15 years of Steam Service.... what happened to this platform.

[Pineapple]

Remember when you were a kid and your parents tried to just buy you video games without going off your list... remember how bad that could go due to the nature of the industry back then.

Steam.. you essentially did this to your own store through greed and lack of quality control.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/

This list shows the number of titles released every year on steam.

You can actually see the massive amount of garbage exponentially grow.



There are so many developers who are making games because they want to make money and capitalise on the growing industry this is almost identical the what caused the previous crash in the gaming industry due to the quality of games dropping to extremely low levels.

What are some of your thoughts on the current state of the steam store?

Is it too easy to get a game listed on steam?

Should steam have separate sections for developers based on previous releases?

Should developers have a rating system which scores how their games are shown?

Do you think you will be using steam 5 years from now? If so do you see the growing library becoming an issue when shopping in the future?

[TimLM]

I have been using steam since 2005. This account is from 25th november 2009 though. I will still be using steam in 5 years. I still can't forgive them for getting rid of the Steam Powered User Forums in favor of the Steam Discussions though... That still hurts.

[Blargo]

I pretty much never look at the store page.
If there's a game I might want to buy, I usually find out about it from external sources anyway.

[Julymorning]

Although I acknowledge the existence of actual shovelware games on Steam, I disagree that most games here are bad. Not all games have to have best graphics and a good budget to be a decent game. I have played a lot of games with crappy visuals, they were all pretty good.

That being said I am not happy with those visual novel games with sexuality and tons of crap RPGmaker games .

[WhiteKnight]

Few things i wish Valve do would but they won't :-

* Remove shovelwares.
* Move all hentai from the main store to another store.
* Stop with weekly maintenance.
* Stop making hardware's
* Start publishing games
* Start getting aggressive against Epic Games
* Kick Gabe Newell or force him to retire.

[nightnight]

I think you're right about the gaming marketing heading to an inevitable crash and I believe we are about to circumvent that entirely by the shift to VR. In the next ten years, VR will be indistinguishable from normal gaming in all its fidelity. VR because of the skepticism of the market will be a solid ground to rebuild and stem the shovel ware.

NO to a scoring system. Ratings and scoring and algorithms are everything wrong with media today. How many times have you heard "oh it's a 6/10? I'm not playing that," or "that show was canceled? I'm not watching that." Good content is overlooked because people decide to hold any flaw against the entire picture and if it isn't rated to "perfection" then people don't invest their time in it. It's a ridiculous way of why the news and stupid influencers dominate youtube and why "tripple A" studios dominate Steam.

The way through is not with furthering a decrepit system of scoring and developing something that will counter numbers and appreciate the more artistic and creative side of game development. And that includes all media altogether.

[Phirestar]

Unrelated, but I'm impressed by the fact that in 15 years you've only accumulated 102 games on your account. So many people here have such bloated libraries that it's neat to see something like that for a change.

[Zekiran]

Don't buy them then.

I've been on the service that long and ... funny, I don't give a rat's butt about the games I'm not going to buy.

Done.

[AdahnGorion]

Originally posted by WhiteKnight:

Few things i wish Valve do would but they won't :-

* Remove shovelwares.
* Move all hentai from the main store to another store.
* Stop with weekly maintenance.
* Stop making hardware's
* Start publishing games
* Start getting aggressive against Epic Games
* Kick Gabe Newell or force him to retire.

There is an issue with this.
Whom gets to define what shovelwares is? I mean.. personally (I am super biased) I would just find anything tagged with animal and move it into the bin as showvelware..

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

steam is fine in general.

The only thing I can understand is that yes there is a good quantity of suspicious games where you'd wonder if the person just copy pasted a tutorial and sold the game as it's own , at the same time there is a large quantity of these games that do end up being removed.

So yeah I prefer seeing a more open shop that also allow crappy games then a store being too strick and preventing some actual good games from being sold.

[Violent Rainbow]

There's so much trash on this site now that I struggle to find games I actually want. It's literally like picking through a garbage dump!

[Haruspex]

When I was a kid, Steam didn't exist. You would buy PC games at the store on floppy disk or CD Rom. My parents bought me games based on the box art, and not usually much more than that. In fact, they were completely uninformed about their game purchases. They didn't read the magazines, and they couldn't just Google it, because Google didn't exist.

Today, I am the parent who buys games for my kid. Steam is an uncurated sea of games, true. But there's treasure there among the trash, and Valve provides the tools necessary to seek it out. I am a much more informed purchaser of games than my parents ever were.

I've been on Steam for 17 years. I expect in 5 years myself (And my son, who will officially have entered adulthood.) will still be using Steam. Valve decided it's not their job to be the gatekeeper of what a good game is or is not. It's your job to be an informed shopper who knows what to look for and Steam absolutely gives you to tools necessary to do that.

And as for the people complaining about hentai on their store page. That is something you won't see by default. You have to opt in to start seeing the hentai. That's like willingly going in to a strip club then complaining that there are too many naked people dancing around.

[Nomad]

Originally posted by Pineapple:

this is almost identical the what caused the previous crash in the gaming industry

Not even remotely. Just because I have a greater variety to choose from, doesn't mean I'm suddenly gonna forget what I like.

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by TRASH:

Originally posted by Pineapple:

this is almost identical the what caused the previous crash in the gaming industry

Not even remotely. Just because I have a greater variety to choose from, doesn't mean I'm suddenly gonna forget what I like.

Also it's nothing like the video game industry crash of the 1980s. Back then, video games were physical goods that required shelf space and storage. Digital games are not, and do not require any storage that takes up actual, physical space. If Electronics Boutique had a back room full of Atari 2600 games they couldn't sell, they had a real problem. When goods aren't physical and storage is effectively infinite, there's no problem.

Steam is like the Internet itself these days. Most of what's on the Internet is garbage, but you are given the tools you need to cut through the garbage and get to the good stuff.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Steam stocking lots of things you don't like - and things I don't like, and things that person over there doesn't like - is a good thing.

It is not too easy to get a game listed on Steam.

More people having an easier time making some money making games is a good thing.

People fearmongering about "the video game crash" are being basically as absurd as sterotypical streetcorner "the rapture is coming!" doom prophets.

[Bagel]

Originally posted by 8bitbeard:

Steam is like the Internet itself these days. Most of what's on the Internet is garbage, but you are given the tools you need to cut through the garbage and get to the good stuff.

I really don't understand why people get upset about games that they can simply ignore by filtering the list for popular games only.