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Lumpy the Cook posted:I remember saying years and years ago that Greenlight was a horrible idea in general and that Valve needs to have a fully staffed team conducting quality control if they wanna go through with anything like that and the only response anyone could come back with was along the lines of “STFU more games = betterer” and, well, LOL I'm not seeing the problem
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Jun 2, 2018 01:44
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Lumpy the Cook posted:I remember saying years and years ago that Greenlight was a horrible idea in general and that Valve needs to have a fully staffed team conducting quality control if they wanna go through with anything like that and the only response anyone could come back with was along the lines of “STFU more games = betterer” and, well, LOL Like I mentioned a few pages back, Valve has some hippy-dippy management structure where everyone does whatever the gently caress they want. (unless they went back to something sane? I dunno.) Mucking though the 943 billion lovely games on Steam is something no sane man wants to do, so no one does it.
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Jun 2, 2018 01:52
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If they don't have the employees or want to 'structure' their corporation to allow even basic moderation, then fine just get some volunteers to do it. There is literally no reason for the storefront to be as bad as it is. And it's still shocking that Valve is willing to gently caress over the legitimate livelihoods of so many people to avoid doing so.
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Jun 2, 2018 03:02
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SomeJazzyRat posted:If they don't have the employees or want to 'structure' their corporation to allow even basic moderation, then fine just get some volunteers to do it. It has close to a monopoly and doesn't actually give a poo poo about any of those people if it doesn't threaten it's bottom line.
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Jun 2, 2018 03:22
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FoolyCharged posted:It has close to a monopoly and doesn't actually give a poo poo about any of those people if it doesn't threaten it's bottom line. Close to a monopoly!? Ha! Just try playing Forza Horizon 3 or Sea of Thieves or
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Jun 2, 2018 04:57
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SomeJazzyRat posted:If they don't have the employees or want to 'structure' their corporation to allow even basic moderation, then fine just get some volunteers to do it. Think about the Steam Forums, and then imagine a similar gaggle of volunteer moderators only now they control whether or not a vendor gets to access the marketplace instead of whether an idiot gets to shitpost. Managing the storefront would be a full-time job for a team of professionals, and that's what Valve will need if they ever decide they care about doing it right.
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Jun 2, 2018 05:27
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It's not like Valve can't afford it
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Jun 2, 2018 12:53
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valve is extremely deep in the ~automation~ rabbit hole, they'll hire even more backend programmers instead
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Jun 2, 2018 13:00
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Yeah, waifu holocaust was allegedly due to a rogue algorithm hell bent on showing humanity that not all AI is evil.
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Jun 2, 2018 17:59
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SomeJazzyRat posted:And it's still shocking that Valve is willing to gently caress over the legitimate livelihoods of so many people to avoid doing so. Anything valve does is gonna gently caress over the legitimate livelihood of somebody. Only an incredible pollyanna would think a human review of all new games wouldn't crush some number of games with bad or mistaken judgements of quality. As far as the developers that make the games, the current system is probably the most fair you can get. Nobody is actually losing sales to trigger simulator or whatever other dumb poo poo. They're losing visibility, but even without the poo poo games there is just too much competition to have "my game is on steam" be your only source of visibility. And for those who have no budget or pull to get visibility elsewhere, at least you can throw the dice and hope your game gets organically discovered. Lumpy the Cook posted:I remember saying years and years ago that Greenlight was a horrible idea in general and that Valve needs to have a fully staffed team conducting quality control if they wanna go through with anything like that and the only response anyone could come back with was along the lines of “STFU more games = betterer” and, well, LOL Valve should have let the post-greenlight shitwave keep rising for longer than they did. When they floated out the proposal for a deposit fee to put games on steam, the internet hot take machine attacked it as unfair rather than welcoming it as a savior from the shitphoon. so then valve puts it at the minimum from their spread and it's pretty ineffective.
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Jun 2, 2018 19:24
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Klyith posted:As far as the developers that make the games, the current system is probably the most fair you can get. "Fair" doesn't mean "lets scammers do whatever with no real recourse for people that get scammed"
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Jun 2, 2018 19:46
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Klyith posted:Anything valve does is gonna gently caress over the legitimate livelihood of somebody. Only an incredible pollyanna would think a human review of all new games wouldn't crush some number of games with bad or mistaken judgements of quality. "You can't charge money for developers! That's classist gatekeeping!" And then everyone died in a deluge of raw sewage mixed with anime. Boy, I'm sure glad there were no barriers to entry.
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Jun 2, 2018 20:17
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It's weird because the SotS group seems to find proof of asset flips pretty quickly so you can tell what's a legit but bad game and a lovely asset flip. I don't know many legit games with 500+ achievements, let alone 13,000.
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Jun 2, 2018 22:06
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They just need to up the price to $500 instead of $100. Any developer who's serious about their actual non-asset flip real game will pay it. Might actually get noticed on Steam too since the poo poo devs will be priced out since they know they won't make that money back in sales.
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Jun 2, 2018 23:35
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:I don't know many legit games with 500+ achievements, let alone 13,000. Tales of Maj'eyal is definitely an outlier.
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Jun 2, 2018 23:47
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The Joe Man posted:They just need to up the price to $500 instead of $100. Any developer who's serious about their actual non-asset flip real game will pay it. Might actually get noticed on Steam too since the poo poo devs will be priced out since they know they won't make that money back in sales. I'm not sure there is a threshold where scammers will throw their hands up but hobbyists won't - there are plenty of "serious" developers who'd be shut out at $500.
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Jun 2, 2018 23:49
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overeager overeater posted:I'm not sure there is a threshold where scammers will throw their hands up but hobbyists won't - there are plenty of "serious" developers who'd be shut out at $500. Honestly, how much net profit can a zero-effort asset-flip game make? Four, five hundred at the absolute most.
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Jun 3, 2018 00:14
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Gynovore posted:Honestly, how much net profit can a zero-effort asset-flip game make? Four, five hundred at the absolute most. I don't know how the storefronts work but I assume once you buy the assets you can use them infinitely in your studio's projects and, despite "making new studios" to get on Steam, they don't have to buy a copy of the assets each and every time.
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Jun 3, 2018 00:18
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Gynovore posted:Honestly, how much net profit can a zero-effort asset-flip game make? Four, five hundred at the absolute most. Serious answer to a stupid question, your goal with something like that is a shotgun blast approach. Here's various ways you recoup from a project like that in a quick turnaround:
One game won't make $500 without some luck in this bottom tier, but if you're churning out one every few days (and I'm being wildly generous here), this is a quick, filthy path to profit you repeat on the regular when your company is blown up, leaving anyone with the cards holding the bag since they can't be sold now... But also leaving you free to start a new company with a name untainted by your old bullshit and repeat.
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Jun 3, 2018 00:23
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The Joe Man posted:They just need to up the price to $500 instead of $100. Any developer who's serious about their actual non-asset flip real game will pay it. Might actually get noticed on Steam too since the poo poo devs will be priced out since they know they won't make that money back in sales. Up the price, and add a cap on the number of achievements a game can have. Make it even less likely some dumb rear end will spend $.49 on it since they can't collect a billion steam dick achievements.
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Jun 3, 2018 00:34
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Tony Phillips posted:add a cap on the number of achievements a game can have There is a cap, it's 9999.
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Jun 3, 2018 01:29
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Well you see, there have been so many great games that have gotten onto steam because of the lowered entry barrier, such as -
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Jun 3, 2018 02:50
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Improbable Lobster posted:Well you see, there have been so many great games that have gotten onto steam because of the lowered entry barrier, such as Stardew Valley. It's pretty well known by now that everyone at Valve thought it was a game about doing boring poo poo nobody cared about that looked like garbage and would never sell, and they were absolutely gobsmacked when it passed Greenlight and went on to sell millions of copies. Never woulda passed a manual gatekeeping process by Valve staff. On the other hand, if we're comparing Steam Greenlight to Steam Direct, I'm not sure the latter has meaningfully improved things for anyone. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jun 3, 2018 |
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Jun 3, 2018 03:43
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Quicksilver6 posted:raw sewage mixed with anime. no need to repeat yourself
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Jun 3, 2018 04:06
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Voyager I posted:Think about the Steam Forums, and then imagine a similar gaggle of volunteer moderators only now they control whether or not a vendor gets to access the marketplace instead of whether an idiot gets to shitpost. They could start by having somebody read the name of the game before they hit the upload button.
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Jun 3, 2018 04:15
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Improbable Lobster posted:Well you see, there have been so many great games that have gotten onto steam because of the lowered entry barrier, such as Conversely, there have been so many great games that no one ever heard of because they were lost in the flood of garbage, such as
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Jun 3, 2018 04:20
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kirbysuperstar posted:Tales of Maj'eyal is definitely an outlier. It has something like 2-300 achievements in game. But it keeps track of which difficulties you've earned those achievements on, and there are 9 different possible combinations of difficulty settings. The solution when it was ported to Steam was to just create 9 copies of every achievement.
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Jun 3, 2018 04:32
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:It has something like 2-300 achievements in game. But it keeps track of which difficulties you've earned those achievements on, and there are 9 different possible combinations of difficulty settings. Yeah I can't really blame them on that one. Hell, 300 is still a hell of a lot.
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Jun 3, 2018 05:44
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Thuryl posted:Stardew Valley. It's pretty well known by now that everyone at Valve thought it was a game about doing boring poo poo nobody cared about that looked like garbage and would never sell, and they were absolutely gobsmacked when it passed Greenlight and went on to sell millions of copies. Never woulda passed a manual gatekeeping process by Valve staff.
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Jun 3, 2018 11:24
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Thuryl posted:Stardew Valley. It's pretty well known by now that everyone at Valve thought it was a game about doing boring poo poo nobody cared about that looked like garbage and would never sell, and they were absolutely gobsmacked when it passed Greenlight and went on to sell millions of copies. stardew valley didn't pass greenlight iirc, it was so overlooked by the born-failure of a system that they had to get published by chucklefish to bypass it
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Jun 3, 2018 11:32
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kirbysuperstar posted:Yeah I can't really blame them on that one. Hell, 300 is still a hell of a lot. Let me tell y’all about payday 2...
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Jun 3, 2018 15:20
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Nipponophile posted:Conversely, there have been so many great games that no one ever heard of because they were lost in the flood of garbage, such as Steamworld Dig 2 sold 20 times more copies on the Switch than on Steam. This is not uncommon.
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Jun 3, 2018 15:26
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Improbable Lobster posted:Steamworld Dig 2 sold 20 times more copies on the Switch than on Steam. This is not uncommon. get out of here with your facts, you're ruining the hot takes
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Jun 3, 2018 15:43
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FoolyCharged posted:It has close to a monopoly and doesn't actually give a poo poo about any of those people if it doesn't threaten it's bottom line. Technically in this context it's a monopsony
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Jun 3, 2018 16:23
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Improbable Lobster posted:Steamworld Dig 2 sold 20 times more copies on the Switch than on Steam. This is not uncommon. Entirely about the steam flood of garbage, nothing to do with the fact that there were 18 games, total, published on the Switch in 2nd half of September 2017. survivor bias is pretty neat. also, there were 28 games released for switch in just the last week of May 2018. the whole thing with the switch being virgin ground where a game can get visibility is over. that news got out and any indie that can make a port happen is moving there.
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Jun 3, 2018 16:50
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Klyith posted:Entirely about the steam flood of garbage, nothing to do with the fact that there were 18 games, total, published on the Switch in 2nd half of September 2017. A game selling worse on the platform where it got drowned out means that games don't sell worse on platforms where they get drowned out?
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Jun 3, 2018 17:00
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Improbable Lobster posted:A game selling worse on the platform where it got drowned out means that games don't sell worse on platforms where they get drowned out? you: Steamworld Dig 2 was drowned out by the flood of garbage. me: Steamworld Dig 2 was drowned out by Cuphead, Divinity 2, Dishonored: DOTO, and a half dozen other good games they were up against in their launch timeframe. (including some other indies that didn't do particularly great, like Ruiner & Hob.)
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Jun 3, 2018 17:45
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Klyith posted:you: Steamworld Dig 2 was drowned out by the flood of garbage. There was literally hundreds of trash games released at the same time you dipshit
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Jun 3, 2018 18:33
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Yeah but unless Steam's algorithm is working very differently for you than it is for me, those hundreds of games are generally not promoted on the front page or recommendations. If you judge the problem with discoverability using the baseline of 'consumers look at the list of ALL recently released Steam games' then yes it appears that Steam is overwhelmed with terrible titles but this is not a reasonable measure. e: it does look like the 'upcoming titles' section of the frontpage is filled with games that are low effort cashgrabs, but it does seem in this case the problem is 'some developers are optimizing their entries to game the algorithm'. One could interpret this as a 'too many bad games' problem, but it's a general issue with relying on the algorithm in cases where you don't have more concrete data to work off of (ie sales/reviews, not that these metrics don't have issues). FreeKillB fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jun 3, 2018 |
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Jun 3, 2018 18:41
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Improbable Lobster posted:There was literally hundreds of trash games released at the same time you dipshit all of which sold nothing and had zero effect on anything but the "all games" page. whereas the Front Page -- generally cited as driving the majority of impulse or undecided sales -- didn't highlight Steamworld Dig because some other games came out that got more attention. we just have a difference of opinion, but I feel confident in the economics that back up my end. Gresham's law (bad drives out good) only works on commodities in markets where there's information asymmetry, like used cars. video games have near-endless information available about exactly what you're buying. I just don't think there are that many people coming to steam looking for a unknown surprise from the complete list of possible games, so I don't believe the flood of garbage has a huge negative influence on sales. Now, if steam was a super-curated experience where only 10 games came out per week (like the nintendo e-shop in 2017), there would be more people looking through the full list. But that's what I mean by survivor bias: you see the 10 successful games and the ones that didn't even make it through curation are invisible. Between steam and the e-shop, I'll take steam. FreeKillB posted:e: it does look like the 'upcoming titles' section of the frontpage is filled with games that are low effort cashgrabs, but it does seem in this case the problem is 'some developers are optimizing their entries to game the algorithm'. One could interpret this as a 'too many bad games' problem, but it's a general issue with relying on the algorithm in cases where you don't have more concrete data to work off of (ie sales/reviews, not that these metrics don't have issues). iirc there was a thing I saw a while ago about how upcoming is hosed with because devs can change their launch day at will, so they'll game it by constantly resetting it to the next day. but valve doesn't police it strictly because only major publishers get to have pre-orders.
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Jun 3, 2018 20:51
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