I never understood that point about the need for curation.
Is it really that much harder to find a game on Steam, than it is on, say, apple's store?
Personally, I don't need someone to decide what I should play or not. I can make my own decisions. I prefer to have access to everything, and select which games I want to play, or not, than to have games I want to play missing from Steam.
Looking at those "trash", asset flip games people keep talking about, I have to ask: does anyone actually buy those games under false pretence? If one shows up while browsing the store, just one look will tell you it's a low-effort game.
And, even if you are completely fooled, you can play the game up to two hours, and refund it.
So, while Steam is still my platform of choice (not only because I have most of my library there, but also because of the features it provides me, as a customer), I certainly welcome Discord's "open the floodgates" new policy.
At the same time, Epic's curation, and "moneyhatting", couldn't appeal less to me as a potential customer.
As for the need of curation, and the problem of "discovering" good games, I have an idea.
We have one million youtubers, "influencers", streamers, commentators, game journalists, gaming websites, and whatnot.
How about, instead of making daily articles or videos about "shitty games", they start covering games worth playing, instead of giving time and coverage to those low-effort games? Just a thought.
Honestly, I find the iOS App Store to be an ugly nightmare to navigate, so I would hope that Steam isn't using that as the bar of quality!
But seriously, Steam's suggestions and store functions are much more useful than you find on places like the App Store.
I think the one thing we should be fair about is that many people don't
want to make their own decisions .And there are probably a lot of reasons why that is, but overall that's okay!
I think in most cases, people want reviewers, curators, influencers, etc to tell them which games are
worth buying. Obviously tastes vary, blah blah, but people like to be able to read quick summaries about products before they buy them (or in the laziest of cases just look at the final score) because they want to spend their hard-earned money on things that are
good. People like us that are on message boards that spend time watching streams, reading pre-released coverage, and broadly consuming everything about games are not the majority. Many people don't have the time to do that, and even when they do have extra time, they sometimes don't have enough interest in the hobby to do that anyways.
And yes, the "asset flip" games are almost a complete false flag concern. Pretty much the only reason they get attention is because certain dopey YouTubers and journos (
cough Jim Sterling cough) use them to get views on videos, which only gives them attention they wouldn't otherwise get.
Overall I agree with your idea. The way that more small games can succeed on digital storefronts is for there to be better coverage. Instead of Article #7601 about Asset Flips and Article #4982 about the latest AAA console release, having better, effortful coverage about small games could really make a difference. It's bizarre that even a successful indie hit like Rimworld sits on only
5 reviews. Your average AAA game has 5 reviews up within the first thirty seconds of the embargo lifting.
But alas, doing that won't bring in the clicks and the views, so instead we have to hear those same influencers, streamers, commentators, game journalists and gaming websites pop up in our newsfeed occasionally to whine about Steam, wondering why oh why these poor games have no visibility. Never once considering "Hm, am I part of the problem?"