Steam Needs To Stop Selling Toys Full Of Cum (The Jimquisition) - General

[video=youtube;jNLemHpDQ60]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNLemHpDQ60[/video] 40% of all games on steam have been released on 2016

I haven't bought anything off of steam since 2014. I can't see myself bothering to change that anytime soon. When the storefront went to shit, steam lost one of it's major selling points with me. If a game requires steamworks, it's still easier to just activate the key after buying it on amazon. Impulse purchases aren't possible if I can't find anything to buy.

Storefront went to shit? It's never been better. Giving us customization options and giving it a major overhaul was one of the best decisions for it.

I think he means the storefront is [i]filled[/i] to shit, not went to shit. Steam's interface has gotten a huge upgrade over the years, but holy christ is it filled with awfulness. Greenlight was a mistake.

[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;51481205]I think he means the storefront is [I]filled[/I] to shit, not went to shit. Steam's interface has gotten a huge upgrade over the years, but holy christ is it filled with awfulness. Greenlight was a mistake.[/QUOTE] It's still a good platform for purchasing PC games. Greenlight and EA are no reason to avoid it IMO.

I never see any of the awfulness of the steam store. The worst shit to appear on the front page for me was major/minor furry shit which I thought appeared there because I play Dust. Everything that shows up for me is some new advertised game or something recommended to me either because a friend recommends it or it's similar to something I play.

The real problem is, greenlight used to gauge based on other titles on greenlight. No votes didn't matter and still don't, it just compares the yes votes to other games. This hasn't changed, there was just much more games at the beginning of greenlight, which meant the automatic standards were higher, it's really slowed down recently it feels like. (No stats, just based on personal anecdote) Just two images I found, this was last year: [img]http://puu.sh/sFjQe.png[/img] and this is right now [img]http://puu.sh/sFjAk.png[/img] Second is my game, got greenlit in about 3 months (was uploaded early 2015), but it looks like games commonly get greenlit in a month or less now, compared to the year they used to take. The top #100 etc numbers get cut off when the game is greenlit, it looks like games are getting the same amount of yes votes, but accepted much earlier nowadays. I don't think anything's changed with the system, it's just being played hard now by bundle sites. For comedy: here is a greenlight project I made private about a month in and forgot to delete. [img]http://puu.sh/sFjTo.png[/img] I recently stumbled back onto it, and it was at about 20% when I made it private, it's 51% now, with not even 1 more vote in.

What the absolute fuck is this title, am I missing something? Is cum toys a meme?

[QUOTE=rrunyan;51481379]What the absolute fuck is this title, am I missing something? Is cum toys a meme?[/QUOTE] i think thats just jim sterlings thing since since he opens every video with stuff like "welcome you smega filled picnic baskets something something something" he randomly names vile shit or something

[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;51481205] Greenlight's minimum bar is a mistake.[/QUOTE] FTFY. But in all seriousness, greenlight as an idea is fantastic - but in classic Valve fashion - it's execution was poor. Why go through the process of trying to convince Valve to let your game be on their store, when you could let the very people who might actually spend money on it? That system should inshore that every game has a base of people who are at the very least (and when running a storefront this is the most important part of a product) interested in buying it. At least that's how it [I]should[/I]work. The main thing that is causing the system - and by extension the store itself - to be full of fucking garbage is the minimum requirements for a project. Do you know how many votes a page needs to be greenlit? Supposedly between 400-500. That's like .005 percent of the entire steam userbase. Ain't that some shit. Didn't refresh-edit: [QUOTE=Untouch;51481294]ALL THAT AND A BAG OF PO-TA-TO CHIPS.[/QUOTE] .....Or perhaps not? From hearing how many votes various projects I've followed over the years needed - who update their progress on how close they are - I've always come to the conclusion that it's a horrendous case of "BAR TO LOW MAN".

[QUOTE=rrunyan;51481379]What the absolute fuck is this title, am I missing something? Is cum toys a meme?[/QUOTE] It's an example he used once to combat the argument of "Steam is just a storefront and shouldn't need to curate its content". He says that if Toys R Us got a shipment of teddy bears covered in cum, they wouldn't keep selling them, they would burn them and avoid getting more of those bears. He brought the example back for this video and ends up not addressing it for a good few minutes.

Also look at this [url]http://greenlightstats.com/[/url] [url]https://twitter.com/greenlightstats[/url] It used to be based on waves, every 2 or so weeks they'd greenlight a small chunk. In 2014 they barely greenlight anyone, in 2015 they took off the brakes, but it's out of control in 2016. Based on the data it looks like they're allowing about the same amount in compared to 2015, but the chunks are MUCH larger, so the standards of getting in are much lower, that's where the people playing the system are coming in.

-from the other thread, before I realized it was the later one- Steam certainly does need some form of quality control enforced. That much should go without saying, but to some it seems to come across as a mere suggestion. But of course it's not just Steam that could do with some quality control. Not by a longshot. Now, I don't have any exact numbers to hand at the moment, but when it comes to how many games there are on the Apple Store and Google Play Store, I can safely go out on a limb and say a METRIC FUCKTON. And out of those, I imagine a lot of them are shoddy clones and ripoffs of the actual good material that crops up on mobile every now and then. In times like these, I end up wishing that there was a much stronger motivation for digital storefronts to actually curate and check the quality of all the shit that gets sold. I don't care whether it be that QA ends up becoming a financial goldmine for stores, or that Valve has to pull their thumb out for fear of getting thrashed in the legal arena, but quality assurance needs to be fiercely enforced.

[QUOTE=Zephyrs;51480951]I haven't bought anything off of steam since 2014. I can't see myself bothering to change that anytime soon. When the storefront went to shit, steam lost one of it's major selling points with me. If a game requires steamworks, it's still easier to just activate the key after buying it on amazon. Impulse purchases aren't possible if I can't find anything to buy.[/QUOTE] you could always just use filters to get rid of the shit

I don't look to the steam discovery thing to discover things i might want to buy, i look at various forums and what friends are playing, add it to a wishlist then wait for a steam sale, usually.

Flooding an essential storefront with low quality titles is probably going to give us a situation similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983.

[QUOTE=Charades;51483398]Flooding an essential storefront with low quality titles is probably going to give us a situation similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983.[/QUOTE] i know that seems like a clever parallel, but it's not.

[QUOTE=Antimuffin;51481155]Storefront went to shit? It's never been better. Giving us customization options and giving it a major overhaul was one of the best decisions for it.[/QUOTE] The storefront is amazing but tbh the content is just fucking obscene I love to find things on my own. If I went to basically any other website I'd have no issue, but with steam I'd have to sift though MOUNTAINS of bullshit [editline]5th December 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=Charades;51483398]Flooding an essential storefront with low quality titles is probably going to give us a situation similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983.[/QUOTE] The market is way different than it was back then the reason the crash happened is because the internet didn't exist. You literally had 0 ways of sifting through the content and finding the sweettarts and caramel candies hiding in the nuggets of shit. No one could find good games so everyone just stopped buying games so long as you look OUTSIDE of steam you can easily sift through pretty much ONLY good games... rather than 50 bad games and 2 maybe ok ones and then like 5 that are worth it at all, but also 70 of them aren't even started, and there's 40 early access titles, and one of them is a stolen game.

[QUOTE=Charades;51483398]Flooding an essential storefront with low quality titles is probably going to give us a situation similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983.[/QUOTE] is this bait because pretty sure that will never happen again because the internet exists and if a game is actually shitty then it'll be exposed pretty easily.

With a functional refund system I see no reason to keep this "Steam needs quality control",you have reviews and can even try the game for 2 hours, if the game is shit just refund and move on. What Steam needs is improved customer support, not someone deciding if you should have the previlege to buy a game.

[QUOTE=Psyke89;51485891]With a functional refund system I see no reason to keep this "Steam needs quality control",you have reviews and can even try the game for 2 hours, if the game is shit just refund and move on.[/QUOTE] The issue lies not so much with people getting burned by buying shitty games (though your little technique doesn't work with early access and devs who claim "it'll be fixed next patch", 2 hours might be enough to see if a game is worth the price, but if you have to go back to the game every once in a while to see if it has improved you'll reach that threshold fast). The main problem is that when you saturate the store with shit, it reduces exposure for actually competent developers and good games. Now an indie dev can't rely on his game being good and featured on the storefront to break even, they have to be backed by marketing or get noticed/know people within game journo sites. If you want to support innovative and quality content being produced by indie devs, you can't be apathetic to the fact steam's catalogue went to shit.

The storefront changes where inevitable, even without greenlight there is a endlessly growing selection of games, and a steady growth in amount of game releases. Once your platform gets past the point of relying on front-page visibility and in-house QA, the impact of all the crap games is pretty much null. Its a little annoying it kinda happened in reverse order, where we first got the flood and then the store/refund improvements. But right now, its the negative impact is mostly migrated, and there are probably a dozen of games that could have only came to life under greenlight.

[QUOTE=Charades;51483398]Flooding an essential storefront with low quality titles is probably going to give us a situation similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983.[/QUOTE] Except that it's really easy to tell when something is shit and there's still plenty of amazing stuff to find. When the crash happened, there was basically nothing but garbage coming out and you had no idea of knowing what you were really buying. Which is almost the opposite of today.

[QUOTE=_Axel;51485937]The issue lies not so much with people getting burned by buying shitty games (though your little technique doesn't work with early access and devs who claim "it'll be fixed next patch", 2 hours might be enough to see if a game is worth the price, but if you have to go back to the game every once in a while to see if it has improved you'll reach that threshold fast).[/QUOTE] Early access are different beasts, like Kickstarters you are likely to get burned by them, hence you need a proper customer support for such cases. Killing Floor 2 is such an example, people got refunded regardless of game time. [QUOTE=_Axel;51485937]The main problem is that when you saturate the store with shit, it reduces exposure for actually competent developers and good games. Now an indie dev can't rely on his game being good and featured on the storefront to break even, they have to be backed by marketing or get noticed/know people within game journo sites.[/QUOTE] Don't fool yourself, even if the "shitty games flood" didn't happen you'd still need a good amount of "backing"/word of mouth to get your game noticed, look at how many decent indie games get ignored on consoles. Plus, if you start curating again, you'll find yourself in the same situation where you'll have good games that can't get on Steam because Valve just won't aprove them or takes too long to aprove them for whatever reason, which at the end of the day is even worse when you can't even sell your game.

I both like and dislike how lenient the greenlight system is.

[QUOTE=Psyke89;51486254]Plus, if you start curating again, you'll find yourself in the same situation where you'll have good games that can't get on Steam because Valve just won't aprove them or takes too long to aprove them for whatever reason, which at the end of the day is even worse when you can't even sell your game.[/QUOTE]Greenlight exists because of exactly this reason. Valve can't judge every game that wants to be sold on Steam. There are far too many and determining that would be entirely up to the discretion of the individual who happened to judge it that day. Everyone at Valve might see a game and think it'd be a great addition, but if the one guy who gets it to judge it doesn't like it, that game doesn't appear on Steam. Remember that shit games were still being added to Steam before greenlight, and that was in part a complaint that good games weren't being added but shit games were. People wanted Valve to step back and not play gate keeper any more. Valve did the one thing I frankly wish many other people and companies would do when put in such a position: they gave the people complaining exactly what they wanted. People can make demands they don't actually want fulfilled because the result will be worse than the problem. I like to see people's demands met and forcing them to confront the unpleasant reality that they didn't understand what they were asking for and they made things worse. I find that greenlight is ultimately good, so I'm of the persuasion that a curated system would be a bad decision for everyone. But I'd enjoy seeing greenlight halted and a curated system implemented. Either I'm wrong and it works great, in which case hurray we have a better system in place, or I'm right in which case hurray, maybe people will be a little wiser in the future.

Valve sure has gotten lazy over the past few years Quality control is not the only thing steam needs. Why don't we have a dedicated 64 bit executable? Why is the steam in-game overlay sluggish, broken, and outdated? Why isn't there a reliable support team? Why does the steam UI not scale to support larger displays? Just a few of many problems I personally have with the steam client. As much as people like to rag on Origin, uPlay, Microsoft, etc, at least when I send in a support request, I can chat with a live person and get immediate and (for the most part) helpful info on whatever issue's I'm having. You'd be lucky to get a reply back from steam in the same week.

I wouldn't trust any given curator to make the right calls on a consistent enough basis that I would be happy with it. I would rather they just provide customers with more and better tools to self curate/outsource curation to volunteers.