Valve taking more steps to combat fake games and asset flips - Sensationalist Headlines

This is from the private Steamworks group, source. https://i.redd.it/ji3iyxq471411.png

How about instead of capping achievements they introduce some human curation to the Steam store? It's not like they don't have the money to hire a few more employees. Besides, 100% fake games are one piece of the puzzle. Asset flips aren't fake per se, but they're equally shitty and clog up the store just as badly.

I love how instead of just preventing these games from being on the system and causing these issues, they just make the system worse to accommodate the problem instead of solving it. it's the laziest diversion I've seen, Jesus Christ.

Is it really considered accommodating if they are making changes to totally disincentivise fake games from ever being submitted at all? I can agree with you that humans definitely should be curating this, but even then, why not still try to reduce the illegitimate load anyway? I don't think this is in any way worsening the system by any means.

Sorry, but this isn't going to disincentive them from being submitted. The entire point of steam direct was to fix the problem of greenlight, and all it did was make it thousands of times worse. Everything they're doing is making the problem bigger. They haven't done a single thing to prevent this from happening and only pretend to solve it by totally and completely missing the point.

Valve wants to stay small in terms of employees to keep the flat structure, some employees can't even handle the structure. If they hire normal people it would make Valve have to work normally too.

Credit where it's due - Valve have been communicating a lot more recently and they're taking a lot of steps in the right direction. They directly addressed the content issue head on and stated their view and how they would act, and here they at least seem to be taking some steps to better curate games. Sure, they could be doing more and I hope to see some human curation, but I think they need to be given some credit for recent communication.

Again, how is this particular move going to make the problem bigger? Valve is completely right that the entire selling point of a lot of these fake games was inflating achievement counts. If nothing else, this change means that you can no longer put a game on steam with the sole selling point of "thousands of achievements unlockable in seconds!" That is a worthwhile change, eve n if there is admittedly WAY more Valve could be doing.

Speaking of Greenlight, why not go back to that? It had its potential for abuse, yes. But an actual serious indie game developer should be more than capable of shelling out 100$ or whatever it was to get it on. They have to actually show gameplay and such and prove it's in a viable state instead of just shitting out Minecraft With Guns ft. Stolen Content without any sort of oversight, be it from Valve or the community. Alternatively, if the abuse of bots is still going to let too much trash in, have the developers get in contact with Valve to make them "trusted" and allow them to upload without any sort of issue. They make another Garry's Incident, they get shitcanned and have to refund people for selling something that doesn't work. The devs don't need to rely on a seemingly random community to get onboard, and Valve can profit all they want off of the uncensored hentai games that will inevitably flood the market, without having to worry too much about someone "accidentally" releasing a game with a missing .exe file.

How many like solid games actually even have more than say fifty achievements?

Warframe has 175, Isaac has 400, TF2 has 500, Payday 2 has over 1000.

Ah. Proves then I certainly am not an achievement hunter.

the 1000 on payday 2 you literally can instantly get with a trainer..so

Yes, cheating gets you thing instantly. Who knew.

And the communities that actually care about achievements and have rankings can immediately recognize such cheating and penalize/ban for it.

Why is Payday 2 even relevant here? You can get literally ANY Steam achievement with a trainer. Unless it's been discontinued there's literally a program focused entirely on giving you achievements in games.

i only knew about payday with it. never looked at other games using trainers to cheat the achievements

You're lucky it isn't VAC because you'd be fucked lmao

didnt said i used it. i know about it

That would be absolutely terrible to do honestly. They already showed how much they failed at it, it would still have all the issues unless they were willing to actually truly curate it, and they aren't. it would bring about another slow period for maybe a minute before it goes back to its old problems. They tried to fix the problem of anything being voted in, by opening the floodgates, they did literally the opposite of what worked.

https://github.com/gibbed/SteamAchievementManager I believe that's the one at least but it works for most, if not all, games on Steam.

wait is that a software to cheat the achievements?

Youtubes version of 'open floodgates' comes in the form of how much real content is being demonetized and removed. Youtube doesn't really have any "Fake" content because anything can be content. But on that same note, those weird pedophilic videos are being monetized as far as I remember. Steams problem is that they wanted to make the platform more open, this is something to strive for, they absolutely should have a more open platform. However people complained that they were letting too many games in, so they 'solved' that complaint by letting even more games in, unfiltered, basically doing the opposite of what people wanted. I don't think it's really good to compare the two however, because they should function entirely unlike each-other and have totally different problems. My point is that Google is trying automation, and its not working at all, and just causing more issues. Having fake games is an issue because... why... should they be on the platform at all? They're fake games, they shouldn't even be on it. I'm not even sure where I'm supposed to start, because it should be obvious.

yeah, also allows you to unlock them. I dug around the source code for a couple minutes but didn't give it much effort. If I was to assume, it would use the steamworks library to mimick launching a game, and send the right api calls to unlock achievements (like a normal game would) if possible. Some achievement's don't work since they are protected. iirc, steam offerers things like this natively from the partner portal (I think) for testing purposes

Not the first time they've said this shit. I'll believe it when I see it.

they literally already implemented these features lol it's not just words

I'm a little conflicted with "asset flipping" as you prevent games that are built for their game design to be posted on steam. A brilliant example is "GAME OF THE YEAR 420BLAZEIT" it's pure shit when it comes to its art but its fun to play which means it's game design succeeds.

And it's really the same system from before just with more restrictions

The youtube comparison doesnt really work because the amount of content uploaded to YouTube per day is so large that it is completely infeasible to check it with human oversight. They don't really have a choice. Steam on the other hand, has around 50 games uploaded daily. And you dont need to play the full game, you can see if its a trash/asset flip within 30 seconds of opening it.

I'll wait to see if this will actually do anything. But I'm not going to hold my breath either.