So much garbage on the steam store

[TheClap (Gonnorhea)]

Are they just letting ANYONE make a game and put it on the store these days? Even most triple A or big ass companies are putting out mcdonalds teir games. Its like we've lost track of what makes a game enjoyable. Anyone feel me here?

[Crazy Tiger]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Kargor:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Crazy Tiger:

Not sure why people seem to think that stores need to carry a catalog that is based on an individuals personal preferences. Quite odd.

"Stores" in the real world are doing this. They have limited shelf-space, so they are deciding what they want to offer, and what not.

Not what I meant. Stores don't change their catalog just because random person X says "I don't like Y".

Money talks much louder than words, after all.

[Elbs Final One]

The Steam store is a metaphorical junkyard, and anyone who disagrees doesn't understand what exactly we're talking about here.

I see people here arguing about Indie vs AAA, but that's not what OP means probably.

We are talking about LITERALLY worthless content, as in something a 10-year old made after school. Nothing wrong with that - heck, that's awesome! But it shouldn't be on a storefront, because NOBODY wants to play it. Not in a mean way, just in an objective way. We are talking Unity tutorials, YouTube tutorials, downloaded templates, or just really low-level RPG Maker or Game Maker stuff. Again - nothing wrong with making games for the first time! It just shouldn't clog up the New Releases and Discounts section because it hinders sales.

Next, we got games with malware. Yes, this has happened, it's documented. Some games have (in the past) included malware, and who knows if some games still get malware through the cracks considering there's probably at least 5k games that nobody has played.

Remove these two categories, and we'd already have slashed 10-30k of the 100k games (and counting) that are sold on Steam. And by the way, I am not even counting those ridiculously stupid jigsaw puzzle hentai games or whatever, some people do want those games apparently based on reviews. Luckily, those games are actually filtered out pretty well with the adult tickboxes in your store preferences.

I have desperately tried to filter out those aforementioned games, but it's impossible. I have even used the nuclear option by filtering out the entire "Indie" tag just to check if that would work, but no, it only removes the worthwhile Indie games. Why? Because worthless games aren't played and so aren't being tagged.

That's not to mention how futile it is to filter the WORTHWHILE games. Have you ever tried filtering out Early Access games? You can't, trust me. You can untick the Early Access box in your store preferences, you can even filter out the entire Early Access tag (which will actually also hide games that have fully released because they never lose their Early Access tag), but no dice. I STILL get Early Access games on pages like the "Great on Deck" discounts page. Horrible. Some pages are filtered, some aren't.

But you know what?!

Steam is actually still the best storefront, believe it or not... You can't do ANYTHING to filter the Nintendo e-shop, you can't do ANYTHING to filter out the PSN store, and nobody has ever used the Xbox store in the past decade so who knows? Gamepass seems to be clean at least.

Last thing I'll say. The GameCube had a library of 600ish games. The Wii has 1,600ish games. The PlayStation 2 has 3000ish games. The Switch? 4,500ish. The PlayStation 5? Same thing. And of course, Steam has 100,000 games and counting.

When we went from physical to digital, what we lost is the ability to actually browse a store full of games. You cannot browse Steam, you cannot browse eshops or PSN stores, you HAVE to watch YouTube to find the games. There's no other way. And that hurts developers, publishers and players. I want to try out truly niche games, and I am not talking Nine Sols which is plastered on the home page, or even some Early Access roguelike that has 1k reviews. But no, sucks to be you, spend a day of your life sifting through the barely functional infinite scrolling New Releases section before it inevitably breaks; and God help you if you do that on a Steam Deck.

If you actually love indie games, you'd agree that the worthless trash needs to go.

/rant

[Crazy Tiger]

I absolutely love indie games and I don't agree. I've never needed Youtube to find games either.

Might be because I'm old and been gaming for so long, so I might be doing something differently. But seriously, how do people browse the stores to find all that stuff?

Or do people just watch yourube videos and then project that on here?

[Tecnocrat]

I see nobody expects a curated store anymore. Ok, enjoy the landfill.

[Elbs Final One]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Crazy Tiger:

I absolutely love indie games and I don't agree. I've never needed Youtube to find games either.

Might be because I'm old and been gaming for so long, so I might be doing something differently. But seriously, how do people browse the stores to find all that stuff?

Or do people just watch yourube videos and then project that on here?

How much time do you have on your hands to sift through a 100k game catalogue?
Sorry if that sounds judgemental, I don't actually mean to be rude, but personally just sifting through 1000 of them is impossible considering the store literally breaks after you scroll down a few pages.

[Elbs Final One]

Let me ask this differently.
I just looked at the first page of New Releases and found Nazireu1.0.
What is the benefit of having Nazireu1.0 on this store? The trailer features copyrighted music (I am pretty sure) and you can see the taskbar of the game in that footage as well.

Why do we advocate for a store that includes it? It moves me one more click away from a game that is worth something. And Nazireau1.0 is one of at least 10k games in the 100k catalogue of Steam games that is like this.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3326040/Nazireu_10/

[The nameless Gamer]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Elbs:

Let me ask this differently.
I just looked at the first page of New Releases and found Nazireu1.0.
What is the benefit of having Nazireu1.0 on this store? The trailer features copyrighted music (I am pretty sure) and you can see the taskbar of the game in that footage as well.

Why do we advocate for a store that includes it? It moves me one more click away from a game that is worth something. And Nazireau1.0 is one of at least 10k games in the 100k catalogue of Steam games that is like this.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3326040/Nazireu_10/

That game never appeared in my recommendations nor discovery queue. Similar ones used to appear when I had a 1000+ games on my ignore list. Haven't seen anything like it in years. Usually, I only learn from games like that one when people who complain about "trash" on Steam link them directly.

[Elbs Final One]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย The nameless Gamer:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Elbs:

Let me ask this differently.
I just looked at the first page of New Releases and found Nazireu1.0.
What is the benefit of having Nazireu1.0 on this store? The trailer features copyrighted music (I am pretty sure) and you can see the taskbar of the game in that footage as well.

Why do we advocate for a store that includes it? It moves me one more click away from a game that is worth something. And Nazireau1.0 is one of at least 10k games in the 100k catalogue of Steam games that is like this.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3326040/Nazireu_10/

That game never appeared in my recommendations nor discovery queue. Similar ones used to appear when I had a 1000+ games on my ignore list. Haven't seen anything like it in years. Usually, I only learn from games like that one when people who complain about "trash" on Steam link them directly.

So you do not browse the New Releases section? You only buy popular recommended games? You'd get those in a curated store as well.

[BJWyler]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tecnocrat:

I see nobody expects a curated store anymore. Ok, enjoy the landfill.

And who is going to curate? You? No thanks. I'll thankfully not put that trust in someone who uselessly necros a year+ old thread. I'm perfectly capable of curating games for my own library myself. And if it's that important, people will take the time and effort needed to do the same. Simple as.

And I'll just leave the rest here, from a thread not 4 days old:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย BJWyler:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Imon Spartan:

I don't want to be misunderstood; I understand and support that everyone has the right to buy whatever they deem appropriate, whether it's a good game or a bad game, such as the recent inclusion of erotic games. I defend this right.

But you have to understand me—every fundamental right comes with certain responsibilities, and obviously, it's not the user's responsibility what gets published on Steam beyond whether someone is foolish enough to buy this kind of game. However, it is Valve's responsibility to control, in a minimal way, with fair and balanced moderation, the products that end up reaching the end user.

That's a hard disagree. That, again, is someone making the determination of what type of art someone else is allowed to be exposed to. Whether you do it, or whether Valve does it, it makes no difference. The only curation that needs to happen is in regards to legal boundaries, which most certainly happens. Valve even goes beyond that and will kick devs off their platform if they egregiously violate the TOS of the platform. There is no way to be fair and balanced in a subjective medium like gaming - just look at the complaints from the anime/hentai crowd on what games get blocked from Steam or categorized as adult only.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Imon Spartan:

There should always be some form of moderation, in all aspects of life.

Certainly I agree in that regard. But I am also a big proponent of personal responsibility. No society can exist without limits on what people to hold as core freedoms. That's just a fact of human nature, but one of those core facets is the belief that one should be able to make decisions for oneself in terms of what type of things they expose themselves to. Of course some things may have to be more restricted for practical purposes, such as affects on one's own well being. But when it comes to consumption of art and subjective entertainment, certainly there can, and should be, less restrictions and no one should dictate what art another person may be exposed to (within legality).

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Imon Spartan:

And setting aside the main argument about personal tastes, what you say—"a game might seem like trash to me, but it might seem like gold to someone else"—I think we all agree that there’s a minimal logic when it comes to distinguishing between the publication of a game that’s simply bad versus the publication of an outright scam.

Of course there is. One is subjective. The other, presumably, violates laws or regulations. And again, in the case of the latter, Valve takes action against those games. But thousands of games are released every year on gaming platforms, and no platform has the capacity to curate every single one of those games to make a determination on if it violates a law or not. That's where the report feature comes in.

But as I am fond of saying, just remember, what you think might be a scam, might actually not be a scam in terms of the law, or the Steam TOS.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Imon Spartan:

I don't think it's a bad idea for Valve to moderate the content that ends up in their marketplace. There needs to be a minimum order, a simple benchmark.

And who is going to determine that? Should it be me? If that's the case, then Hentai games don't meet the minimum requirements, and should be removed from the store. See, where this is going? What if my bar is that no game with the name Warhammer in it is allowed on the store? Valve does moderate the content that they allow to be sold on their platform, but they do it in such a way that does not limit the choice of art one can expose oneself to or purchase, as crappy as some of that art may be. No system will be perfect by any means, but what you want is already in place. You just seem to not want to accept the fact that that means stuff you don't approve of has as much right to be sold as the stuff you approve of.

[The nameless Gamer]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Elbs:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย The nameless Gamer:

That game never appeared in my recommendations nor discovery queue. Similar ones used to appear when I had a 1000+ games on my ignore list. Haven't seen anything like it in years. Usually, I only learn from games like that one when people who complain about "trash" on Steam link them directly.

So you do not browse the New Releases section? You only buy popular recommended games? You'd get those in a curated store as well.

No, feel free to look through my library. I actually mostly play obscure and unheard of games. Probably the only exceptions are the Command & Conquer collection, Age of Empires I and II, Age of Mythology EX and Hades. I do browse the new releases section, but whatever I am not the target audience for simply fades from my memory as soon as I scroll away or close the store page.

[Kargor]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Elbs:

Let me ask this differently.
I just looked at the first page of New Releases and found Nazireu1.0.
What is the benefit of having Nazireu1.0 on this store?

I don't know this game, but let's look at from a different direction: I would LOVE for the Steam store to be curated, to only include games that I would buy (including the ones where I'm not sure right away, but decide to go with it eventually). The could even hire me as the great curator, to 100% guarantee my satisfaction with the content of the Steam store.

The problem is, I'm just one of the many Steam customers. Steam catering to MY wishes would be great -- for me. Not for them.

At the end of the day, this is the kind of problem that curation creates: we would still get threads from people complaining about games that Steam put into the store even though they don't like it, and we would get the other set of threads from people complaining that Steam did not put a game into the store. Which might not even be a curation thing -- maybe the publisher didn't even go to Steam in the first place; we would only see that the game isn't here.

I don't mind having games in the store that I never/rarely get to see anyway because I'm not interested in them, if the other side of this coin is Steam maintaining an "hands off" approach. At this stage, I would only advocate for an age checking system, and Steam not preemptively caving in to special interest groups. Both of which could actually increase the amount of garbage I could possibly see.

[Leonardo Da Pinchi]

I mean...the term "good" is all relative on personal opinion.

For example, I don't think zoomer and gen alpha humor is "good". With blown-out nonsensical memes about beans, or the "ohio rizz" mindrot.

But, that's not content made FOR me. So...why be incensed by it?

It's like older generations of gamers might say "modern games aren't hard", despite Souls-likes existing. Why? Because they didn't have the ability to save their games, or had limited lives. So if you messed up, you had to start over from square one.

[Tecnocrat]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย BJWyler:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tecnocrat:

I see nobody expects a curated store anymore. Ok, enjoy the landfill.

And who is going to curate? You? No thanks. I'll thankfully not put that trust in someone who uselessly necros a year+ old thread. I'm perfectly capable of curating games for my own library myself. And if it's that important, people will take the time and effort needed to do the same. Simple as.

Oh, no. It's the thread police. I will keep giving my opinion. It's something call 'free expression'. You should try it.

[The nameless Gamer]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tecnocrat:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย BJWyler:

And who is going to curate? You? No thanks. I'll thankfully not put that trust in someone who uselessly necros a year+ old thread. I'm perfectly capable of curating games for my own library myself. And if it's that important, people will take the time and effort needed to do the same. Simple as.

Oh, no. It's the thread police. I will keep giving my opinion. It's something call 'free expression'. You should try it.

Games you don't like are part of someone else's "free expression".

[Leonardo Da Pinchi]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tecnocrat:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย BJWyler:

And who is going to curate? You? No thanks. I'll thankfully not put that trust in someone who uselessly necros a year+ old thread. I'm perfectly capable of curating games for my own library myself. And if it's that important, people will take the time and effort needed to do the same. Simple as.

Oh, no. It's the thread police. I will keep giving my opinion. It's something call 'free expression'. You should try it.

But devs aren't allowed the same freedom by making games they want to make?