What was Valve/Steam's biggest failure you can think of?

[Zoey.]

For me, it would be the Greenlight feature which was replaced by Steam Direct

[Feds are in the bread]

yeah i think that was the name of it

[fatburner]

They enabled support for Premium Mods, but people got so upset because they didnt understand its potential, and Valve decided to scrap the idea before it had properly taken off.

[Tito Shivan]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย fatburner:

They enabled support for Premium Mods, but people got so upset because they didnt understand its potential, and Valve decided to scrap the idea before it had properly taken off.

They also implemented the idea in the worst way possible, which resulted in a truckload of issues.

[J4MESOX4D]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย fatburner:

They enabled support for Premium Mods, but people got so upset because they didnt understand its potential, and Valve decided to scrap the idea before it had properly taken off.

The only potential in that was Valve to line their pockets even more against something that's widely industry-free, and for the likes of Bethesda to find a load of suckers to fix and improve their games whilst them also getting a cut for doing nothing. The brute-force in how it was implemented and presented to the community was a shambles and it only lasted a week.

[Tito Shivan]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย J4MESOX4D:

The only potential in that was Valve to line their pockets even more against something that's widely industry-free.

I've always been in favor of mod makers being able to properly sell their product without the dangling threat of a lawsuit or having to go through workarounds like asking for donations.

It's their work and they should be able to put a pricetag on it

[J4MESOX4D]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tito Shivan:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย J4MESOX4D:

The only potential in that was Valve to line their pockets even more against something that's widely industry-free.

I've always been in favor of mod makers being able to properly sell their product without the dangling threat of a lawsuit or having to go through workarounds like asking for donations.

It's their work and they should be able to put a pricetag on it

The majority of mod makers aren't looking to make money directly and are happy doing it for free or offering personal donations which can't really be actioned against if some draconian publisher decides to clamp down on how their open tools are used. Valve actually opened the floodgates for this possibility and it would've had a dire impact had it progressed in the last 9 years.

It also increased the potential of mod piracy becoming a real issue and Bethesda have already discovered with their paid mods 2.0 that a huge amount of the stuff they have sold already has actually been stolen. If this was implemented in 2015, it probably would've caused absolute carnage for years and had a massively detrimental impact on mods and the people that created them.

Thankfully this second bite at the cherry with Bethesda has not taken off or been widely adopted. As long as Valve don't chime in for a second wind, it'll hopefully stay that way and then modders can produce with the tools at their disposal without being bound to stringent publication contracts.

[Tito Shivan]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย J4MESOX4D:

The majority of mod makers aren't looking to make money directly and are happy doing it for free or offering personal donations

To be fair they've never been able to legally do it as their work is derivative of the game IP (Once ina blue moon a modder gets a deal with the dev and that's all)

Donations is the only way they can monetize but it's subject to people's goodwill.

Albeit being a catastrophical failure the paid mod workshop proved there's a demand for being able to properly sell mods. And that doesn't necessarily have to detract from the free scene (Lots of content creation facets share a healthy paid and free scene, music, art, 3d assets, Game engine assets and plugins...)

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย J4MESOX4D:

As long as Valve don't chime in for a second wind, it'll hopefully stay that way and then modders can produce with the tools at their disposal without being bound to stringent publication contracts.

They actually had paid workshops before their trial with the Skyrim mods. Both the TF2, CS2, Dota workshops are basically showrooms for what they will became paid in-game modifications. And they're quite successful.

Which makes even more unbelievable how badly they managed the Skyrim paid workshop.

[xBCxRangers]

Getting away from the gamers and giving away the shop to developers.

[DΩVID]

Probably inventory Gems.

[Tito Shivan]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย DΩVID:

Probably inventory Gems.

They're working as designed TBF. They never were meant to be anything useful. Just a way of 'deleting stuff'

[lolschrauber]

There's an issue with re-authorizing payment methods on mobile. I've been hounding support about this last year. It essentially renders the mobile app pointless because you can't buy games with it.

But people don't really care since you can just use your PC (ok thats fair), but just the fact that it's been an issue for about 2.5 years and they simply refuse to care annoys the hell out of me.

I guess I'm just still nostalgic about flash sales where it actually paid off to look at games every couple hours during major sales, didn't want to miss out on awesome deals just because you weren't at home.

[FOXDUDE69]

There's not one single biggest failure but there are a few big ones.


Having a strictly binary review rating locks anyone who wants to engage with the system into only two options, positive or negative, when the majority of games out there have a mix of positive and negative aspects with different ratios of positive to negative.
It's remarkably hard to find a game that's all good or all bad, but the rating system forces players who choose to engage with it to pick one of the extremes, logically and naturally leading to review ratings that don't represent the overall reception of a game as accurately as a 5 star system or a 1 to 10 rating scale would. Perhaps this is why, despite gamers being a very passionate audience, it is estimated that only 20% of users engage with Steam's review system.

Your review ratings don't count towards the overall rating unless the game was purchased directly from the Steam Store. So if you bought Black OPS 2 physically, or a Space Marine 2 from Humble Bundle, your rating doesn't count.
Yet another reason to completely ignore Steam reviews or not take them seriously.

Being cheap with moderation. Moderation on the Steam Hub has always been a disaster. From volunteer mods who blatantly abused their privileges to silence those who disagree with them and their buddies, some of them who didn't even have a good grasp of the English language... To today's mods who don't seem to understand the rules they are enforcing and randomly close threads for weird reasons.

Bad support. Steam support not bothering looking into your tickets and just copy/pasting some message, refusing to provide clarification and sometimes even clearly demonstrating they didn't really read what you wrote. All of these issues with Steam support contributed to problem above, because they should be your defense against stupid bans from dirty volunteer mods or sloppy payed mods.
If you get stupid ban on the Steam hub, good luck, 8 out of 10 times, support will not overturn it despite of how absurd the ban is.
As a long time supporter of Steam, this shook my trust in the company and I started purchasing most of my games from reputable third party key sellers.

Not allowing a "furry" tag to take hold and therefore not allowing normal people to filter out furry content (unless they want to filter out ALL adult content).
This basically forces normal people to either be occasionally bombarded with bestiality while scrolling the store or shut off all other forms of adult content some of which they might enjoy.
Tags are user created, so why doesn't Steam allow a "furry" tag to take hold? Quite strange.

Valve played a pivotal role in the popularization of lootboxes and gambling in gaming with no signs of stopping until some form of regulation forces them to. To top off their greed, they tried to sell you mods, but thankfully that blew up in their face.

Valve doesn't make a game they can't put a lootbox in anymore (apart from Alyx which was just a spin-off used to sell you their VR kit). All other big name videogame companies regularly contribute to videogame history with single player masterpieces, like Breath of the Wild, God of War, Cyberpunk, etc. Valve could easily produce games like these but won't because they'd rather sell you 500 dollar AK-47 skins. Don't even get me started on how disgusting artificial scarcity is.
The last proper videogame Valve made was Portal 2 and that was over a decade ago.
This is the real reason why there's no Half-Life 3. And even their lootbox games rarely get significant updates compared to their live competition. There's more new content in a single season of Fortnite or Apex than in years of "development" for Counter Strike.

Forcing game updates. All other big name platforms, from Epic, to GOG to Playstation to Xbox, allow you to launch single player games without updating them if you choose to do so. Steam users lack this option.
This feature was already present in the Playstation 3, that's how far behind Steam is on this. Not to mention that this feature is far more valuable in PC gaming than in console, as a single update can break all your mods.

Removing all references to Christmas from the holiday sale.
Can't have Christmas anymore, might offend someone (who likely plays Furry "games").

Allowing Denuvo and other forms of DMR in their store. Valve could easily enforce a "no additional DRM" policy in their terms of service and publishers would have to bite the bullet and stop putting performance-impacting crap like Denuvo in their games. Denuvo and other forms of DRM only really inconvenience the paying customer, sometimes even making their legally acquired games inaccessible.

Steam awards. More specifically, the clown award.

Steam points can't be used towards the purchase of new games like Nintendo Coins and Playstation Stars.
"B-but you can earn Steam points for free!"
No, you can't, someone had to make a purchase to get those points.

The Steam subscriber agreement doesn't legally allow the creation of child accounts for children under 13, despite many games on Steam being rated PEGI 4.
Again, this is not an issue on other big name platforms.
This means the Steam Family feature cannot legally used by families with children under 13.

There's so much more but I gotta go hit the Gym now...

[Tito Shivan]

Few counterpoints to that

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย FOXDUDE69:

:gold_poop: Having a strictly binary review rating locks anyone who wants to engage with the system into only two options, positive or negative

They may have called them 'reviews' but are actually endorsements. If you want to blame Valve of something is their weird naming choices.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย FOXDUDE69:

:gold_poop: Your review ratings don't count towards the overall rating unless the game was purchased directly from the Steam Store. So if you bought Black OPS 2 physically, or a Space Marine 2 from Humble Bundle, your rating doesn't count.

First. Steam wants people to buy on their store. (Not retail, not on key sites) so it makes business sense to give Steam purchased copies an edge. Second, had developers not abused the reviews through activated licenses to astroturf their games you most probably wouldn't be having this complain. Lesser of two evils.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย FOXDUDE69:

:gold_poop: Valve doesn't make a game they can't put a lootbox in anymore (apart from Alyx which was just a spin-off used to sell you their VR kit).

Speaking recent Valve games, Portal didn't have lootboxes, Portal 2 didn't either. Artifact and Underlords didn't have them either.

We'll see what happens with Deadlock once it releases.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย FOXDUDE69:

:gold_poop: Removing all references to Christmas from the holiday sale.

There's never been a Christmas themed sale as long as Steam has existed.

[Brian9824]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tito Shivan:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย FOXDUDE69:

:gold_poop: Removing all references to Christmas from the holiday sale.

There's never been a Christmas themed sale as long as Steam has existed.

You would think he would remember that as he made an entire thread about that less then a year ago where that was explained to him - https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/4030223299340818596/

Never said christmas, the most they ever did was call it a generic holiday sale

[Ben Lubar]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Chalupacabaras:

Allowing Denuvo and other forms of DMR in their store. Valve could easily enforce a "no additional DRM" policy in their terms of service and publishers would have to bite the bullet and stop putting performance-impacting crap like Denuvo in their games. Denuvo and other forms of DRM only really inconvenience the paying customer, sometimes even making their legally acquired games inaccessible.

DRM was originally developed by Apple as an anti-piracy tool for their iTunes store. They ran the numbers two years later and realized DRM didn't stop piracy but increased it. But by then, everyone else was adopting it so it became the industry standard.

Digital Rights Management in video games has existed long before Apple or iTunes were even words associated with technology.