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Your assertion is that something like warz would not make it ot retail. As BigRigs and other terrible terrible games have over the years show, broken broken games make it to retail. It is of course rare, but it's not 'impossible'.
Resorting to a personal attack? That's not very reasonable of you.
Thank you, I still think so too but obviously many see it in a different way. Which is very well their good right as well.
I am nonetheless very surprised at how many people behave in a slightly defensive way when it comes to accept criticism of Steam and even more surprised at how few people actually want more customer rights (for whatever reason).
Please, guys, try to keep this discussion on a non-personal basis. It has been going very well so far and I think we can keep this up!
And again this 'problem' occurs so infrequently as to be entirely moot. Just like magicians generally the industry is 'self regulating'. they know that putting out a junk product isn't the way to go (usually) and if they do put out something horrible, people ifnd out fast and obliterate sales. Generally this rule works well. Sometimes like this case it doesn't. But it makes little sense to make Steam the QA arbiter of a game, when it's not something they should be doing nor are capable of in any capacity, nor would it 'solve' the actual problem either.
Unless you charged devs like xbox does 25k to do a 'patch'.
The other problem I see is that 'qualtiy' is really an ephemerial quantity. It doesn't actually 'mean' anything.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/45100/
Some people would argue this game is of 'low' quality and should be off steam. I've heard people say the same thing of games they just don't 'like' regardless of the actual quality of the game itself. They just don't 'like' some genre or such and so it's 'bad quality'.
Customer rights are a diffrent issue then expecting a company to protect you. If you want customer right, you got to your government not the company that would have conform by those right.
Those two are very diffrent things.
Criticism is diffrent then suggesting that a company be required to protect you from your mistake too.
A company is there to do one thing. Make money. There is no exception to that. To make money they have to spend as little as possible. There is a balance between a retailer satisfying all their customers and still make good money. The Developers and Publishers are their customers too, not just us.
It is a good idea to look the the whole picture and not just focus on the part that would benifit the customer. When the other parts start to suffer because of it, everyone loses.
• Preapproval and content verification of a product's Steam Store page - Self-explanatory. This basic QA would prevent so much trouble (The War Z being the most blatant example).
• Steam integration - Making sure any given game meets the standards for proper client integration. Not a huge problem per se, but there are games on Steam that conlict with or just don't plain work with the client.
• Publisher/Developer Research - This is obviously done to a small extent already, but Valve needs to start digging deeper into the history of pubs and devs that want to release their games on Steam. Greenlight games are the exception here, of course, but cash-grab vaporware projects are becoming way too common these days. It's obvious why Valve does business with these kinds of companies, but profit shouldn't excuse exploitative behavior.
• Minor playtesting - A small group of 5-10 part-time playtesters could work wonders for Steam's customer service. Spend a couple hours testing any game that's up for release, record any technical issues found, report those issues to the developers, and demand that they fix the more serious problems that crop up. Publishers cannot be relied upon anymore to properly test their own games, and Valve need to be able to assure their customers that any reasonable preventative measures have been taken to squelch game-breaking Day One issues. As it is now, the customer is the one doing the testing; that's not right, and that's not fair.
The argument that "Valve can't afford it" is blatantly false. The argument that "Valve don't have a duty to do it" is true, to a certain extent -- they can choose to bypass basic QA techniques in favor of expediting profits, and we as customers can choose to take our business elsewhere. The argument that "retail stores don't do it" is a straw man -- retail stores are forced to abide by a vast number of consumer protection laws, and digital distribution is still an infant industry that has very little in the form of consumer protection.
Valve got hasty when allowing The War Z to be released on Steam. A little factchecking, playtesting, and quality assurance would have prevented the resulting debacle. Expect to see more of this unless Valve start taking some responsibility for the games they sell on Steam.
Or, accept the fact that as a retailer this is not their job any more than it's Targets job to test every vacuum cleaner or Lowes job to test every tool. They're retailers, they sell the products manufactured by these companies and Steam is as well, but it's the companies job to handle their own quality control and it's the consumers job to do a little leg work on what they're buying.
You're putting a double standard forward, and that is far from a "straw man" at all. Valve is still forced to abide by all the same consumer protection that brick and mortar stores have to abide. In fact, since Valve is online and sells internationally they are actually held to even stricter rules than your local brick and mortar. This industry has the same consumer protection as any other, the reality is that Valve made an error they even admitted to and you're using it as a springboard to a completely ridiculous crusade that is not only impractical, but is an outright double standard, all while preaching about consumer rights laws you clearly do not understand. Heck, the War Z issue isn't even a factory here since everyone agrees that Valve needs to provide some notice that a game is still in development, but what you're asking for goes way beyond just that. You're basically springboarding towards demanding Valve be an outright industry regulator, which would really just be corporate suicide to even try, not to mention your outright ignoring retailer/publisher contract obligations and liabilities and Valve's role under trade laws. So don't preach about industry rules and such that you clearly have chosen to ignore or simply don't understand.
You're right, the consumer is basically the one doing the testing, and you know what; don't buy the game and don't support the companies that do that then. It's not rocket science, but expecting Valve to do the legwork, increase their overhead in the process and alienate the developers they depend on is certainly not going to fix it. I mean crap, talk about being reasonable; you should try it for a change.
It's still possible to get a refund for some video games purchased at brick-and-mortar stores; all it takes is a bit of pushing. In fact B&M has an advantage over Steam: unless a Steam game is a preorder or provably faulty, there's absolutely no way to get a refund, even if the game's serial key is unused. Not only that, all refunds handed out through Steam are in the form of Wallet credits -- they get your money no matter what. At least with B&M you have the option of getting cash back.
On the subject of consumer protection: do you know what happens when you try to do a chargeback against a Steam purchase? Valve locks your account, preventing you from playing legally purchased games in your existing library in addition to blocking any further purchases. That's reasonable in the sense that Valve is trying to prevent fraud, but the problem is that Valve preemptively treats every single instance of chargebacking as a fraud case. Credit cards are legally obligated to act on suspected cases of retail abuse, and part of that process can involve chargebacking. Where are the laws preventing digital retailers from treating their customers like criminals?
The laws governing physical retail and digital retail are different in many ways because they have to be. You're delusional if you think you've got the same type of choices and protection shopping online as you do when shopping in a store.
I'm not springboarding anything here -- the issues I listed have been problems for years. I'm not looking for Valve or any other digital retailer to gain an inordinate amount of power when it comes to telling publishers and developers what they can and cannot do -- go back and reread each point that I went through, and ask yourself how any one of those points could be construed as advocating massive industry regulation. You're blowing absolutely everything I said out of proportion.
Do you seriously think that demanding a developer to release a technically competent and stable Day One game is unreasonable? I sure as hell don't. It honestly boggles my brain that you think it's okay to treat the customer as an unpaid tester. You're exactly the kind of consumer that allows companies like Hammerpoint to get away with ripping people off.
I don't think that's unreasonable, but I don't think it's Steams job to ensure developers release completed and functional games but rather the developers job to ensure their products are good enough for release. Don't sit here and accuse me of being the type that allows Hammerpoint to get away with this crap when I've been as hard on them as anyone up to this point. The difference is I direct my attention towards where it belongs instead of trying to derail that momentum in some flawed, irrational and unrealistic attempt at making it Valve's problem. Valve made a mistake in putting this game up without drawing attention to the fact that it's an in-development game that is just a beta that isn't release ready. That's been acknowledged and addressed repeatedly and everyone agrees on the point that Valve should at least provide notice of that.
Let's not forget the fact howver that, as has been said, this isn't even about just WarZ and Hammerpoint but the QA demands made by the OP regarding all products Valve is going to sell. A demand that is impractical, unrealistic, and reliant on an unsustainable business model from both a funding perspective and a contract perspective. Don't try and swing this back to some issue about WarZ when the whole point of the initial argument was to go well beyond what just happened with WarZ and implement a practice that, whether you like it or not, is not remotely feasible no matter how much you want to pat yourself on the back for being "reasonable".
You keep using keywords like "unrealistic", "impractical", "ridiculous", and "irrelevant", yet you haven't come up with a single detailed explanation as to why a more rigorous Steam approval process would be so difficult to implement. Contracts can be amended. Funding is a non-issue. The business model is certainly sustainable (we're talking about viable QA processing here, not some kind of abstract commercial theory).
And where did anyone here lay a lion's share of the blame on Valve? I haven't seen direct accusations of that sort anywhere in this thread. You're cherry-picking information, you're purposefully obfuscating my finer points, you're parroting my terminology, and you're letting your emotions cloud your critical thinking skills.
I'm done responding to you.
Maybe someone a little more even-tempered than Keonyn can chime in here?
Contracts can be amended but it's not so easy and the other side won't be so keen on that amendment, particularly when Steams competitors will require no such amending. Funding is certainly an issue as extra staff is no small feat, particularly the amount of staff that would be required even to QA to a smaller degree the number of titles that Steam sees coming in on a weekly basis while still being able to ensure the release date will be met which will be demanded by both the developer and the consumer-base. Then there's the competition factor which would be a huge issue since Valve would be place regulatory demands on the companies that choose to sell through Steam that they will not face elsewhere which would easily impact the Valves position in the industry and not likely in a positive manner.
Plenty of details have been provided to you why this isn't going to work and why Valve isn't going to even be receptive to the idea. You can continue this little crusade but it's simply not going to happen since it demands a standard not met in pretty much any like industry, and would put Valve in an unfavorable competitive position, not to mention push away the developers Steam depends on by forcing them through a regulatory process that most developers, good and bad, are not going to be too keen on.
What would this reallistically mean? In an alpha stage MANY things don't work at all. This is pretty much normal. Even in beta things don't work. When you make the store page it's a list of things that should ship with the product. But there's no guarantee that ALL such items would be in any 'pre-approval' build of the game. It would effectively mean you could only take pre-orders for a game maybe 1 month in advance.
You might want to give examples of this since obviously if you SELL something on the store it has to actually work with the client. Not sure what you're trying to address with this?
Again beta/alpha builds have LOTS of bugs. This is normal. Even FINAL build games have bugs. This is actually NORMAL. Bugs are prioritized by criticality and before you ship you may have to decide, yeah these bugs are kinda minor so we'll fix them after we fix the 'you explode when you press 'enter' bug'. A couple of hours doesn't even begin to describe the kind of playtesting that is required for most games. Towns is commonly described as 'beta' yet playing the game for a few hours hardly even shows that it is. You don't even get past the tutorial in that span.
What you're describing is a massive amount of time and resources being effectively wasted by Steam for a problem that doesn't actually exist to any appreciable degree. Again games THIS broken being released onto Steam are literally only a handful of under 5. Does it make sense to be spending easily close to half a million on payroll to do this 'testing' for a problem that really doesn't exist on a massive scale, for which Valve would add almost no value to most devs anyway and would in fact be a gigantic roadblock to distribution? If these kinds of games were so common i'd be more inclined to agree, but given the problem is effectively the edge cases of edge cases it's not a very compelling argument from a resource allocation perspective. I mean seriously those 5-10 people would be better off doing Support stuff to be honest and that would be a million times better allocation of resources and result in better 'customer' satisfaction than a playtesting group so that the can catch like the 1 game every 2-3 years that does this.