Poll of the Day > Why is Jim Sterling complaining that it's easier for bad games to get on Steam.

(+) Yeah! (+)

That's like a wheat farmer complaining that people want to eat bread.
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We WANT more games, the law of garbage dictates that about 10% of the trash will be good.
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The complaint is the people who just get some resources off the internet and throw them into a basically no effort "game" to get a buck from people gullible enough to buy it. It serves to bury potentially good games under shit.

But while I can understand the argument I would prefer lower barriers to entry, shit and all. The good games always seems to float up and there are a number of great channels on youtube that sift through the shit to do videos on the promising games.

BlackScythe0 posted...

no effort "game" to get a buck from people gullible enough to buy it.

If they turned a profit... they're doing a good
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Sterling is trash, but he's right about this one.
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.. because opinions. More importantly he isn't wrong.
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Zareth posted...

That's like a wheat farmer complaining that people want to eat bread.

A closer analogy would a wheat farmer complaining about the shelves being overcrowded with sawdust bread, and cocaine.

Steam is full of noise, and there's no good way for a "good" indie game to get noticed. Thus, the only way to make to make any significant money on the platform is free-to-wait suckerware, like what's utterly dogpiling phones now.

BlackScythe0 posted...

But while I can understand the argument I would prefer lower barriers to entry, shit and all. The good games always seems to float up and there are a number of great channels on youtube that sift through the shit to do videos on the promising games.

More or less my thoughts. I don't want aspiring developers to feel discouraged because they don't have the support and funds for their startup game(s) that AAA companies have at their disposable. Even if we do need to sift through a pile of rocks for that occasional gem, I do feel the good ones will stand out in some form or another.
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InfestedAdam posted...

I do feel the good ones will stand out in some form or another.

That's generally not the case.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/674520/FightN_Rage/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/680390/Hidden_Dragon_Legend/
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Jim Sterling has one of the worst speaking voices of all time.
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Krow_Incarnate posted...

InfestedAdam posted...

I do feel the good ones will stand out in some form or another.

That's generally not the case.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/674520/FightN_Rage/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/680390/Hidden_Dragon_Legend/

There's bound to be some causalities. Would said developers have ever had a chance of publishing their game if online distributors were more strict on what game(s) get posted?
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With some respectable quality control, absolutely.

Too bad Steam's ran by a barrel of monkeys.
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Krow_Incarnate posted...

With some respectable quality control, absolutely.

Up until last week or so, "quality control" was essentially "no naughty bits! also no AO games except for that one time" - now it's essentially "lol, i dunno"

Ignoring quality control was one of the reasons of the 1980s gaming crash, so this can come back and hurt gaming
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Steam is a marketplace, it's job is to have an outlet to sell games. It is not it's job to filter through the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of games on it's platform to only provide you with the good ones. Anybody expecting Steam to do this is fucking insane.

How about people not buy every random game that shows up on their recommended list without first researching it and making sure it is actually worth your time and money?
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Questionmarktarius posted...

Krow_Incarnate posted...

With some respectable quality control, absolutely.

Up until last week or so, "quality control" was essentially "no naughty bits! also no AO games except for that one time" - now it's essentially "lol, i dunno"

Basically, everyone shouted at Valve that they needed to exert more quality control over their own platform, because it had basically become a massive septic tank of asset flips and shovelware that drowns out far worthier games and has become an incredibly corrupt system. So Valve actually started taking (incredibly hesitant and inept) steps to try and do that.

Then they decided to yank "adult" games for PR reasons, and it backfired spectacularly. So now they're gun-shy and are basically saying "Ehh, fuck it - it's easier and more profitable for us to not give a shit, so it's your problem now."

It's an attitude that is starting to hurt Steam, and one that is leading a lot of more legitimate devs to consider potential alternatives. Steam is in no way the golden child it was a few years ago.


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The existence of asset flips alone is inexcusable.
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I enjoy his vids but the guy is basically a professional complainer
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Mead posted...

I enjoy his vids but the guy is basically a professional complainer

...dammit!
I'm in the wrong line of work.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

one that is leading a lot of more legitimate devs to consider potential alternatives. Steam is in no way the golden child it was a few years ago.

I do feel GoG, Humble Bundle, and Green Man Gaming have grown over the years while Steam has plateaued.
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InfestedAdam posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

one that is leading a lot of more legitimate devs to consider potential alternatives. Steam is in no way the golden child it was a few years ago.

I do feel GoG, Humble Bundle, and Green Man Gaming have grown over the years while Steam has plateaued.

GoG is it's own thing (which I agree has gotten better over the years, especially after they introduced Galaxy), but Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming usually just give you Steam keys, they aren't a platform for PC gaming like Steam or GoG.
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Zareth posted...

That's like a wheat farmer complaining that people want to eat bread.

It's more like a baker complaining that the biggest grocery store in town (by far) doesn't actually care about the quality of the bread they stock, so their shelves are full of moldy, stale, bug-ridden bread, much of which is actually just repackaged flour and doesn't even qualify as "bread" by any reasonable definition. They'll still stock that baker's bread, along with any other legitimate, high-quality bread, but because of how much garbage they'd have to sift through, consumers aren't likely to ever buy said bread unless they know about it already and ask a clerk to show them where it is.

Basically, Steam's storefront is useless for anyone looking to shop. It's fine for buying, but lesser-known games depend on people shopping aimlessly to be discovered.

Dikitain posted...

Steam is a marketplace, it's job is to have an outlet to sell games. It is not it's job to filter through the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of games on it's platform to only provide you with the good ones. Anybody expecting Steam to do this is f***ing insane.

Literally every store in the world filters its products. Expecting Steam to do the same is not unreasonable; that's just how retail works.
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adjl posted...

Dikitain posted...

Steam is a marketplace, it's job is to have an outlet to sell games. It is not it's job to filter through the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of games on it's platform to only provide you with the good ones. Anybody expecting Steam to do this is f***ing insane.

Literally every store in the world filters its products. Expecting Steam to do the same is not unreasonable; that's just how retail works.

Store != Marketplace

Store implies that it would be a single shop (I.E. developer) selling games. I mean you can argue that it is a store for Valve games but not for other developers. A marketplace is a series of shops, and since Steam is catering to multiple developers who get money every time one of their products are sold (unlike a typical store where they would buy a set number of keys for sale and it would be their responsibility to sell them at what they think is a fair price for profit) it is not a store and therefore does not need to follow a quality control mechanism. Is it a mall's responsibility when you buy a shirt that falls apart from a store that rents space there?
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Dikitain posted...

Store implies that it would be a single shop (I.E. developer) selling games. I mean you can argue that it is a store for Valve games but not for other developers.

Not at all. A store is just a place to exchange money for stuff, stocked with goods the store owner wants to sell. Those goods don't have to be produced by the store's owners (and in many cases, they are not), they just have to be purchased for resale.

Dikitain posted...

unlike a typical store where they would buy a set number of keys for sale and it would be their responsibility to sell them at what they think is a fair price for profit

That is effectively what they do. The nature of digital goods is such that Valve's purchase of the key from the developer happens at the same time as the consumer's purchase of the key from Steam, but that doesn't change that it's absolutely a retail transaction. Valve handles all distribution in exchange for their cut of the sale price.

Dikitain posted...

Is it a mall's responsibility when you buy a shirt that falls apart from a store that rents space there?

In a way, yeah. Malls weed out those shops by charging rent; if the shop sucks, they won't be able to pay their rent, so they'll be booted out. Malls also don't want their reputation dragged through the mud by poor-quality shops, so they generally don't want shops that aren't doing well enough to be sustainable.
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Jim Sterling makes games? The farmer analogy is confusing. It doesn't make sense to compare him to a farmer/game maker if he doesn't harvest wheat/make games.
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Ogurisama posted...

Ignoring quality control was one of the reasons of the 1980s gaming crash, so this can come back and hurt gaming

Maybe, but the difference now is that there's several more platforms to buy games for, not to mention multiple avenues to buy them
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Golden Road posted...

Jim Sterling makes games? The farmer analogy is confusing. It doesn't make sense to compare him to a farmer/game maker if he doesn't harvest wheat/make games.

Nah, he litterally grows games in his garden. You didn't think he grew veggies over there did you? Have you seen the size of the man?

Golden Road posted...

Jim Sterling makes games? The farmer analogy is confusing. It doesn't make sense to compare him to a farmer/game maker if he doesn't harvest wheat/make games.

The best I can think of to make the analogy work is Jim Sterling likes to make videos every once in a while where he purposely reviews a game he knows is bad so he can make fun of it.

He was in fact previously sued by a (small) developer for doing so (which he (Sterling) eventually won). It was considered a big case because if Sterling lost this case it means it's okay for publishers to forcefully silence criticisms of their products through youtube take downs and lawsuits.
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Questionmarktarius posted...

Zareth posted...

That's like a wheat farmer complaining that people want to eat bread.

A closer analogy would a wheat farmer complaining about the shelves being overcrowded with sawdust bread, and cocaine.

Steam is full of noise, and there's no good way for a "good" indie game to get noticed. Thus, the only way to make to make any significant money on the platform is free-to-wait suckerware, like what's utterly dogpiling phones now.

No no no, Jim Sterling is the wheat farmer because more trash games means more trash games for him to complain about, more videos and therefore job security for him.
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BlackScythe0 posted...

The complaint is the people who just get some resources off the internet and throw them into a basically no effort "game" to get a buck from people gullible enough to buy it. It serves to bury potentially good games under shit.

But while I can understand the argument I would prefer lower barriers to entry, shit and all. The good games always seems to float up and there are a number of great channels on youtube that sift through the shit to do videos on the promising games.

People forget that this exact scenario happened with the atari. Which actually led to a videogame crash. But that was also when videogames were new and people were unsure about them. Now they are part of a way of life, just like any movie or novel. Heck the industry is growing so big that it is actually gonna be overtaking movies. So having a bunch of garbage will do nothing but make people never buy their games again. Nowadays if you screw up a game, your gonna get a ridiculous amount of bad publicity and boycotts. Like I will never buy another game from Gun Media, there handling of Friday the 13th is terrible.
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Zareth posted...

That's like a wheat farmer complaining that people want to eat bread.

I... what? That's an awful metaphor.

BlackScythe0 posted...

The complaint is the people who just get some resources off the internet and throw them into a basically no effort "game" to get a buck from people gullible enough to buy it. It serves to bury potentially good games under shit.

But while I can understand the argument I would prefer lower barriers to entry, shit and all. The good games always seems to float up and there are a number of great channels on youtube that sift through the shit to do videos on the promising games.

idk, while I like the concept of low barriers, a lot of stuff I might like is probably buried deep enough in the muck that I'll never see it. Only the really superb stuff -- which also requires some luck -- really excels, whereas a lot of pretty good games get crammed among the zero-effort nonsense.

adjl posted...

It's more like a baker complaining that the biggest grocery store in town (by far) doesn't actually care about the quality of the bread they stock, so their shelves are full of moldy, stale, bug-ridden bread, much of which is actually just repackaged flour and doesn't even qualify as "bread" by any reasonable definition. They'll still stock that baker's bread, along with any other legitimate, high-quality bread, but because of how much garbage they'd have to sift through, consumers aren't likely to ever buy said bread unless they know about it already and ask a clerk to show them where it is.

Basically, Steam's storefront is useless for anyone looking to shop. It's fine for buying, but lesser-known games depend on people shopping aimlessly to be discovered.

This, tbh. It's one big reason I've never got into Steam.
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Thank God for Jim
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Andromicus posted...

Thank God for Jim

You're welcome. ...oh wait, did you mean Yahweh? That guy gets all credit! =x
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As long as Valve makes money from it they won't give a damn. Maybe if people are sick and tired of Valve's lack of quality control now they should, rather than just complain about it jump ship over to Origin.
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The internet itself is an uncurated mess of content that people manage to navigate and find cool content on. I'm not sure that Valve's approach of opening the floodgates and relying on automated systems to sort through the mess is going to work and it certainly causes problems in the short term, but I admire their efforts and do believe it's the best approach if they can pull it off.

I also believe that the current problems with steam's storefront are overblown. Looking at my front page right now I don't see any of the garbage that winds up in Jim Sterling reviews. I see an assortment of games in my favorite genres, ranging from big budgets to indies and new releases to classics I haven't gotten around to trying. It's far from perfect, but the automated tools are there and do work.
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funkyfritter posted...

The internet itself is an uncurated mess of content that people manage to navigate and find cool content on.

If that were the case, Reddit wouldn't be so big now and burying non-terrible sites.
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adjl posted...

Dikitain posted...

Store implies that it would be a single shop (I.E. developer) selling games. I mean you can argue that it is a store for Valve games but not for other developers.

Not at all. A store is just a place to exchange money for stuff, stocked with goods the store owner wants to sell. Those goods don't have to be produced by the store's owners (and in many cases, they are not), they just have to be purchased for resale.

Key word: purchased

Steam doesn't purchase the keys, they just provide an outlet for them to be sold. Again, similar to a mall.

adjl posted...

Dikitain posted...

unlike a typical store where they would buy a set number of keys for sale and it would be their responsibility to sell them at what they think is a fair price for profit

That is effectively what they do. The nature of digital goods is such that Valve's purchase of the key from the developer happens at the same time as the consumer's purchase of the key from Steam, but that doesn't change that it's absolutely a retail transaction. Valve handles all distribution in exchange for their cut of the sale price.

Except Valve doesn't set the price, the developer does. Sure in a regular store a distributor can set a "suggested retail price" but the fact is the store can still sell the goods for whatever price they want. Not so with Steam. Even during Steam sales it is the developer that decides how much a game get's discounted.

adjl posted...

Dikitain posted...

Is it a mall's responsibility when you buy a shirt that falls apart from a store that rents space there?

In a way, yeah. Malls weed out those shops by charging rent; if the shop sucks, they won't be able to pay their rent, so they'll be booted out. Malls also don't want their reputation dragged through the mud by poor-quality shops, so they generally don't want shops that aren't doing well enough to be sustainable.

Malls don't give a damn about the quality of the shops there, so long as they pay the rent. Similarly, Steam doesn't care about the quality of the games on their platform so long as they get the money for putting games up and a cut of all sales.

It is really not that difficult: Steam is just a platform for developers to sell their shit. Anyone thinking they should even have quality control in the first place is insane. Why would a platform with unlimited resources to sell everything under the sun care what should and shouldn't be sold there? They shouldn't. Even the physical store analogy doesn't work because they only care about quality due to having limited space to sell their goods. Steam doesn't have that issue so they have the freedom to sell whatever game exists under the yellow sun. If people are stupid enough to buy the shit piles, that is their fault.
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Dikitain posted...

Key word: purchased

Steam doesn't purchase the keys, they just provide an outlet for them to be sold. Again, similar to a mall.

-Consumer gives Valve $20 for a game
-Valve pockets $8 and gives $12 to developer
-Developer gives Valve key for game
-Valve gives key to consumer

All of which happens more or less instantly, because of how digital distribution works, but Valve is very much the middleman here, not just an outlet where developers can peddle and distribute their own wares. Even more so where I believe what actually happens is that Valve is given a distributable copy of the game and the rights to generate their own keys for it. Valve sells copies of games. Steam is a store, not a marketplace (the actual Steam Marketplace aside).

Bear in mind that Valve does have to approve every game before it ends up on Steam. That pipeline is there. At this point, they've automated it such that there's no human input and it lets just about anything through that isn't a virus or pirated copy of another game, but the paradigm is very much a matter of "will you sell this game for me?", not "I'm setting up shop on this platform and selling my stuff."

Dikitain posted...

Except Valve doesn't set the price, the developer does. Sure in a regular store a distributor can set a "suggested retail price" but the fact is the store can still sell the goods for whatever price they want. Not so with Steam. Even during Steam sales it is the developer that decides how much a game get's discounted.

That's just a matter of policy. There's nothing inherent to Valve's business model that prevents them from setting prices as they wish, they've just chosen to let developers pick their own prices because that works well.

Dikitain posted...

Malls don't give a damn about the quality of the shops there, so long as they pay the rent.

Charging rent is itself a form of quality control, but beyond that, malls do care to a certain extent. A mall's reputation strongly affects how much rent they can charge, and a big part of a mall's reputation is the quality of the stores therein. Malls can therefore influence who gets to set up shop by adjusting their rent.

Dikitain posted...

Why would a platform with unlimited resources to sell everything under the sun care what should and shouldn't be sold there?

Because they don't have unlimited resources. Storage space? Yes. Bandwidth? Effectively. Storefront? That's very finite, and taking up that storefront with an endless torrent of garbage makes Steam pretty useless for marketing new games.

Dikitain posted...

Anyone thinking they should even have quality control in the first place is insane.

They're making more than enough money to be able to pay a dozen people to try out the hundred new games they get a day to make sure they at least work. Especially where the only reason they get so many new games is because they've earned a reputation for letting anything through, so the job would only get easier with a bit of vetting to discourage using the platform as a dumping ground for unplayable asset flips.

I do like that Steam doesn't have stringent standards. That's a considerable boon for anyone starting out who doesn't have the resources to penetrate more exclusive markets. Turning down stuff that is actually, non-hyperbolically garbage doesn't have to hurt that, though. You can have low standards without giving up on standards entirely.
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yutterh posted...

BlackScythe0 posted...

The complaint is the people who just get some resources off the internet and throw them into a basically no effort "game" to get a buck from people gullible enough to buy it. It serves to bury potentially good games under shit.

But while I can understand the argument I would prefer lower barriers to entry, shit and all. The good games always seems to float up and there are a number of great channels on youtube that sift through the shit to do videos on the promising games.

People forget that this exact scenario happened with the atari. Which actually led to a videogame crash. But that was also when videogames were new and people were unsure about them. Now they are part of a way of life, just like any movie or novel. Heck the industry is growing so big that it is actually gonna be overtaking movies. So having a bunch of garbage will do nothing but make people never buy their games again. Nowadays if you screw up a game, your gonna get a ridiculous amount of bad publicity and boycotts. Like I will never buy another game from Gun Media, there handling of Friday the 13th is terrible.

I don't think your Atari reference is truly valid.

ET wasn't just a random one dollar game from a no name developer on steam. It was a advertised for a super popular movie that they made way too many copies for and developed by atari. Also wasn't really game reviews, not the way we have now to instantly pull things up on our phones.

The kind of trash games I'm talking about aren't making it onto consoles. The industry is more mature now and technology allows us to pull up reviews on our phone at anytime for anything we want.

What I dont like is buying a physical disc at a store then having to download it anyway, thanks Bethesda! Our internet sucks so downloading takes forever, if it doesnt take all our high-speed gigs to do it.
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The practice of having "physical" copies of PC games just be Steam keys in boxes is indeed nonsense. Having the game connect to Steam once installed and use Steam to keep it updated? Sure. Making you download the whole thing after trying to buy a physical copy? That's dumb.
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BlackScythe0 posted...

yutterh posted...

BlackScythe0 posted...

The complaint is the people who just get some resources off the internet and throw them into a basically no effort "game" to get a buck from people gullible enough to buy it. It serves to bury potentially good games under shit.

But while I can understand the argument I would prefer lower barriers to entry, shit and all. The good games always seems to float up and there are a number of great channels on youtube that sift through the shit to do videos on the promising games.

People forget that this exact scenario happened with the atari. Which actually led to a videogame crash. But that was also when videogames were new and people were unsure about them. Now they are part of a way of life, just like any movie or novel. Heck the industry is growing so big that it is actually gonna be overtaking movies. So having a bunch of garbage will do nothing but make people never buy their games again. Nowadays if you screw up a game, your gonna get a ridiculous amount of bad publicity and boycotts. Like I will never buy another game from Gun Media, there handling of Friday the 13th is terrible.

I don't think your Atari reference is truly valid.

ET wasn't just a random one dollar game from a no name developer on steam. It was a advertised for a super popular movie that they made way too many copies for and developed by atari. Also wasn't really game reviews, not the way we have now to instantly pull things up on our phones.

The kind of trash games I'm talking about aren't making it onto consoles. The industry is more mature now and technology allows us to pull up reviews on our phone at anytime for anything we want.

LMAO you think I was only talking about ET? Yeah ET was a the poster child for the failure of games but it isn't the reason lol. A lot of companies back then made a lot of games and all kinds of games were made for the atari. Some of them broken and completely unplayable. Some awesome games we got were actually rush jobs as well. The whole industry back then had zero quality control. I honestly forgot where I heard a lot of this stuff from. probably some documentary on video games or my own research. But basically the entire industry crashed because all of the broken games made it crash. Nintendo revived gaming because of R.O.B. being marketed as a toy. No one wanted to buy videogame consoles or put them in their store for a long time. Which is also why nintendo made the seal of approval, so people know they are getting a quality game. Of course the seal didn't always protect against bad games but it was a PR stunt to get people trusting of the industry again. The rest, as they say, is history.
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The Nintendo seal of quality at least amounted to Nintendo saying "we've curated our library and are willing to put our reputation on the line if the games we approve are bad," which is way more than Atari ever did. In practice, it was mostly a PR stunt, but it did at least represent a much healthier attitude.
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