Community MetaSteam | January 2024 - Let's get this year started!

[Line]

Done with Death's Gambit.
Definitely not really a Souls-like (since death is almost irrelevant), not reeeally a metroidvania either despite having new unlockable movement skills (that are actually pretty fun and not commonly seen, so that's nice), just a pretty good side scrolling RPG that combines both elements surprisingly well, despite the metroidvania part being tacked on post release.

I liked it a lot more than I expected, but it does run out of steam, since there is not tons of really different gear (though every weapon has its own little skill activated with the movement skills) and the areas are pretty but not super imaginative, if very well tied together in Dark Souls 1 fashion.
The gameplay is good for what the game is, but it feels a bit off since the player is relatively fast and extremely mobile for a Souls-like... so the difficulty is not super high, until you get into optional rematches for bosses that is, then there's so much stuff to avoid to becomes a bit too hard... balance is a bit odd.

It felt like an incredibly competent game in every aspect, managing to mix souls and metroidvania together, really interesting and often very unique boss mechanics, a strange mix of souls-like dread but also random comedy bits (that one I can see not being to the taste of everyone)... but it is also deeply uninspired.
So that sucks a bit, to see a good game being weaker than the sum of its parts because it lacks quite a bit of identity.

 

[Aaron D.]

Damn you Aaron D. - Im hooked on Airport CEO.

Its got some nice depth to it. I'm a sucker for these types of games. I keep re-starting due to getting to a certain point and realising i've not got enough space to expand further or not positioned my terminal in an optimum place. I've done the first stages of the tutorial about 5 times now.

Like it a lot, has a nice flow. Reminds me of Prison Architect a fair bit.

Glad you're enjoying.

With my limited time I can tell this is one of the higher-quality Tycoon games out there. It was in EA for quite some time and it looks like it paid off in the end.

Steam Workshop:ubinek's master collection (steamcommunity.com)

Be sure to check out Dubinek's master collection in the Workshop for a one-stop collection of official liscense skins for everything from airlines to food vendors, fuel suppliers, etc.


In other news Portal: Revolution finally dropped. Free fan-made mod that adds a full new campaign.

Been in the works for quite some time.

 

[NarohDethan]

My tired ass really was waiting for an image to load

You need Metacouncil Gold in order to see the full post.

 

[spindoctor]

Core Decay might be dead after another round of 3DRealms layoffs...


That game looked really nice to me

Seems like the game might still make it

 

[dex3108]

Just saw this

 

[Arc]

Pretty cool.

Just saw this

That's a silly take. If those games didn't release on Steam, they would have released on itch, Epic, GOG or some other platform.

 

[NarohDethan]

Just saw this

Brainworms take from Kotaku, must be a day ending in y.

 

[PC-tan]

Just saw this

This is the main reason why I made the whole thing about Japanese Doujin games was because of this exact post. And we'll if Valve has never approved Recettear then the video game landscape would have looked different.

Pretty cool.

By the way they already do something like this in the US, specifically in GameStop stores. They will have a row of Steam gift cards. The main difference is that in the US those individuals cards have the pictures of a game on, so you will have one that has a picture of Spiderman, another that has God of War, another with HZD. I'm still not 100% sure if they are just pictures and the codes themselves are just for $60 on Steam or if they are codes for the game themselves.


As for Japan, that whole Steam gift card stuff is handled by Komodos sister company. Komodo split into two companies with Komodo handling Steam stuff and game publishing stuff, meanwhile the other company handles money transaction stuff, they offer different services to other companies (think what PayPal does, but specifically for Japan and the needs of people, even though PayPal is still pretty huge worldwide, because of how reliant Japan is on physical cash, they are not nearly as big there as they are else where). One of the cool things that company has done in the past is other campaigns with companies for different games, they once did a campaign with 711 Japan for a Yakuza game, if you bought a Steam Gift card at 711 you would be entered for prizes and some of them included stuff like a signed Jacket from RRG. They also did a thing with Capcom in the past for Monster Hunter Rise specific Steam cards (those one do have an expiration date, how ever they do have the Benefit of the pre-order bonus if you redeem one.

My first contact with Doujin games was because Cave Story, I think I found it through a forum because of the announcement of a fan translation. Years later when I started using Steam, Playism started publishing those games. Other way to get aware of the games were through video compilations showing the trailers.

Some years ago there a documentary about doujin games, you can watch it here.

I have been wanting to watch that documentary but you previously had to pay for it. They were selling it on Steam and it was a few years ago when Valve stopped selling videos.

I'm not sure if it's the same production company but I believe that Playism was involved in another document that goes over indie games in China and their recent rise to popularity. That documentary I think is from over 4 years ago.

Fate/Stay night and by extension Fate/Grand Order has it beat, I think.

That is true. Okay so it does seem like their in fact have been a number of games that did release at Comiket first that were later on able to get global recognition.

 

[Alextended]

Just saw this

Dude had the best argument against himself with this given how Steam has done since but he's too dumb to get it.

 

[Stone Ocean]

Just saw this

New year, new curation bullshit arguments that have no realistic solutions.

 

[kio]

Just saw this

We can dislike the outlet and their usual rhetoric when it comes to PC and Steam in particular but the fact is that it's an obscene amount of "games" and that >90% of it is pure trash that shouldn't be available for sale anywhere.

I know I'm alone on this but to this day I still believe that Greenlight was a much better system than what we have now. Sure it wasn't perfect and had glaring loopholes that bad apples exploited but the core concept was solid and just needed time and some fixes to be perfect. Besides the obvious savings with human resources I never understood why they replaces it with Direct. I'll die alone on this hill if I must.

 

[Stone Ocean]

We can dislike the outlet and their usual rhetoric when it comes to PC and Steam in particular but the fact is that it's an obscene amount of "games" and that >90% of it is pure trash that shouldn't be available for sale anywhere.

I know I'm alone on this but to this day I still believe that Greenlight was a much better system than what we have now. Sure it wasn't perfect and had glaring loopholes that bad apples exploited but the core concept was solid and just needed time and some fixes to be perfect. Besides the obvious savings with human resources I never understood why they replaces it with Direct. I'll die alone on this hill if I must.

Steam already has recommendation systems in place, the average Steam user is not even aware of that pure trash existing, you have for the most part to search for it. Beyond that, the problem is having people decide that sort of stuff for you. Steam used to not allow VNs because they are in a technical way not games, who's to say games that look awful but are actually legit wouldn't be culled by Greenlight? Stuff like Cruelty Squad, Ditty of Carmeana and the like.

 

[Alextended]

Yeah, if you want curation you can find it in so many ways, by playing on console, egs and other protectors-from-bad-games you can put your trust to, only playing high metacritic score games, only playing what your favorite journalists tell you to, etc.,I see no reason for the store itself to limit everyone's options. Improvements are always in order and they certainly have been done, maybe there's a better sweetspot for the $100 barrier to entry but maybe not too

Edit: and yes essentially making most games invisible as asked is like not having them on the store at all, Meta's App Lab is like this and mostly a graveyard.

 

[Mivey]

I love shitting on John Walker, I really, really do. But he should be called out for the dumb stuff he is actually saying. All he's saying in that article is that it would be nice if Valve would manually curate the frontpage of Steam (which I guess you could translate as the store front). So it's not about not allowing games on Steam, it's about which games get featured. Currently, Valve is using lots of algorithmic features for this (though there are some major game releases that Valve themselves is pushing, like the big banner thing. John Walker makes the point that the algorithmic stuff isn't good enough for most indie games (based on no real numbers, just personal anecdotes) and then proposes that Valve playing favorites would be the solution.

I think there is a pretty strong counter argument that it's not Valve's business to determine who wins and who loses, it's not their job to shift through the garbage that gets released and find diamonds in the rough. It's on the devs to market their game. I personally also find the suggestions that I see from the Steam front page often quite useful. I doubt that it's helping every rando indie dev out there, but from a purely customer perspective, I think it's doing a decent job.

 

[NarohDethan]

I love shitting on John Walker, I really, really do. But he should be called out for the dumb stuff he is actually saying. All he's saying in that article is that it would be nice if Valve would manually curate the frontpage of Steam (which I guess you could translate as the store front). So it's not about not allowing games on Steam, it's about which games get featured. Currently, Valve is using lots of algorithmic features for this (though there are some major game releases that Valve themselves is pushing, like the big banner thing. John Walker makes the point that the algorithmic stuff isn't good enough for most indie games (based on no real numbers, just personal anecdotes) and then proposes that Valve playing favorites would be the solution.

I think there is a pretty strong counter argument that it's not Valve's business to determine who wins and who loses, it's not their job to shift through the garbage that gets released and find diamonds in the rough. It's on the devs to market their game. I personally also find the suggestions that I see from the Steam front page often quite useful. I doubt that it's helping every rando indie dev out there, but from a purely customer perspective, I think it's doing a decent job.

The moment Valve curates its front page, they will start getting accused of picking winners and having a bias to certain types of games. It's a unsolvable problem.

 

[Stone Ocean]

I love shitting on John Walker, I really, really do. But all he's saying in that article is that it would be nice if Valve would manually curate the frontpage of Steam (which I guess you could translate as the store front). So it's not about not allowing games on Steam, it's about which games get featured. Currently, Valve is using lots of algorithmic features for this (though there are some major game releases that Valve themselves is pushing, like the big banner thing. John Walker makes the point that the algorithmic stuff isn't good enough for most indie games (based on no real numbers, just personal anecdotes) and then proposes that Valve playing favorites would be the solution.

Sure, I wouldn't be against more discoverability. But the reality is this is capitalism and there will be losers, even if we assume 90% of what gets released is not worth talking about thats still over a thousand games, it's simply not possible for all those games to get equal attention and/or be successful.

 

[Derrick01]

There's too much of everything in entertainment these days and the gradual erasing of the barrier of entry that the internet has caused is the reason behind it. Personally I think it's mostly a bad thing as the flood of garbage has made things pretty difficult on people who aren't hardcore enthusiasts of something. I mean how many times have you seen someone on the internet complain about music or gaming and the answer is always "there's still good stuff you just have to find it"? The onus never used to be on the individual to spend hours doing research just to hear a song or watch a movie that isn't trash.

That being said this is one of those problems that you can't undo once that bottle is opened, we needed to be smart enough not to open it to begin with. I have no idea how you address it now. Companies try to use algorithms but those are proving to be more problematic than helpful because 1) they're not advanced enough to keep up with the insane glut of cheap trash and people finding ways to exploit the algorithm and 2) because they're so dumb they often steer people in dangerous directions. To this day I get youtube trying to push joe rogan on me despite years of telling them not interested.

edit: Another perfect example of the stupid algorithm at work: That alex jones game steam recommended to everyone last week. Besides the obvious problematic elements here it's not even a real game it's a lazy bottom of the barrel piece of shovelware that the algorithm thought we should play because it thought it was similar to something way different (and MUCH higher quality). We do not have the capability of battling the flood of garbage being dumped in every aspect of our life other than assigning humans to act as gatekeepers like we did in past decades. It's not perfect but it's the only solution we have that is proven to work relatively well.

 

[C-Dub]

I don’t think Valve should be surfacing or hiding stuff inorganically. It’s ripe for abuse, and even if Valve doesn’t take cash from developers for preferential treatment, the trust is undermined once you start doing that.

I think the only thing Valve should be banning (or at the very least, shadow banning/hiding) is all the far right/nazi stuff on their platform. Anything else should be fair game - let the community decide.

 

[curi0usBystander]

The moment that tools became cheaper and more accessible. You either open the floodgates or leave the access to the gatekeepers and we saw how that went.

I think apple handpicks some apps to be featured in their store. But the problem with that is, again, you're leaving it up to humans to decide (I have no idea what criteria they use to feature stuff, tho).

 

[Hektor]

 

[PC-tan]

The whole garbage game thing is true. If you look for asset flips, guess what, Steam will recommend Asset flips to you. Stuff will get through the cracks but overall that's the general idea.



For those wondering what would curation look like? Take a look at PlayStation, out of Steam,PSN,eShop, and Xbox, I would say that PSN does the best job of "presentation". Now comes the real question of what is the end result? This is of now I will now give a definite answer to.

If you look at PSN, they choose winners, I do believe that some of this also has to do with how some some indies that PS likes they will even help with marketing for those games. This has proven to be successful and get attention for those games. This doesn't always work, but there have been multiple cases were it has definitely helped get the name of the game out there.

So they curate the games that they allow on PSN and they also choose on how to display said games. They have an indie corner and it's you typical indie games. Nothing that really stands out or highlights any "hidden gems".

 

[Aaron D.]

I’m just amazed that someone mentioned Ditty of Carmeana on this page.

 

[Madventure]

We can dislike the outlet and their usual rhetoric when it comes to PC and Steam in particular but the fact is that it's an obscene amount of "games" and that >90% of it is pure trash that shouldn't be available for sale anywhere.

I know I'm alone on this but to this day I still believe that Greenlight was a much better system than what we have now. Sure it wasn't perfect and had glaring loopholes that bad apples exploited but the core concept was solid and just needed time and some fixes to be perfect. Besides the obvious savings with human resources I never understood why they replaces it with Direct. I'll die alone on this hill if I must.

I mean the problem with green light ended up being that people figured out the literal exact numbers needed to get greenlit and then people that weren't popular enough to bludgeon their way through to that many votes bribed their way in with saying "Ill give you a free steam key" and shit like that so it ended up being entirely against the intended purpose of people voting for stuff that didn't look like complete shit or cash grabs

A lot of that happened entirely off steam with them being funneled directly to their greenlight page so it was like on kickstarters or reddit pages or even people doing giveaways on steamgift. So it's not like they could directly enforce stuff either

I do remember getting into a thing with my old boss where we would both go through every game introduced for the day for greenlight then say why they were all complete shit or not and somehow he ended up with like 5-10 more than me and it pissed me off so much

 

[Li Kao]

Far too many games are being made. It is not on Steam to curate what is made, nor should it be.
Try again in 7 years, John.

And, as has already been said, the minute Steam curates its store is the minute the same crowd will complain about unfairness and picking winners.

 

[Madventure]

Even epic, and GOG started out as massively curated stores and then had to open up the gates because it was literally killing their storefonts.
GOG is where I buy the second most stuff because they sell old games but they now sell a massive amount of Visual Novels and Adult games and anime stuff in general and then Epic had their "NO BAD GAMES EVER" followed by them obviously letting in a deluge of random shit and like NFT games or whatever

Now GOG is still old games but they have a lot more modern games but just removed DRM so that's cool, it lets them expand out on that.

As far as steam goes I think it's a damned if you do damned if you don't, if you hire someone you manually go through each application you're going to get biases on what they think a good or bad game is anyways

With just paying a fee and getting (Generally) auto accepted by a computer it bypasses that hassle for like 95% of everyone besides the 5% that need extra looking at or shouldn't of been accepted at all

 

[Le Pertti]

The problem is that people think every game made should be for them. I would argue that there aren’t even too many games nor too many games released, there’s room for more. There are enough player for every game, it’s about finding the right game for the right game and that definitely can’t be done by curation. Valve is on the rights track with algorithms, goal is for that to make it so everyone has a very unique storefront with the games they might like.

 

[Kyougar]

I am in search for a good beamer (100-300€) for movie watching and maybe even gaming
Any recommendations? Want to stream from my PC to the beamer in the same room and the bedroom 5 meters away

 

[spindoctor]

I'm always confused when people who fully understand the pitfalls of Valve curation advocate for it to happen anyway. Everyone remembers the early days when Valve used to pick every game that appeared on the store and how many good games got left out because of that. Even these days you get a story once every 6 months or so when some anime game or visual novel is denied distribution. Then you have about 3 days worth of repetitive discourse about how "There's definitely someone at Valve who hates these games" or how "It's so unfair that this game was allowed but that one wasn't". Even with this periodic reminder some people still want games they personally disapprove of to be denied distribution on the service. People need to understand that their personal values system is not universal and there are people who might like games that they dislike, just as there are people who will dislike games that they like. The only fair way to deal with this is to allow them on the store and let them find their audience. Meanwhile you have the tools to ignore any games or publishers that you personally dislike. This is how it should be and I'm glad Valve works along these lines.

As for why some games don't find success on the platform... it's not because there are too many asset flips or bad games on the store. It's because there are far too many good games being made now. It's because people have a limited amount of time and money to spend on games. It's because many games are being designed to be played for months and years now. There is no solution to this. It's not like a vast amount of people are accidentally buying crappy asset flips and then run out of money to buy good games. It's not that somehow only the asset flips are being displayed on the front page to a large amount of people and they never get to see the good ones there. None of this is happening. Developers need to find ways to find their audience. It's not easy, but then there is no endeavor in life where success is guaranteed just because you worked hard.

 

[kio]

I mean the problem with green light ended up being that people figured out the literal exact numbers needed to get greenlit and then people that weren't popular enough to bludgeon their way through to that many votes bribed their way in with saying "Ill give you a free steam key" and shit like that so it ended up being entirely against the intended purpose of people voting for stuff that didn't look like complete shit or cash grabs

A lot of that happened entirely off steam with them being funneled directly to their greenlight page so it was like on kickstarters or reddit pages or even people doing giveaways on steamgift. So it's not like they could directly enforce stuff either

I do remember getting into a thing with my old boss where we would both go through every game introduced for the day for greenlight then say why they were all complete shit or not and somehow he ended up with like 5-10 more than me and it pissed me off so much

I pointed out that greenlight had it's problems but at the core it was exactly the organic curation system that steam needed.
The ways in which it was exploited are well documented by now but back then we didn't have all the tools we have right now that could weigh in on the decision, stuff like demo downloads/ play time, next fests engagement, kickstarter success, social media followers, wishlists, etc.
Plus you could put barriers that would block accounts younger than X years and/or with less than Y games to participate in the vote, playtime and/or game completion could also be a factor, you could have a weighted system that wasn't a simple 1 user = 1 vote to further disincentivize bots and abusers, there are a ton of things that could have been done before throwing everything out.
If, on top of all that, you had human valve employees that certified the votes and just excluded any obvious scam or game with potential harmful content, what's wrong with that? It's not his/her opinions deciding what goes in or doesn't, it's the community of players that are actively engaged with the platform.

Allow me a tangent comparisson, isn't the deck's verified system completely human centered? Why isn't anyone complaining about that but gather all the pitchforks when human curation of the store is mentioned? I fail to see what's the core difference.

Anyway, like I mentioned, I know I'm alone in this and I don't expect to change anyone's mind. At the end of the day whenever stuff I have zero interest in shows up I just add it to my 20k+ ignore list and move on with my life.

 

[Censored]

Play your Unreal Engine games on VR
Universal Unreal Engine VR Mod

Releases · praydog/UEVR

Universal Unreal Engine VR Mod (4.8 - 5.4). Contribute to praydog/UEVR development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[Li Kao]

I finished Sigil II. E1M8 was... you don't talk about E1M8.
Now, I'm a little tired of shooting things. So I obviously opt for the logical next step. Shooting more things.

Venturous 1.5 Release - ZDoom

forum.zdoom.org

 

[curi0usBystander]

Allow me a tangent comparisson, isn't the deck's verified system completely human centered? Why isn't anyone complaining about that but gather all the pitchforks when human curation of the store is mentioned? I fail to see what's the core difference.

Weird comparison, the deck system just tells you this game works or not, is not stopping you from trying.

In the middle of the tweet posted before you can find the dev of DUSK saying that GOG (read a human) rejected his game until it was popular enough.

 

[Li Kao]

Looking a little into Doom total conversions and I… uh… I made a huge mistake.
Incredible. Too much.

 

[fantomena]

If I was part of Valve's game curation team, many games that I ended up loving, would have been rejected by me. Cruelty Squad and Dusk are 2 good examples. Based on screenshots, they look bad, especially CS, but they are not bad in any way.

 

[Kyougar]

If I was part of Valve's game curation team, many games that I ended up loving, would have been rejected by me. Cruelty Squad and Dusk are 2 good examples. Based on screenshots, they look bad, especially CS, but they are not bad in any way.

I would have rejected several games that I loved based on screenshots.
I even had Project Zomboid on "not interested" before I saw it in a lets play and bought and loved it.

 

[STHX]

Looking a little into Doom total conversions and I… uh… I made a huge mistake.
Incredible. Too much.

Welcome to the doom family
When you get tired of simply shooting things fell free to move to shooting, jumping and whipping things

 

[Dandy]

Just saw this

If only there were people who decided that, as a career, they wanted to talk about videogames. Perhaps those people could spend some of their time talking about hidden gems that were lost in the crowd.

Anyway. I cannot stand John Walker. One of the whiniest, melodramatic, petty, voices in gaming.

 

[Gamall Wednesday Ida]

How common was it for Elden Ring to crash?

I have 520 h in ER, 400+ of them on Linux, on two machines.

On the first machine (Win, 1070, 16G, about 80h), it crashed every 2, 3h, if I recall.

On the second (Lin, 3070, and later 4070, 32G, 400h+), I'm sure it probably crashed once or twice, but I can't really recall any specific instance. This is despite all the layers of proton, gamemoderun, mangohud, weird command-line substitutions to disable EAC, plus er-patcher now, and the frequent use of OBS and constant Alt-TABing.

It's a very stable game, given enough headroom, especially wrt RAM.

this is one of the games I def would hate being crashed on lol

Actually, it saves your progress every 30s or so. There are triggers when you pick up some items etc. Unless it crashes at the end of a long boss fight, it's hard to lose any meaningful progress.

(Of course, as with any game, a "save the save files" script is a must; I have never had save corruption occur in any souls games, but it can happen)

 

[Cacher]

Discussion - What are you currently playing? (Week 2 of 2024)

Darn, week 2 already?! I don't even remember what I did last week. Anyway, what are you playing? Just mostly Marvel's Midnight Suns and Tears of the Kingdom. Not much to say haha except enjoying both.

metacouncil.com

 

[Mor]

I wasn't really going to say anything about this topic because we had this conversation a few times in the past but oh well, here we go.

Curation by itself is not bad, however, it should only be limited to remove content that is straight illegal or offensive by targeting collectives, however, I don't think any entity nor person should decide what goes in and what doesn't. I believe here we are all adults that know exactly what we like to consume and what we want to hide from our storefront view and guess what, we can do exactly that thanks to the insane amount of filters Steam offers us.

I don't like NSFW games and I spent some time tuning my steam preferences so it hides most of the content, do I see some +18 content from time to time? yes, can I just remove those? yes.

The excuse of "oh but you see low effort titles hurt good ones visibility" is a lie. First of all, while there's a common line for low effort, in most cases, what's low effort is based on our subjective opinion and what you might find low effort, I might find fascinating. Secondly, the way the algorithm works it highlights games with traffic and pretty much pushes to the lowest parts of the platform so when a shitty game gets highlighted it is because people keep sharing it even if its to trash it (latest one is the Alex Jones game, instead of reporting, threads and all opened through forums, then the system understands that's something that might generate money, user's fault)

I understand the "frustration" of seeing weird stuff from time to time or think that the platform should be cleaner, but IMHO, neither a human approach would work nor it should given that each one of us is different and has different quality bars, I bet quite some of my games wouldn't be on Steam if it was a closed system.

---

As for the journalist, nothing positive to say but this isn't the first time this folk has done this to get viral and get some visibility and to be honest, there are some answers to his tweet I agree with and pretty much say what I would say to him, don't care about his opinions at all yet here we are, talking about his stuff, jeez.

 

[Dandy]

Does any one here just go on Steam and scroll through games at random in hopes of finding a game they have never heard about? I haven't. I rely on games media, content creators, forums, etc...

 

[Lashley]

You've all given Kotaku more attention in this 1 page than they received all year. There's a reason their site is dying.

Outrage shit gets people whining on twitter but it doesn't actually make people visit your site.

John Walker is a whiny idiot who couldn't beat a boss on a game (I think it was guacuamelee) So he whined that every game should have a skip boss button.

 

[Le Pertti]

Does any one here just go on Steam and scroll through games at random in hopes of finding a game they have never heard about? I haven't. I rely on games media, content creators, forums, etc...

I do sometimes. Mostly when there a sale. Like I might check RPGs and see what have good user rating.

 

[Alextended]

I check the all new releases page quite often myself (and wish it was a single click from the front page to get there instead of an extra two), usually filtering DLC and some other stuff to make it easier to see actually new games. It's not too hard to trim out the real crap and asset flips by just the pop up content when hovering the cursor over the game or even the description at times. I check it more than the storefront. But I realize I'm the minority. And that's fine. Similarly some times I also check the all upcoming games list, usually to check out what VR stuff are imminent in case there are any cool stuff I've missed. Beyond that I also check my discovery queue occasionally (but more likely to do that if I've not actually checked all new releases as diligently lately) or the "games similar to this" stuff within a game page. Usually I've already seen the stuff I end up investigating further elsewhere. Like I said I'm in the minority.

Basically I usually do the job of the storefront manually I guess so have less interest in the actual storefront doing it for me. It's pretty obvious with his kind of curation we wouldn't even have many games that led to genre revolutions like (Vampire) Survivors and Boomer Shooters, there are enough examples of games that became a BIG DEAL not getting approved on GOG, EGS and elsewhere to believe they're only the tip of the iceberg we'd have been missing out on.

Maybe itch.io would have grown bigger if Steam wasn't allowing such games on it. But then that'd just mean Steam itself has that flaw allowing room for it and once again we'd have complaints in the vein we now get hypotheticals about how being barred from Steam limits your sales potential/kills studios etc., we already had those around the Greenlight times so Idk how people who clearly were there for it pretend it didn't happen and ask for a return to similar.

 

[Derrick01]

I'm always confused when people who fully understand the pitfalls of Valve curation advocate for it to happen anyway. Everyone remembers the early days when Valve used to pick every game that appeared on the store and how many good games got left out because of that. Even these days you get a story once every 6 months or so when some anime game or visual novel is denied distribution. Then you have about 3 days worth of repetitive discourse about how "There's definitely someone at Valve who hates these games" or how "It's so unfair that this game was allowed but that one wasn't". Even with this periodic reminder some people still want games they personally disapprove of to be denied distribution on the service. People need to understand that their personal values system is not universal and there are people who might like games that they dislike, just as there are people who will dislike games that they like. The only fair way to deal with this is to allow them on the store and let them find their audience. Meanwhile you have the tools to ignore any games or publishers that you personally dislike. This is how it should be and I'm glad Valve works along these lines.

As for why some games don't find success on the platform... it's not because there are too many asset flips or bad games on the store. It's because there are far too many good games being made now. It's because people have a limited amount of time and money to spend on games. It's because many games are being designed to be played for months and years now. There is no solution to this. It's not like a vast amount of people are accidentally buying crappy asset flips and then run out of money to buy good games. It's not that somehow only the asset flips are being displayed on the front page to a large amount of people and they never get to see the good ones there. None of this is happening. Developers need to find ways to find their audience. It's not easy, but then there is no endeavor in life where success is guaranteed just because you worked hard.

I remember those days but I also don't really know how many good games would get left behind. The only thing that was ever said was stardew valley wouldn't exist on the old system and while that sucks because even I love that game, would I trade it to ensure lets say 80% of the trash on steam didn't exist? I probably would take that deal and I would take similar deals on the consoles.

I understand I have a bit of an extremist stance on this though. I'd also argue the live service games are hurting other games just as much as flooding everyone with garbage (which makes browsing for something impossible you have to know exactly what you want) as they hold everyone's time hostage preventing them from playing other things. The younger generation almost literally lives in some of these games never touching anything else. And that's not even getting into the problematic parts of those games like mtx abuse and skin gambling on the steam marketplace.

Does any one here just go on Steam and scroll through games at random in hopes of finding a game they have never heard about? I haven't. I rely on games media, content creators, forums, etc...

No, you pretty much can't do this on any game store and that's the problem. Trying to find something on a whim is next to impossible because of all the garbage out there. As bad as it is on steam it's even worse on the consoles as they don't have a lot of the filters steam does and their algorithms are probably even worse too.

 

[Gamall Wednesday Ida]

you pretty much can't do this on any game store and that's the problem.

Is it really a problem?

Don't most people end up with a humongous wishlist without even trying? Are there really people out there who find their wishlist is not quite large enough already, and think a store is a better place to find new things to want than the gaming websites and communities catering to their tastes?

 

[Lashley]

People love whining about curation for Steam, but it's incredibly how daily you can go on PSN sort by new and just scroll through countless asset flips and shit games

 

[Kyougar]

People love whining about curation for Steam, but it's incredibly how daily you can go on PSN sort by new and just scroll through countless asset flips and shit games

But it's curated shit! So it must be good if Sony lets it on the Store!

 

[Stone Ocean]

I’m just amazed that someone mentioned Ditty of Carmeana on this page.

I was tempted to use the Candice Debébé trilogy as an example but I didn't wanna go too far into the adquired taste realm

 

[Alexandros]

I pointed out that greenlight had it's problems but at the core it was exactly the organic curation system that steam needed.
The ways in which it was exploited are well documented by now but back then we didn't have all the tools we have right now that could weigh in on the decision, stuff like demo downloads/ play time, next fests engagement, kickstarter success, social media followers, wishlists, etc.
Plus you could put barriers that would block accounts younger than X years and/or with less than Y games to participate in the vote, playtime and/or game completion could also be a factor, you could have a weighted system that wasn't a simple 1 user = 1 vote to further disincentivize bots and abusers, there are a ton of things that could have been done before throwing everything out.
If, on top of all that, you had human valve employees that certified the votes and just excluded any obvious scam or game with potential harmful content, what's wrong with that? It's not his/her opinions deciding what goes in or doesn't, it's the community of players that are actively engaged with the platform.

Allow me a tangent comparisson, isn't the deck's verified system completely human centered? Why isn't anyone complaining about that but gather all the pitchforks when human curation of the store is mentioned? I fail to see what's the core difference.

Anyway, like I mentioned, I know I'm alone in this and I don't expect to change anyone's mind. At the end of the day whenever stuff I have zero interest in shows up I just add it to my 20k+ ignore list and move on with my life.

I participated a lot in Steam Greenlight (basically every day until Steam discontinued it) and ultimately I don't think that it was a mistake to stop it. I recently cleared my ignored games list from the days of Greenlight and I noticed that I rejected a lot of games that should have a place on the store. Every system has flaws of course but I do believe that it is for the best that Valve doesn't actively curate the whole store.