has nothing to do with the quality of the games on steam. All the games I just mentioned are good, even if they're not your cup of tea.
You can always go into preferences on the Steam Store and choose which games you don't want to be shown based on tags

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

Helios said:
Games aren't defined by one characteristic. One of your examples is Slay the Spire. Maybe you haven't played any card games but you have played rogue-likes which StS falls under. Maybe you don't play MMOs but you play RPGs, which is why it recommended you MHO and BDO . It also depends on what your friends like. Steam is very open about why it recommends you certain games
Also this has nothing to do with the quality of the games on steam. All the games I just mentioned are good, even if they're not your cup of tea.
You can always go into preferences on the Steam Store and choose which games you don't want to be shown based on tags

The problem wit hthe TAGS is that in the most of the games the TAGS are bad matched. On the other hand maybe the game has certain TAGS for a characteristic of the game that is minimun and I like it, or has a online multiplayer TAGS that I don´t like.

So if I exclude TAGS in my feed, the way of find new games will be more difficult.

Helios said:
MHO and BDO

What´s the meaning of these sorry?

Helios said:
Maybe you don't play MMOs but you play RPGs

What does it have to do MMO and RPG to stay matched?

BTW- This is my friend list on Steam...

Helios · Jan 4, 2019

Daniel Pacheco said:
What´s the meaning of these sorry?

MHO was a mistake on my part. I meant to say MH:W which is Monster Hunter: World and BDO is Black Desert Online. Both of those games were recommended to you by steam and my theory is that they were recommended to you because you play RPGs.
I actually looked and after refreshing a few times Black Desert appeared on my front page as well. And you can see why.

BlackTron · Jan 4, 2019

Jroderton said:
Just really got into PC gaming for the first time and I was pretty damn surprised to see all of the crap that's on Steam. Can't just click a list of games and browse due to how many damn weird games are all over the place.

At least the storefront isn't as bad as Nintendo's eshop.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

Helios said:
MHO was a mistake on my part. I meant to say MH:W which is Monster Hunter: World and BDO is Black Desert Online. Both of those games were recommended to you by steam and my theory is that they were recommended to you because you play RPGs.
I actually looked and after refreshing a few times Black Desert appeared on my front page as well. And you can see why.

hahah ok, I see.

So I think that Steam is pushing BDO. Steam says that is relevant for me because of this:

Very poor explanation from their side....

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

BlackTron said:
At least the storefront isn't as bad as Nintendo's eshop.

Really- I don´t like nintendo but I can´t believe that could be wrost than Steam.

Alexios · Jan 4, 2019

Your arguments are all over the place, you quoted me but didn't really respond to any of what I said so what do you want me to do, just re-write everything I already said?

You're moving goal posts from "it shows bad games" to "it shows genres I don't care about", what the fuck man, tell me what games you like and I'll recommend you 12-24 a year so you can be happy and leave Steam and other stores alone, with all your ridiculous goal posts and complaints only 24 games a year would be left to put on Steam anyway if they took your recommendations to heart and made it the ideal store for you specifically as you seem to want them to do else consider them a failure.

Again, show me a store with NO trash and ALL the good games and I'll tell you yes, Steam should be like it, but your definition of good and trash clearly differs to mine and there's no such store either, nor is it the job of the store to tell you exactly what to buy! Why do you want want their opinion?! If you buy a Xiaomi phone and you're not happy with it after the return period do you go to the retailer to complain that they even had it in stock when the same phone worked out fine for someone else or was otherwise completely inoffensive and relevant to the store's business, not to mention Xiaomi has all kinds of other phones so they have no reason to not keep doing business with them? Do you go to your local super market and complain that they have all the brands you don't use in stock rather than merely suggest the brands you do use to be added? Do you say hey, I buy my bath products elsewhere so just don't sell any here and put something I would buy from you on that shelf instead?

It's also dumb to expect the press to not do their JOBS because they're overwhelmed by the amount of games and can't highlight all the good ones when they "have to" waste time on the bad ones. That's their choice, criticize them, not the world they live in, they've always done that shit, waste space and time to laugh at shitty Wii shovelware instead of talk about the great games on that or other systems in the same space because that brought attention, clicks, whatever worked for them. Not to mention Besides, even if all these games weren't on Steam why would I expect the press to not know of their existence or try them, I sure hope they talk about the great games that not on Steam just as much as those that are on it, but again that's just me who doesn't think spoon feeding is the job of any store.

You're clearly the worst person to run the weekly recommendations thread so simply don't if it's so much trouble for you that you have to complain about the amount of games released and how you can't find everything good when you have to search through 300 releases, lol. You even had to question me over and over about what makes this or that game good when I made a couple suggestions instead of just click to see what they're about. Then I realized what you're like and how I don't want to spoon feed you anything, which is why I didn't try to support the thread again despite you urging people to.

The bottomline is if you only wanna see "good" games, then arrange by user reviews (or arrange by whatever and only check those with thumbs up) and they're usually on point with your shallow view of what is and isn't worthwhile to be on Steam, look at only those that have at least 90% or above or whatever works, watch a trailer, decide if you agree, problem solved. In the end though, you don't want NeoGAF's opinion, you just want to say over and over that your opinion is the best opinion on the subject and everyone else's wrong. Despair for living in an awful Steam world then.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 4, 2019

Al3x1s said:
Your arguments are all over the place, you quoted me but didn't really respond to any of what I said so what do you want me to do, just re-write everything I already said? You're moving goal posts from it shows bad games to it shows genres I don't care about, what the fuck man, tell me what games you like and I'll recommend you 12 a year so you can be happy and leave Steam alone, with all your ridiculous goal posts and complaints only 12 games a year would be left to put on Steam anyway if they took your recommendations to heart and made it the ideal store for you specifically as you seem to want them to. Again, show me a store with NO trash and ALL the good games and I'll tell you yes, Steam should go for it, but your definition of good and trash clearly differs to mine and there's no such store either. Also dumb to expect the press to not do their JOBS because they're overwhelmend by the amount of games and can't highlight all the good ones when they waste time on the bad ones. That's their choice, criticize them, not the world they live in, they've always done that shit, waste space and time to laugh at shitty Wii shovelware instead of talk about the great games on the system because that brought clicks.

Hey, relax beast. Nobody is talking to you as bad as you are talking to me.

I answered you by parts and I think it´s ok. So If you are looking for a disrespectful argue I am not your guy.

BlackTron · Jan 4, 2019

Daniel Pacheco said:
Really- I don´t like nintendo but I can´t believe that could be wrost than Steam.

I love Nintendo, and state openly that the way their eshop is presented is a joke. In comparison, Steam is polished and professional.

TrainedRage · Jan 10, 2019

I have gotten so used to just going to the most popular tab and browsing from there. I avoid the trash at all costs... But you will find some gems in there. Like...

thelawof4 · Jan 10, 2019

Why exactly are you so upset about this? As multiple users have already noted it is very easy to filter/self-censor on steam and if thats not enough there are multiple other sources for your gaming needs.

As long as 'games' with literal viruses/spyware get removed i am completely fine with the current situation with shovelware.

Kadayi · Jan 10, 2019

Holammer said:
I'm a lurker and I haven't had a GAF account since Gaming-Age, but I had to register to respond to this thread.

Your average Steam user will never see most of the games OP listed. Why? Because Steam is a curated service. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but let me explain. Valve decides what games get exposed to users based on a multitude of factors including:
- Developer/Publisher pedigree.
- Sales, Preorders & Wishlist amounts (Devs ask you to wishlist for a reason).
- Engagement on store page/forums/community hub and user reviews.
- Data mining Youtube/Twitch/Twitter/Google trends etc.
- Discovery Queue.
- Chemical X.

This is the stuff we can infer logically because a trained hamster can develop the API for it and I further suspect that users with good standing, ones with older accounts and amount of games owned weigh heavier in the algorithms to make it difficult to game the system and Valve have banned publishers for just that.
So I repeat, your average Steam user won't see the garbage because it gets "disappeared" by this process. If you want to find the shit you actually have to go elbow deep and muck around. Most people don't do that, except for masochists and outrage merchants like Jim Sterling looking for easy Youtube material.

The garbage will disappear into the void, maybe become filler in some Indiegala Monday bundle and the nuggets will find their audience. OP's listed examples actually shows how the system works because he lists a bonafide hit; the game in question is Granny, a mobile game with a 4.5 score, 1.9M ratings and 50M installs on Android. Yes, the game is basically jump scare streamer trash, but there are YT videos with 71M views for it. The game is a phenomena and there will surely be sequels, a Switch version (perfect for switch!) and Game Theory videos about it at this rate.
It's still rather new on Steam and its current user score is 89% with 122 user reviews, that's aprox 5-6k sales and there will be more. Expect Steam to give it exposure on the store hero etc. Now, the point I'm laboriously working my way towards is that Granny might not have been able to survive manual curation, OP and myself would have shitcanned it immediately, but the 'wisdom of crowds', or 'marketplace of ideas' made it find its audience. So I, for one, welcome our curating computer overlords.

While I'm at it, love OP's other thread and are John Mambo and War of the Three Kingdoms really that bad? They look reasonably competent compared with your average unity asset flips. Pixel Fishies? That one looks like it could become popular like Agar.io if streamers gave it exposure.

Quality post.

OP might as well be raging against Amazon recommendations. It's basically the same thing. Steam looks at what you've shown interest in and says 'hey you liked/bought that, you might like this also' If you buy shitty games then guess you're going to end up with more shitty games in your recommendations list. But the thing is, as others have already said repeatedly as the user you have the ability to alter this stuff.

thelawof4 said:
Why exactly are you so upset about this? As multiple users have already noted it is very easy to filter/self-censor on steam and if thats not enough there are multiple other sources for your gaming needs.

As long as 'games' with literal viruses/spyware get removed i am completely fine with the current situation with shovelware.

Because OP believes it's far better to rage here than it is to just tweak their Steam preferences.

Omega Supreme Holopsicon · Jan 10, 2019

The more shovelware the better, I love this policy. Free speech means you have to allow not just quality but crappity too. In fact they should be even more liberal in their policies, as long as laws aren't broken anything should be allowed.

We have social media, games journalists, and word of mouth to distill quality. And for those that want 1$ games of questionable quality and content, they can have their cake too.

Kadayi · Jan 10, 2019

OSC said:
The more shovelware the better, I love this policy. Free speech means you have to allow not just quality but crappity too. In fact they should be even more liberal in their policies, as long as laws aren't broken anything should be allowed.

We have social media, games journalists, and word of mouth to distill quality. And for those that want 1$ games of questionable quality and content, they can have their cake too.

Indeed. Without the trash we wouldn't have quality threads like GAF Unkindness Club for instance. Personally, I'm ok with questionable recommendations. Sometimes it throws up some real gems.

Daniel Pacheco · Jan 10, 2019

BlackTron said:
I love Nintendo, and state openly that the way their eshop is presented is a joke. In comparison, Steam is polished and professional.

I can´t imagine how can be that eshop...

TrainedRage said:
I have gotten so used to just going to the most popular tab and browsing from there. I avoid the trash at all costs... But you will find some gems in there. Like...

But Project Zomboid is a popular game at indie intustry, this game is awesome!

thelawof4 said:
Why exactly are you so upset about this? As multiple users have already noted it is very easy to filter/self-censor on steam and if thats not enough there are multiple other sources for your gaming needs.

As long as 'games' with literal viruses/spyware get removed i am completely fine with the current situation with shovelware.

Not upset, only looking for opinions.

Kadayi said:
Because OP believes it's far better to rage here than it is to just tweak their Steam preferences.

Maybe that is what you think. As the title says, I need your opinion about this, this is so far for rage, I reservemy rage for other things. I am always looking for opinions, and stadistics.
I have my own opiniopn about this of course and I am not happy about Steam filters... I know how to use the preferences but always recommend me AAA games, and I have never purchase one. I only consume indie titles.

So I think is not too accurate to asume what I belive Kadayi.

OSC said:
The more shovelware the better, I love this policy. Free speech means you have to allow not just quality but crappity too. In fact they should be even more liberal in their policies, as long as laws aren't broken anything should be allowed.

We have social media, games journalists, and word of mouth to distill quality. And for those that want 1$ games of questionable quality and content, they can have their cake too.

Uff I think they are in the top of liberalism, there are dozens of titles that are not games. As Unity or Unreal examples.

Kadayi said:
Indeed. Without the trash we wouldn't have quality threads like GAF Unkindness Club for instance. Personally, I'm ok with questionable recommendations. Sometimes it throws up some real gems.

This thread is great personally I gave to Strange headhache (the OP) a pack of keys for the club.

But I usually find those games on Itch.io.

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