I don't think this is so bad idea. I am kinda happy for it. I wasn't complete zombie who bite this games at first moment just for 5k idling achievements. All this "fake" games I own, I got for free on giveaways around or from russian websites for just 1-5 cents. My problem is that again, by Lord Gaben's decision, I got "punished". This morning I noticed that my game stats are changed. I had 967 perfect games and now I have 934. That mean that they wiped from my account 33 perfect games, which is really big number. That's pretty unfair, considering that I did this before this announcement. Anyway, does somebody know where I can find information about which 33 perfect games I lost. I need games names, I don't know that yet...
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I have 3 or 4 perfect games, I think? (ed: 5)
I'm not sure why people would care about 'perfect game' stats when so many people cheat their achievements on the games. There was one person on my friends list that used to do this but I guess he got bored with it, since I don't see it anymore.
But, some game that has been bundled or has had cheap regional pricing, usually the 'hardest' achievement will have at least 1 or 2%.
Some game like Starcrawlers, I'm able to have achievement with 0.07%, since it has yet been like this.
These games that I like that have been bundled, like King of Dragon Pass, when comparing achievement, I can basically look at this achievement that the least amt of people have, see it as something like 2%, then deduct 1.99% from all the rest to get actual values
If I saw someone with 967 perfect game on my friends list I would think they were some idiot for cheating achievements like this. Maybe you should have less
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Trust me I am not cheater, that's why all this bother me so much. If I have cheated (example with SAM as many others sadly do), I would just unlock in other 33 games all achievements and "fix" problem on that way. All what I did on this almost 7 years on Steam was those 967 perfect games. I am addicted to play only games which have achievements and I am not start any game if I don't plan to finish it 100%. I know that's retarded on some way, I don't deny that, but at least I did all of those on fair way!
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Why didn't they start with getting rid of green light...
I don't understand people's hate towards game collectors or achievement hunters. I don't go around telling people to use their stamps they collect cause they are just +1ing their collection and never shoving the shite on an envelope. People can do whatever they want with the games in their library.
The problem is the games. Slap a price on publishing and less of it will show up. The problem is the meme loving and money hungry "devs" not the consumers.
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It's the fault of the Stamp makers for producing the useless +1s just for money. Clearly the Post Office should start regulating the availability of such useless stamps by having the picture only appear if it's glued to an envelope and stamped.
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The post office shouldn't allow a Kappa stamp, Wal-Mart kid stamp, Logan Paul stamp, nyan cat stamp, flying pug stamp, bugged zombie stamp with your choice of custom stamps, poop in soup stamps, zup stamps etc.
People collect stamps and people don't blink an eye. Nobody starts making meme stamps for them but hell i can go to the shops and get a disney stamp if i want to. You'll get collectors in all walks of life. ITS THEIR MONEY. ITS THEIR COLLECTION. ITS THEIR LIFE. It's not up to you, me or anyone else to tell them to play their games or stop buying to +1.
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Exactly! Forget about the money spent. Just rip them off and tell them it clutters the shop! Remember kids, use your stamps and we won't hate you!
Nobody tell anyone about my card collection that I don't play with D: THE HORROR!
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Personally my problem is not the collectors, but the effect of the collectors on my experience of reality. By your stamps example - imagine my country - let's say we have joke-stamps for 1 HUF ( 1€=~300HUF) but we have hundreds and hundreds of them. And to buy a proper stamp for my letter I need 100-200 HUF minimum in stamps. And as great Valve's the post office's system is, the only way to buy a stamp is to scroll through a list with stamps of incrementally higher values. A minute or two later, I have what I want. It would have taken 5 seconds without the "memes" clogging up the system.
( and this is far from a joke, as on Steam marketplace if I want to look for all the cards for a specific game, I have to scroll through all the games that have a separate inventory, to find the little, irrelevant listing "Steam" on it, that contains ALL the remaining games with cards and such. I still don't know why they don't pin Steam as the first item on that list :D )
And while Steam doesn't offer me filters based on price (it's problematic, have played great 1$ games) and developers I just don't want to use Steam as a storefront. It's a horrible experience to look through genres and new releases, I get my info from sites (PCGamer, RockPaperShotgun and such), podcasts and/or curators or some more pro-experiment friends (plus SG giveaways and recommendations).
I guess it's not my problem how shitty the Steam selection is if I don't use Steam itself for browsing because of how shit the selection is, but it makes me kinda unhappy that it feels further and further from the point, where I would actively use it.
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I kind of said to FallenKal what I'd say to you and you be kind of covered it! I think with any big store you are going to have to browse a little to get to what you want, sure steam is extreme... its just word of mouth and looking at other sources to find what you may enjoy!
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Yeah, this.
All this crap on steam from asset flips, 100% hoarders, cards idlers, +5000k in 5 min achievements hoarders and so on makes it impossible for normal people to find anything.
Hoarder doesn't care, as they will buy every possible piece of crap when it's cheap enough. And then open Idle Master or Astats to hoard. And normal customer have storefront that's impossible to use.
I'd also be in favor of stiff price mark. But I'd set it to <10$. To remove those 35 THOUSANDS crap games. As I will learn about gems like Pony Island from other sources and can buy them directly.
Number of games on steam released every year rise exponentially. I'm sure that in the span of 3 years between 2014 and 2017 devs didn't came up with idea for 12k OK-quality games:
2012 - 1020
2013 - 1350
2014 - 2980
2015 - 4840
2016 - 8570
2017 - 14800
2018 - 30000 (??)
I hope those new devs storefronts will work nicely, so I will browse only them and not have to swim in all this waste on main store front.
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I don't hate collectors or "fake" achievement hunters, the problem is those people encourage others to make more assist flips for quick cash. And those of us who don't care about that have to use the same store which gets filled with more and more trash because of it. So for us non-collectors it gets harder and harder to find legitimate games.
Let's say for example that there are people creating fake stamps that you can't use to post a letter, which are sold at the same store. Some people just want to post a letter and don't want to sort through all the fake stamps to find a real one. So the major problem is that both types of people have to use the same store.
I don't really care that much honestly, and I highly doubt this will have much impact. Though I do believe removing these games would improve the store.
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You'll never stop it, there are money grabbers everywhere in every walk of life. I'm not a game collector at all because I never buy a game to plus one however I did buy a few Zup games for the achievement showcase but it turned out it was a very fun game. There are so many ways to find good legitimate games such as following reviewers, curators or word of mouth from your friends.
Its like a car boot sale, you have to look around the trash to find the good stuff. I don't walk into a clothes shop and see everything I like, I browse the store and pick up what I like!
I say get rid of greenlight and bump up the fee for releasing games. There is only so much that you can do. Worst comes to worse, don't use steam to buy games! Use other stores such as humble, indie gala, gog etc.
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I full heartily agree with you that people will always find ways to abuse the system, unless Valve makes a serious effort I don't think much will change, hence why I don't care much. As long as a game is playable and enjoyable to some people it doesn't matter much to me, I care more about the asset flips/shovelware that are obvious cashgrabs. But I don't have friends QQ
I would love a store that only has things I like :D
You're absolutely right, but anything that hurts Valve is fine with me since they're one of the greediest and most selfish companies that I know.
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yeah, this.
not that i wasn't into the +1 thing myself, but stopped many months ago, after it became clear what was going on now that these junk games weren't automatically getting the trading cards and still being added in mass quantity (with some help from gogobundle, bunchofkeys, and 90% off coupons pre-change)
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The problem is always the customer, if there is no demand for a shitty product the devs wouldn't have a reason to create a shitty product.
And yes, it is everyones own choice to collect shitty products, but at the same time it is everyone elses choice to hate on those people.
Creating this demand on shitty product at the very least impacts everyone else who tries to browse the steam store looking for good products, so that gives them a reason to hate.
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Fair enough, I just think time is better spent not caring so much about other people's purchases. I've never had an issue browsing the store for new games. Like ever so I don't understand why people are complaining. At the very least the friend activity helps me a lot seeing games I miss as we share common interest in genres so I find a lot that way.
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Poor example. Stamps have actual monetary value to other collectors of stamps, whether or not the collector ever trades or sells them.
Steam games have zero value to anyone but the person who owns them (except for gift copies of games, which are becoming extinct).
In fact, comparing any item that can be physically or digitally exchanged to collecting games on Steam is a poor example.
Most stamp collectors don't just go buying "any old stamp" to +1 their stamp collection. They tend to buy stamps that are either already valuable or desired, or that they speculate will be valued or desirable. You don't find trash stamps at a stamp collector's convention. In fact, most collectors of anything are looking for quality, desirability, and projected value.
Finally, those stamp collectors - you know, the ones who are only looking for valuable or possibly valuable stamps - they don't affect your stamp buying experience at all, because any stamps you'd buy to put on your envelope all cost the same price, regardless of the quality or topic of the picture on them.
And telling people to shop elsewhere for games - it's a workaround or band-aid and indicative of the problem itself - and not the solution.
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Well I didn't once say people collect games, or really anything for that matter for the monetary value. I'm saying people should be able to collect anything despite the intended use for said thing. For example, collecting stamps without sending letters, collecting coins without spending them or collecting stickers without sticking them. It doesn't matter whether it's a low or high value collection if someone is content with the scale, looks or monetary value of any collection then that's fulfilling their happiness.
For example, I collect a few things... Pokemon cards for monetary value and looks however I also collect funk pops which are known for being cheap quality and mostly worth the same or less for the retail price but I collect them because I like the look of them. They stay in the box and sit there for me to look at. Kind of like trash games. People buy the +1 to look at the scale of their collection not to hopefully sell their account or whatever people "shouod" do with a collection. Collectors collect or many different reasons therefore collecting is subjective to each individual.
I say that because I feel like there is no solution unless you get rid of all indie games because what is the trash? Another man's trash is another man's treasure. Its all subjective.
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People buy the +1 to look at the scale of their collection
To look at a single number on their Steam profile, and that's fine, but the rest of us shouldn't be "expected" (as you seem to believe we should, to the point of telling people "well, you can shop elsewhere then") to put up with a shit-filled Steam store because of those people and their incessant desire to add one more number (and that's all it really is) to their collection. As much as you seem to believe they should be allowed (and left alone) to do so, the rest of us should be allowed to express discontent with the effect they're having on our experience.
As I clearly stated, and holds true for the most part, collectors of other items look for quality, not quantity.
And you've used yet another poor example, which serves to make my point --
They stay in the box and sit there for me to look at.
You leave them in their box to preserve their quality, so it doesn't decrease. You wouldn't pick up and collect a ratty torn one covered in dirt that you found in the street, run over by cars and pissed on by the neighbor's dog. Steam collectors won't care, because they're not buying the game to look at the game itself, just the +1 it creates on their Steam profile. It's the rest of us that end up sifting through 5000 piss-covered "Pop dolls" to find the nice ones.
TLDR: The "non-collector's" purchases don't affect the "collector's" experience at all, but the collectors' purchasing habits do have an effect on the non-collector's experience when dealing with the Steam store (and now even bundle sites).
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I still can't understand why do some people feel the need to look at every possible game there is just to buy the ones they want. They don't do that for anything else they might buy, but games are for some reason the holy exception where everything sold must be something they want or even like. 90%+ of games have always been something I would never want for anything else than +1 or cards, but I've solved this problem by mainly looking at games I would want.
True collectors value the items just for the items, not their potential worth, like people collecting bottle caps. Unless they are hoping they can buy games with them once again. :)
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They don't do that for anything else they might buy
But you also don't walk onto a car lot with 15,000 brands of cars or into a store with 15,000 brands (and quality) of toilet tissue, all of which are there simply because there is someone out there who will buy it. The shit manufacturers are weeded out by selection, and that's what Valve is trying to do with their current project.
True collector's value the items just for the items
You said it yourself. They value the items, not how many of them they have. People collecting bottle caps don't collect any old rusty one they find in the gutter. Believe it or not, they too look for quality.
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Exactly my point. If you want to buy a car, first you research online about different cars to find suitable ones. Then you search online for good deals for them. You don't just look at every possible car from A to Z do you? Or buy one from the honest car salesman next door whose cars have only been driven by old grandmas to church on Sundays.
The value of the items is multiple of the value of 1 item, so obviously having more is better. They don't want 1000 of the same best quality cap, having 1000 single gaps makes it a much better collection.
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I'll repeat myself --
When shopping for a car or toilet tissue, the shit manufacturers are already weeded out for you by the consumer, and that's exactly what Valve is doing with this recent change.
The Steam collector is never going to drive the car or wipe their ass, so they don't care what quality it is.
having 1000 single gaps makes it a much better collection.
And they still won't pick up any shit and rust-covered bottle cap off the street just to add one more to their collection. There's always the quality factor.
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No they are not weeded in any way. Stores are full of shitty (pun intended) toilet paper for example that no sane person should ever buy. The kind that more resembles sandpaper than anything you want to wipe sensitive parts with. But do I need to stare at the horrible selection of them? Nope, I just skip them and buy the best brand my ass loves.
For cars every manufacturer makes crap I don't want, so should I start demanding no cars are sold anywhere visible because I don't personally want them? Or start getting bothered by others that collect junk cars in their yards?
They might pick that one if they don't have a better quality one. To anyone not collecting bottle caps all of them have the same value of being junk metal, nothing more. Any other worth is purely imagined by the collector and maybe enforced by others with similar collections you can compare yours to. "I have 9001 different caps and you only have 9000, I win"
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Ah, one thing I (at first, intentionally) neglected to mention, but only because I was waiting for this sort of response.
When you purchase a car, toilet paper, a can of tuna, a stamp or even a bottle with a cap on it or a POP doll to collect, they've already undergone a rigorous regimen of quality control measures - to be sure they meet particular standards for purchase. There's already been whole groups and companies and assembly lines of people deciding what should be available for you to purchase.
Any time you go shopping for -- well, pretty much anything -- there's a bare minimum quality standard that must be met before a product is allowed to be legally sold.
Bottle cap collectors, regardless of the logic behind their collecting, don't skew the quality of bottle caps downward in any respect.
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And that bare minimum quality still allows selling worthless crap that breaks after or even before first use and if not, then it's quite useless for the task you bought it for. Such junk is produced by the metric hyperton in China&co every day and sold everywhere. People buy it for pennies and then throw in the trash when it's worth exactly the price they paid. That's an actual problem compared to having some extra bits on Steam servers.
It also allows selling sugary stuff with no nutritional value causing massive health problems. Some people just love to collect body fat. And so on and on, if you believe every other store except Steam is filled with only quality products, you really should visit the real world :)
Edit: it also allows selling nothing at all https://www.amazon.com/Jay-JA0027-Gift-of-Nothing/dp/B019HDSCPU/
Edit2: https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Mousse-Liquid-Lawn-System/product-reviews/B00LMFJ8KA/ref=reviewerType=all_reviews
Any item with blazing reviews like "Garbage. Do not buy! Doesn't work and completely broke apart with 1st use." obviously gets instantly removed from any store and not be still sold there 2 years later, right?
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Well no pop caps are not sealed and I've removed them from their boxes to look at. Like I said they don't hold any value. A lot of people do not collect to sell they collect to have many if not all of the things.
I will say it again. Another man's trash is another man's treasure. You cannot objectively remove "trash" from a store if other people like and buy it. You would have to remove all games from the store. There is a demand for certain games so you need to suck it up and let it happen. It's life and business for you.
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Thing is, people aren't liking and buying it from the Steam store. They're buying it for 5 cents a copy from cheap shit bundle sites like GoGo and Otaku and Steamground because none of them would ever pay the retail price for that trash.
And you (as expected) avoided the most important thing I said. You wouldn't pick up some ratty old run over and pissed on Pop doll off the street to "collect" it. That's what these Steam "collectors" (though their habits are more akin to hoarding than actual collecting) do. They'll pick up any ratty old half assed "game" for a +1.
And no, we most definitely do NOT have to "suck it up and let it happen." That's where you're dead wrong.
And it looks like Steam is starting to agree.
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This is going no where. You are talking about pissed on pop cap figures...I give up.
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Nobody blames the customers.
Yet Steam doesn't want to do the ACTUAL sollution since that would require manpower... and we all know hiring actual people and actual human interaction is EVIL, so they rather use their mechanical algorithms to take care of the problem.
And then adjust for the next exploit. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.
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How would you objectively remove trash though? What if people enjoy these games? Who's choice is it to choose what goes on the store and what doesn't? It's business. If it's bad the game will not sell!
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You are talking about a copyright issue here which is illegal.
Selling "trash" games such as smack trumps ass simulator with 500 achievements is supply and demand, people want to showcase funny games and have a giggle for 30 minutes while they get 100% achievements. Its business and people eat that trash up. People making games are out to make money so they will do it at every chance they get. Its the world we live in. If people buy these games then why would you remove them? Of course, if it steals somebody's intellectual property then sure that is law breaking but making a silly game that people buy is not illegal.
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Yes, and that's exactly the type of content Valve should block, but they don't.
Your Trump game would pass this since it's not doing the asset flip/non-working/stealing content route... that is the most common kind on Steam right now. Hence people asking for action. Instead Steam does this.
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https://steamcommunity.com/groups/hotanimeladies/curation/app/857440/
It's even recommended by a curator, so I guess I must buy it now even if they can't come up with family safe card art.
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I don't understand how valve isn't able to almost immediately detect fake games and delete the relationship with developer.
There's maximum like.. 15 games released per day on steam. How much would it cost to employ one freaking person to go through these and then delete the fake ones?
Add a clause in terms of service so valve gets to keep the listing fee regardless and it should pay for itself.
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Thing is: where do you draw the line? And that is the problem.
Plenty of these "trash games" aren't actually trash, they're just cheap mini games.
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I'm for it... But that game? Of all games to do this with?
It looks like it actually had at least some amount of effort put into it.
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even Call of Duty has it :P
https://store.steampowered.com/app/115300/Call_of_Duty_Modern_Warfare_3/
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I don't get this. Someone already posted this as "goodbye to achievement spam" but I fail to see how this will curb the achievement spam. If someone wants a game with 6k+ achievements on the store, it will be there as long as X amount of people want those achievements. So, for example Zup! series with their spam are safe because they're actually nice games underneath all that trash. So are probably most anime style spasm games assumption based purely on the "waifu!" and "b00bs <3" style comments I've seen on them.
In my opinion this looks like its going to hit hard on small indie games. They're hard pressed as it is to even get the cards in some reasonable time after release. Being a fan and a possible maker of such titles my first reaction to the news was pure sadness.
Valve should put some effort in cleaning the store based on reports it gets, actually curating the content etc. But instead they put in arbitrary algorithms that will hurt the honest small devs more.
Of course I could be wrong and misunderstand something but as it is looking now, not happy news.
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It's just cards. If your game is worth it, people will buy it with or without cards - and then you basically get the option to have cards anyways because your game is decent enough.
If your game is so bad that even Valve bans it, then you should rethink your approach, no?
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"quality" is very subjective in my opinion. Seen plenty of devs complain about their lack of sales, and at the same time they basically do everything wrong one might could do wrong, besides having also no quality whatsoever themself.
Those trash games aren't really a problem, or do you think good apps won't see any sales on googles appstore i.e.?
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Absolutely agree with the latter. Valve took quite some time... :(
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i've seen the same thing with Fractured Lands i've seen a message saying there won't be any achievements or trading card and some of the gameplay won't be counted in the leaderboard too.
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How is this a real game from the series and WTF is the itemstore?
https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/603750/browse/?filter=all
"We'll remove every one of your games except one but we'll make it up to you by selling 80 euro items for your game"
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I still don't get how GOOD-QUALITY indie games will be affected
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Quite a lot of indie devs simply don't have the budget for marketing, and even those who do have reported that steam sales have been going down, and have stated that the responsible thing to do, if they want to keep the company running, is to no longer view Steam as their primary platform, but as a secondary one, focusing more on platforms like the Switch. Heck, even some publishers have echoed this sentiment, with Paradox being quite vocal about it (Paradox is in no risk of going under, but they've expressed major concerns about the long-term health of steam and have diversified as they no longer feel like Steam is a "safe bet").
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You can market your awesome indie game with giveaways, bundles, streamers etc viral marketing, all of this costing near to nothing. If you have to sponsor some big streamer a bit to play it, you can balance it out with income from bundles. The game just actually needs to be good for most people to make it, not a cult niche classic loved deeply by the 100 who ever bought or even heard about it.
Nintendo Switch? If your games are the same on a tiny pleb console than they are on a master race computer, maybe you should stick to making mobile games for iCrap with micropayments, that's where the real money is. :P
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We've seen time and time again how good games (and not just cult niche games) gets overlooked, and bad games sell well. That's hardly a new thing, it's been like that since the dawn of gaming. Bundling is a tricky one,as one the one hand you give your game exposure, on the other hand you're also losing out on potential customers who might have bought it full price. Same with giveaways (unless they have the opposite effect of making people think your game is a cheapo no effort game, like so many other games that gets given away fro free by devs to promote them) And as for sponsoring streamers, that will only reach a relatively small portion of the potential player-base to begin with, and if a streamer is big enough to have reach, you're battling with many other games for attention from the streamer.
I'm not sure how serious your last comment is, if you're actually the "Gra! PC master race good, consoles bad" kind of person, or if you're just trying to be silly. But if developers of quality games like the Steamworld series, Shovel knight & Stardew valley are expressing concerns about steam, and saying that other platforms are serving them better, and if publishers like Paradox are losing faith in Steam, that should be seen as a bad sign.
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Just like french cuisine and opera are enjoyed by very few while fast food and pop music sell the most, masses are always totally wrong according to an elitist minority. This is just how the world works, not specific to gaming. Just because you think some game is very good it doesn't mean the masses will rush to buy it even if every bad game gets removed from Steam. You still need to market it somehow finding the balance between giving too much and getting too little.
The games consoles have are just not something I've wanted to play and their controllers are horrible compared to playing with keyboard and mouse. Also you can't do anything else with one while a PC is one-in-all solution. Other than that I don't have anything against them and I thought the :P already implied not being that serious about it. At least they are not as horrible as iCraps.
I thought Steam was a horrible platform back when I bought Civ 5 GOTY on a DVD for -60% vs Steam price, but of course the disc only had a Steam installer on it, so here we are. I still think it's a crappy one, but for other reasons than it being an open marketplace for game devs. I think it should be compared to market square where everyone who reserved a table is allowed to sell what they want, not Whole Foods where everything is organic and hand picked(at least that's how it seems based on overseas entertainment).
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But that's not really the situation I was talking about. I'm not talking about the niche darlings, like The Void. But just genuinely good games that are liked by the people who actually play it, but are for one reason or another overlooked. Not because they're niche, but because they don't get the traction needed. Compare SimCity (2013) to Cities: Skylines, two similar games, one generally considered a so-so game at best, even by the people who bought it, and panned by critics, and one considered to be one of the greatest city builds of all time, and well received by critics. So we are comparing apples to apples here. This is repeated all over the place. Quality is not the most important factor in selling games, if it was then Rise of the Robots would not have sold like hotcakes.
And yet, despite their "inferiority", we're seeing a migration again towards the consoles, after having seen a migration to PC for a while. And we're seeing publishers looking elsewhere than steam to sell their games.
And the quality is subjective argument can only be used so far. You might want hamburgers and I want escargot. Both of those are valid things to like. But if someone drowned our food in salt and then burnt it to a crisp we would both be unhappy with it.And if you've got a market where 90% of the things are salt covered pieces of coal then that is going to look bad for the market, even worse if you some of that comes in nice boxes that makes it hard to know that you're buying a salt covered piece of coal, and it is going to make the serious actors less keen on doing business on that market.
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Which one is which? If Sim City is the bad one, I would assume it sells mostly because it has been selling since Amiga days and it has done its marketing already. Just like the annual EA sports games that are nothing but the same game with different textures. Nobody buys them because they are the best ever but because it's a well known brand that they have played before. For a small indie dev giving out the game might help in selling later parts/games, since people who got it for free are spreading word of mouth and buy the next one. Of course there isn't any sure way to ensure sales, but blaming other products for the lack of sales for yours just sounds bit silly to me.
What we are actually seeing is migration to mobile crap devices from anything that's actually useful. Because the majority doesn't want good games or an usable device, they want to play Farmville on Facebook while taking selfies.
It's not the food we ordered that gets the treatment, the restaurant just happens to serve such cuisine because they have demand for it. Now is the reason why snails aren't selling a) nobody but silly French like slimy things found under rocks or b) their sales are ruined by the same menu having tar flavored salt is the question here. You can also just use a minute researching such things, with a quick google translate "sel aromatisé au goudron" becomes yuck, not yum. Just like you can find gameplay videos, reviews etc about games to check before you buy. Or if no information can be found about the game because nobody plays it, take a leap of faith and refund it an hour later. I haven't ever been forced in any way to buy a game that I would hate, have you?
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Which one is which? If Sim City is the bad one, I would assume it sells mostly because it has been selling since Amiga days and it has done its marketing already.
But it does show that quality is not really the determining factor for sales in many cases. If it was, Rise of the Robots would never have sold well.
For a small indie dev giving out the game might help in selling later parts/games, since people who got it for free are spreading word of mouth and buy the next one.
If it actually can survive poor sales of their first game. Which many indie devs can't. Making games is not cheap, and even indie titles can cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of $. Braid is one of the games where the dev has made things public, and it's a relatively high production value indie, but it cost $200 000 to make.
What we are actually seeing is migration to mobile crap devices from anything that's actually useful. Because the majority doesn't want good games or an usable device, they want to play Farmville on Facebook while taking selfies.
Mobile actually has some genuinely good games. Apart from ports of PC games like Panzer Corps & Baldur's Gate, it's also got some nice little "exclusives" like Populus Romanus. The touch screen interface works really well for turnbased strategy, better than mouse & keyboard in some regards (it's faster for one). But how do you find the good games among the sea of crap? Well I've given up on that, not worth my time. And plenty of devs have just given up on trying to make good games for it, because getting noticed is nigh impossible among the sea of Clash of Clans clones and low effort garbage. The market has pretty much been killed by it. Facebook games are not really "the big thing" anymore either, you're really a few years out of date with your examples :P
The mobile migration happened a long time ago though, and it's hardly an ongoing thing. Now we're seeing good devs move from PC to console.
As for the final paragraph, you missed my point entirely. The point I was making was that finding quality in that marketplace was getting harder, not that escargot not being something people would want. And at some point people will give up on browsing the marketplace. If they know exactly what they want and where it is, fine, they can go there and buy their escargot or their hamburger. And clearly people want those escargot and hamburgers, as they buy them. it's just that because one market place is hard to navigate and filled with garbage, they chose to buy their stuff elsewhere. Which is what we've seen with people buying their games on other platforms than steam. For the developers it then does not make as much sense to focus on Steam or PC as their primary platform, as that's not where people buy their games anymore.
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So we agree on that quality on its own isn't enough to sell anything? Marketing in some way is needed, not just making your product available. And even if everything below some water drawn quality line gets removed, 90% of people would keep on buying the worst quality 90%, just ask Sturgeon.
The harsh reality of capitalism is that if nobody buys your product it wasn't worth to make it to begin with. Investing $200k to make something you like doesn't mean anyone owes you that much. It was your choice to make a bet with the money that can either pay off or then not, just like any business investment. You can invest $200k to make the best ever hand crafted design paperclips, but everyone will still keep on buying the mass produced crap you can import from China for pennies per metric ton.
Touch interface is horrible, slow and inaccurate, nothing better about it. I know kids left Facebook years ago when their grandparents started joining in, but there aren't crappy games on Instagram, Snapchat or whatever the trendy social BS of the day is (or are there?) so had to use that one as an example to make fun of.
I didn't miss a point, I just totally disagree with it. It has always been very silly to look at everything imagining that it's worth to buy. It's like being a vegan and going to a restaurant and instead of looking at veggie dishes, you complain that it's impossible to find them because there are also meat dishes on the menu. I gave up browsing Steam store the moment I noticed 90%+ of everything is crap I don't want, like Frames Per Second games that are really just reaction tests and GPU ads, not real games of any sort. The solution really is to stop looking at everything, not waiting for someone else to remove everything you don't like. Just like finding a place to eat in a new city, you don't go visit every restaurant and check their menus one by one, instead you go online to look at reviews.
Amazon is a fine example of this and Steam wants to become a huge digital marketplace like them, not a small store that only sells couple items they think are the best and couple hipsters come to buy. Arguments like yours sound to me like "I can't find anything I want from Amazon because there are products like https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Mousse-Liquid-Lawn-System/product-reviews/B00LMFJ8KA/ref=reviewerType=all_reviews polluting the list of hundreds of millions of items". For every other product you might buy, you look at alternatives, read reviews etc do research on your own before choosing the one that looks best for you. But for games it's apparenly needed that some Official Bureau of Approved Gaming allows anyone to only sell games that fit some imaginary guidelines. And no, 90% of games on Steam aren't broken stuff with no .exes etc, more like 0.00009%. At least it looks to me like it's always the same couple publishers/devs that people talk about and it's trivial to at least me to just ignore them.
Edit: also the real reason why big publishers want to leave Steam to make their own launchers and platforms nobody wants to use is the 30% of $$$ that Steam takes, not some imagined lack of quality of other games sold there.
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I take a calculated guess that Valve\Steam doesn't like people anymore that +1 for game count and those that hoard a lot of specific games that gives them such a huge and easy amount of perfect games and gives them hundreds of thousands of achievements just by idling, opening and closing games. ^^
But no worries they still love anyone's money! :O
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Interesting how Valve markets the hell out of the listed game now... It even got a storefront banner.
Buuuut... wont the actual "Steam is learning" message allow people to learn the requirements over time ruining the 'secret' that was supposed to protect abuse?
Anyway, all for the achievement spam games being handled, but for love's sake Valve, just hire some people. Ban asset flips, ban assets sold straight from the unity store, ban missing .exe's. Stop trusting machines 100%
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That's the funniest assumption of all, Valve ever hiring more people and paying them salary :P
Instead they will lay off half of the current staff now that they can just ignore complains about bad games, since it's already handled by the almighty algorithm. Just like they handled the problem of having to support scammed noobs by punishing everyone else with silly restrictions.
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The store decides what they stock. Blame lies with Valve.
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/400940/Budget_Cuts/
Why has the restriction been lifted from this title, what interactions were deemed adequate for it to be removed form the naughty list?
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Strange as this thread was about that game I thought. (eg it had restrictions placed on it as it was shown to be listed as Steam is learning about this game)
So it's just an x amount of reviews metric and not whether the game is any good.
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It's the same metric that decides when card drops get enabled. Not exactly sure how it works, but number of reviews is one part, number of copies sold is another. and AFAIK if you're one of the bigger/trusted publishers you don't have to deal with it at all.
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Yep, had a run-in with that already with one of my last giveaways. Fortunately the winner had a public profile, and the missing game did show up in his/her library there.
But at the very least, it's another hurdle to clear when creating a giveaway :/ Well, if you care about following the site rules at least
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This is just leading to a flood of even more dodgy games .
Since some of these russian actors have seen a drop in income from the trading card change ,they've since decided to throw more at the fan in the hope some will stick.
That way they can continue to make a profit.
Point is proven by the huge number of trash bundles we are seeing these days.
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quality is subjective, what one person things is crap, another may think is a treasure.. If games have a reason to buy them, people will buy them..
whether it be for the +1, or the cards, or the achievements or the meme factor or any other number of factors..
I've said for a while now if people didn't buy those achievement idler games, they wouldn't get made anymore..
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people are going to find ways to get people on steam to buy their cheap easily made games.. Valve is taking steps to help but I get the idea they don't want to blow everything up immediately..
Which is why they removed the easily made cheapo card games, by putting the 2 hours neccesary before cards start to drop,, and not letting cards get included unless users interact with the game for X amount of hours.. and for Y % of gamers..
They restricted Achievements to 5000 instead of unlimited like it used to be..
Personally should restrict achievements to 100 with an extra 25 per DLC..
It'll take time but eventually things will sort themselves out, until as the OP said, asset flippers find the next big thing to lure money from wallets..
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/400940/Budget_Cuts/
Steam is still learning about this game.
Until more players have interacted with it, some features will be restricted:
Trading cards will not be available and the number of achievements is limited
Achievements won't contribute to global achievement count, and cannot be shown in a Steam Profile's Achievement Showcase
The game itself won't contribute to an account's game library count, and cannot be shown in a Steam Profile's Game Collector Showcase
Thoughts?
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