7 years ago

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I voted 21 - 30 but that's more wishful thinking than an informed opinion. From the looks of the other comments it seems to me that many are conflating their personal taste with bad games though.

7 years ago
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Well, that is the only measurement of a bad game. Even low-rated games have their own audience who play and enjoy them, just like how high-rated games have people who'd have more fun playing football with a spiked ball.

7 years ago
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If that were the case you could argue that there's only bad games on steam, or for that matter, bad games in general. Also you could argue there are only good, or even great, games in existence but that would in my opinion render the concept of good or bad completely useless.

7 years ago
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One just doesn't give a percentage of an opinion :)) :V ... How can I define "bad".
Think about it what is good for me may be bad for you and I am not talking about games but in general so my vote is none of the above :D have a good day .

7 years ago
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7 years ago
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We'll never know since there's too much shit to get through and it keeps dropping.

My guesstimation would be around 60 to 70 percent and rapidly rising ;_;.

7 years ago
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View attached image.
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7 years ago
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90% of everything is crap... But we are talking about steam here, so 99%...

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7 years ago
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Thanks for this! It's nice and concise. It's good to have some decent numerical proof that it's really not all fire and pitchforks.
Though - does that also count games that have only three or four reviews? Those types don't generally get a named rating on their store page yet.

7 years ago
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7 years ago
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Interesting poll and interesting results. Did you make it because of TotalBiscuit and Jim Sterling recently visiting Valve?

It's too subjective as was mentioned numerous times above, but I voted for 61-70%. Maybe even 51-60%. And yes, the amount of "bad" games is terrible if you think about absolute numbers, but I think everything is not as bad as the results of poll show.

My approximation is simple. Besides using common sense and thinking of different types of games from different times - check community wishlist. Most of the games there are at least mediocre if not good. Checking page 10 I see games like A Story About My Uncle, Homeworld, 80 Days, Assassins Creed, Super Meat Boy and many other decent titles. That's ~1000 games most of which are pretty decent and being on many wishlists for quality/fun/interest reasons. There can be some "troll" games and Bad Rats, but not that many of them. Quick look at not so good games on that page - Shower With Your Dad (just a troll game, but still it's not bad, as it's well playable, working and does what's expected from it; etc, etc it seems so from reviews, didn't play it myself), Witcher Adventure Game (played this one, it has many flaws, but it's still a nice game to play sometimes; it's mediocre, yes, but not BAD). Let's go farther. Page 20. Fallout, Prince of Persia, Papo and Yo.... Still don't see many of obviously bad games. More mediocre ones though. That's ~2000 games - some missed bad ones - DLCs. Page 30 (3000 games) - The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human (has many problems, but amazing game in its class), some not so good HOGs, many unknown titles for me, randomly checking some store pages they even have good review ratings). Page 40 - still don't see many obviously bad titles, though I see some nice ones. So let's assume that's the moment after which mostly bad games go (even though it's not true; if you go too far in community wishlist a lot of DLCs start to appear which we should exclude). Still there will be good games among less wishlisted ones. One should also remember that there are many good games which can just be already in many libraries. There are hidden gems also...

So by such rough approximation let's say that there are 4000 games which are definitely not bad, at least mediocre. That's already ~30% of NOT BAD games.

I wrote too much :(

7 years ago*
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7 years ago
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Ok, then you might find this interesting. And yeah, "not interesting" ones are a completely different thing.

Also, no such thing as writing too much.

I'll rephrase then. More than I expected to write and not as structured as I wanted to :)

7 years ago
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This fits pretty nicely with the stats I have based on my own game playing (posted below). There's that famous quote that 90% of everything is crap, and I do find that the top 10% or so is the best bit. But I think it's fair to say that the top tier of the "crap" still appeals to people who enjoy that type of media.

7 years ago
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Based on my own stats from trying out my backlog, across 2464 played games (out of the 3052 I own, so there hasn't been any particular cherry picking):

120 games are no longer categorized because I've beaten them. These skew the stats a bit towards good games, but I don't want to figure out how much right now, so I'm just going to exclude them and use 2344 to calculate percentages. There are quite a few bad games in here as well - just last night I blew through four terrible games because they were each less than an hour long and had achievements.

217 games are really good - 9.26%. These are games that I will play again at some point and intend to finish as soon as I'm done with the sorting.

555 games are decent - 23.68%. These are games that I'm willing to play again, either if I get in the mood for their genres or I just get bored.

1558 games are garbage - 66.47%. I won't play these games again, at least not for fun. Some of them are just mediocre games from genres I hate, but considering "bad" is an opinion, I'm not going to go back and say "well these X games might be fun if you like RTS more than me". The really good RTS games made it into the "decent" number anyway.

14 games are unplayable - 0.60%. These games literally do not work, either thanks to dead servers or just incompatibilities with modern operating systems.

In other words, about 2/3 of the games on Steam are bad, based on a sample that is roughly 17% of the games on Steam (using SteamSpy's 13725 game count).

7 years ago*
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There are exactly 72 bad games on Steam at all times. Whenever a new bad game comes out, an older bad game gets removed from Steam, or gets patched and becomes good. You can see a scientific proof here.

7 years ago
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I haven't played all of them, so I can't say.
I will say there are at least 5 bad ones.

7 years ago
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Curios to know, which ones?

7 years ago*
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Heh, I'll never tell. My taste is weird.

7 years ago
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50% in my opinion.

7 years ago
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Considering that "only" about 33% of my 3304 games have a positive review rating of 75% or above, I'd say around 66%.

7 years ago
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I originally voted 50-60% but that seems way too harsh. A lot of games are merely average, mediocre, or uninteresting.

7 years ago
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Im pretty forgiving with games, so as long as it runs and isnt a glitchy mess, Ill probably find something I like about it. That said, probably a solid 25-30% of the indie horror games Ive tried out lately are so glitchy its impossible to play, assuming I dont get dumped to desktop soon as I start it up. So... based of that, Id say probably 30% of the games on Steam are junk.

7 years ago
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7 years ago
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30% Tops.

7 years ago
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It's a shame that a game like Dhux's Scar (La cicatriz de Dhux), isn't on Steam, that is one hell of a game.

7 years ago
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I answered 81-90% - skip to below list for why I don't mind that too much....

I think what's more relevant is the number of games that are just not a game for these reasons:

  1. Asset flip, obviously - with basically no effort, just a Unity off the shelf.
  2. Totally, absolutely broken games. I have 3(IIRC); I did look quickly, but no, I can't name them right now, that just don't work. Not just for me, for anyone. CTD from the start option from menu or similar.
  3. Almost as broken games - ones that basically crash so frequently that you cannot play them; even if you were Mother Theresa, during Lent, in earshot of Jesus, you'd lose patience and swear.
  4. Games that run and continue to run but that are broken as far as game mechanics go. Again, I have a few of these where you need to be able to collect X & Y to make Z....but there's no X....anywhere...ever.
  5. Games that are so poorly and bizarrely implemented that you cannot work them out and, helpfully, they come without a manual or tutorial. And, to top it off, the "dev" remains silent....like he's actual unable to communicate for some religious / vow of silence reason.
  6. Games that you have to pay for, and then pay to play them in any meaningful or acceptable way, be it time-wasting(grinding if you like) or making you so inferior up against those who have paid and then paid again.
  7. Absolutely, no other way to describe it, totally unfinished games. Games that end where the middle(if you're lucky) of the game would really be. There are even numerous games that IN-GAME make an excuse or just flat out say that "there'll be something here later" or, "this needs an X, lol".
  8. Games missing something that strictly speaking can be done without but stop you wanting to play the game; the best examples of this are the ones where the savegame does not work, or just does not exist.

There are lots of other reasons I could add, but you get the idea, and maybe other people could add theirs to this list.

So, whilst I said 81-90% of the games in my library that I have played, or that I don't need to play to know they're "bad", I also said I don't really mind. It's true - I don't particularly care that of my almost 1700 games, I don't every want to play more that 1400 again. Lots of the games were freebies, bundle fodder, extremely cheap or gifts from / trades with friends, so they don't really count.

Of those that I did expect something of, I guess about two thirds disappoint me to a greater or lesser degree and still I am not that worried about it. What constitutes a "bad" game to me might be someone else's digital wet dream; I'm quite fussy, quite picky, don't really persevere for very long and can quickly make a snap decision about a game saying, "that's ****, and I'm never touching it again". Interestingly, when I break that vow and do give a game a second chance, a proper second chance, there's a small but significant chance I will change my mind.

Games are so much less expensive, relatively, then when I was first buying computer games as a kid in the 80s. Back then, if I bought a PC or a Spectrum game for £10 and I hated it.....well, that was a big deal. And it wasn't just about the money; in fact, money may have been the 2nd most annoying thing about a bad game back then. I bought all the computer games magazines of the time, and the more serious PC mags too, so I might have been waiting months for a game, a game I thought was going to be my favourite game of the year, if not ever. When It sucked, it might mean a year until another game similar to it came out; now we have so many games to choose from, even if we say(looking at the results from the survey above) that most games are "bad".

If you aren't constantly buying AAA games with 2-3 Day One DLC and a $40 Season Pass to come a few weeks later - and they're not my kind of game, usually - then you have a load of games coming out each month to look at and maybe buy(and refund if you really hate them). Add to that the now huge back catalogue of games available from many places(we have games that are 30 years old that are still playable and enjoyable, again depending upon the kind of game you like, I suppose) and the knowledge that there's a whole train of games in development, some where you can get involved with alphas or betas.

Finally, looking at the games I have really invested anything in(in the various was you can invest in a game) in 2017 so far, I can definitely say that I have a good number of games on Steam, GOG and elsewhere that I think are great and a roughly equal number of games I have bought that I haven't even gotten around to trying properly that I HOPE I will like. Maybe it is a shame we have to shovel so much excrement to get to the shiny stuff, but I'll keep on doing it as long as there's electricity and games developers and publishers, for all their myriad sins.

Sorry it's so long........

7 years ago
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couldn't agree more

7 years ago
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Damn, this poll is biased as hell xD. People are way to accustomed to all the weird ranking systems where like 6/10 already means trash and needs to be put into fire... granted, Steam got some really bad, broken games and asset-flips, but not nearly as much as people want there to be.

7 years ago*
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