[QUOTE]In our [URL="steam://openurl/http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399257707760"]previous post[/URL], we described what we believe a successful Steam Store would look like, and why balancing the interests of all the players and developers made it an interesting challenge. In this post, we want to talk about another group that adds further complexity: bad actors exploiting the store algorithm for financial gain.
The reason this group exists is due to various systems that add value to owning games on Steam beyond having the game itself. The best example is Steam Trading Cards, which also happens to be the primary one that these bad actors are exploiting.
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We added Steam Trading Cards in 2013, and they had two main goals:
For players, they were small collectibles associated with games. They were tradeable, which meant you could collect ones for games you loved by trading away cards for the games you loved less. In effect, they were a way for you to show other players what your favorite games were. We knew some players wouldn't care about them, which was fine - they could simply throw them up on the Steam Marketplace, and use the results to buy some other game.
For developers, they were an easy way to add extra value to their game, and provide rewards to their biggest fans.
After the release of Trading Cards, the number of players interested in them grew significantly, until it reached the point where the demand for cards became significant enough that there was an economic opportunity worth taking advantage of. And that's when our group of bad actors arrived, aiming to make money by releasing 'fake' games on Steam.
These fake developers take advantage of a feature we provide to all developers on Steam, which is the ability to generate Steam keys for their games. They generate many thousands of these keys and hand them out to bots running Steam accounts, which then idle away in their games to collect Trading Cards. Even if no real players ever see or buy one of these fake games, their developers make money by farming cards.
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Here's what we're doing:
Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we're going to move to a system where games don't start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it's actually being bought and played by genuine users. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who've played the game prior to that point. So going forward, even if you play a game before it has Trading Cards, you'll receive cards for your playtime when the developer adds cards and reaches the confidence metric.
The confidence metric is built from a variety of pieces of data, all aimed at separating legitimate games and players from fake games and bots. You might wonder why the confidence metric will succeed at identifying fake games, when we weren't being successful at using data to prevent them getting through Greenlight. The reason is that Greenlight is used by a tiny subsection of Steam's total playerbase, producing far less data overall, which makes it more easily gamed. In addition, Greenlight only allows players to vote and comment, so that data is narrow. Steam at large allows players to interact with games in many different ways, generating a broad set of data for each game, and that makes identifying fake ones an easier task.
With this change, we hope to significantly reduce the economic incentive for the bad actors to release fake games on Steam. We're hopeful that this will have little negative impact on other developers and players, with a small number of games having a delay before their Trading Cards start to drop. On the positive side, it should significantly improve the quality of the data being fed into the Store algorithms, which is a good thing for everyone.
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[url]http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1954971077935370845[/url]
The "bad actors" wouldn't be there if Greenlight never happened. While more than a few great games got on Steam through Greenlight, it has been the source of TONS of issues regarding gaming the system.
[editline]16th May 2017[/editline]
Steam Greenlight was a mistake
[QUOTE=chipsnapper2;52237526]The "bad actors" wouldn't be there if Greenlight never happened. While more than a few great games got on Steam through Greenlight, it has been the source of TONS of issues regarding gaming the system.
[editline]16th May 2017[/editline]
Steam Greenlight was a mistake[/QUOTE]
I don't think it was a mistake at all. It was the kind of janky first step typical for pioneering. There's not a whole lot of existing systems that had already gone through these problems and solved them, so Valve has spent the last couple years learning about what issues the system causes and how to address them. They still have a long way to go, but they've also made quite a bit of progress, and their new features that give users more influence over the steam store have been quite valuable.
I think outsourcing curation to the community is just something Valve had to do eventually. Massive storefronts like Amazon or ebay already work more or less like that (tho they don't share all the same needs and issues as Steam). The bottleneck of having an internal team judge entries would be a humongous effort without guarantee for quality. Even if Valve was currently led by the twelve wise men who only push through quality games, there'd no telling at what point the swelling team becomes a terrible arbitrator. We don't know what games they're declining on what basis and can't argue with it, and we don't know what dark number of games could have been hugely successful if Valve had had better gateway keepers.
With democratization you can get rid of both problems. And it does seem that Valve's slowly but surely getting there.
As I see it, these changes to Steam cause short-term problems with long-term benefits that are eventually gonna exceed the weight of the problems. As long as it looks like Valve's on course and they're coming up with reasonable propositions to emerging problems, I think it's worth staying that course.
I could be mistaken, but doesn't the possibility of generating money through trading cards mean that there's an issue with the payout algorithm itself? You'd have to have legitimate users put money into the system at some point.
[editline]edit[/editline] I should have read the post more thoroughly. The issue is that the botting breaks Steam's recommendation algorithm.
[editline]edit[/editline] They really need to split the Steam platform into a main store that's properly curated and a franchise option where developers can make their games available through the technical infrastructure but only have them show up if 'opted in' elsewhere.
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