4 ms·

Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed): 1. Steam receives dozens of releases a day and it's difficult for developers/publishers to make thei

by mjolk 10y ago

Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed): 1. Steam receives dozens of releases a day and it's difficult for developers/publishers to make their title stand-out without performing marketing. 2. Author perceives that Steam's display algorithm results in display of outliers (very good/bad). 3. Very low quality titles are released/being sold by Steam. 4. Reviews are a very poor metric as reviewers can be shills or rate content poorly out of pettiness or malice. 5. Author thinks that staff-curated titles are the solution. My responses: RockPaperShotgun is a game review site. Reviewing games is how they manage to make ad revenue (well, besides click-bait articles). If the defense is that more content comes out than RockPaperShotgun can review, then RockPaperShotgun should hire more people. If that's cost prohibitive, and there's market demand for it, then why are they asking Steam to do it? 1. Welcome to selling anything. 2. I don't know if this is true; I'm not rejecting this claim, but I'd love to see the data. 3. Quantifying "good enough to sell" is a risky game. I'm okay with spending $5 (most of a beer at a bar) on something kind of buggy if it's amusing for 30 minutes. For someone else, that amount may be double or $0 on principle. 4. If this subproblem gets solved without background checks on reviewers, you have a serious business that Amazon/Yelp/etc would love to buy from you. 5. Beyond catching content that simply _does not do what it says on the box_, this is all personal taste. And as an aside, there's a "curious" market that exists in low-quality games that have DLC/content that ends up on the Steam Community Market (Steam gets a % of each transaction), so the "how did a broken game end up on Steam?" question has more depth than a casual observer would guess.

zamalek 10y ago
> Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed 6. Games that received poor reviews are relegated to the trash bin forever. Response: Untrue.[1] The converse also applies, games don't keep their good reviews forever - this helps identify abandonware or post-hype truth. [1]:http://store.steampowered.com/news/21695/ http://store.steampowered.com/news/21695/
ramy_d 10y ago
Asking review sites to sift through the dredges in the spirit of "more business is better!" is naive. Jimquisition comments regularly on this and it has turned into a longstanding and ever constant critique of Valve and its "Whatever goes" attitude to getting on their Steam platform. At 20 or 30 new games _a day_ consumers don't have time to go on review websites and see what's on the "do not touch list". What a monumental task for consumers! If steam would block games that, out of the gate, did not work, that would be great. As the author stated: This morning in half an hour I got through three interesting-looking games that didn’t have functioning controls. You can't even play them! How are unplayable games on Steam!? Additionally they should make sure that the min spec IS an actually min spec that run the game in a playable state. No studio should be immune to such a level of scrutiny (see Rocksteady's Batman Arkham Knight).
- Retric 10y ago
  Paying someone 10$ an hour to do a quick look at a game for 2 hours * 30 new games a day ~= 220k/year, double that to pay for games and your looking at ~450k/year which is not free, but that expensive either. Really this could stand on it's own as a product either as a review site or an industry group that supports several review sites. PS: An yes that seems like a high estimate the average is less than 20$/game and most of this junk does not need 2 hours.
  - michaelt 10y ago
    Well, the article says the guy found three broken games in 30 minutes. Assuming Valve's reviewers took three times that, 30 minutes of testing per game, it'd still only cost them $55k - less than one developer's salary. Hell, they could charge $10 to list a game, and make a healthy profit out of it! Valve wouldn't have to pay for the games - vendors let retailers inspect their product for free /all the time/.
  - ramy_d 10y ago
    You argument is that its cheap to review. Sure, but why should all review sites duplicate the work? Why can't valve do the review, stop the crap at the source. Stop apologizing for shitty content making it to the store shelves.
    - Retric 10y ago
      > or an industry group that supports several review sites. So, no I don't think any one site needs to take on this cost rather anyone can get it off the ground for a few months and then sell a feed to other people thus defraying the costs. Sure, steam could have higher standards, but IMO there is value in letting poor games into their ecosystem that may be improved with time. UnReal World for example been in development by one guy for 26 years and right now it's a solid game though dated game. But, 20 years ago it was a buggy mess that would only really interest a tiny group of people even though he had been working on it for 6 years.
      - 10y ago

by mjolk 10y ago

zamalek 10y ago

> Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed 6. Games that received poor reviews are relegated to the trash bin forever. Response: Untrue.[1] The converse also applies, games don't keep their good reviews forever - this helps identify abandonware or post-hype truth. [1]:http://store.steampowered.com/news/21695/ http://store.steampowered.com/news/21695/

ramy_d 10y ago

Asking review sites to sift through the dredges in the spirit of "more business is better!" is naive. Jimquisition comments regularly on this and it has turned into a longstanding and ever constant critique of Valve and its "Whatever goes" attitude to getting on their Steam platform. At 20 or 30 new games _a day_ consumers don't have time to go on review websites and see what's on the "do not touch list". What a monumental task for consumers! If steam would block games that, out of the gate, did not work, that would be great. As the author stated: This morning in half an hour I got through three interesting-looking games that didn’t have functioning controls. You can't even play them! How are unplayable games on Steam!? Additionally they should make sure that the min spec IS an actually min spec that run the game in a playable state. No studio should be immune to such a level of scrutiny (see Rocksteady's Batman Arkham Knight).

Retric 10y ago
Paying someone 10$ an hour to do a quick look at a game for 2 hours * 30 new games a day ~= 220k/year, double that to pay for games and your looking at ~450k/year which is not free, but that expensive either. Really this could stand on it's own as a product either as a review site or an industry group that supports several review sites. PS: An yes that seems like a high estimate the average is less than 20$/game and most of this junk does not need 2 hours.
- michaelt 10y ago
  Well, the article says the guy found three broken games in 30 minutes. Assuming Valve's reviewers took three times that, 30 minutes of testing per game, it'd still only cost them $55k - less than one developer's salary. Hell, they could charge $10 to list a game, and make a healthy profit out of it! Valve wouldn't have to pay for the games - vendors let retailers inspect their product for free /all the time/.
- ramy_d 10y ago
  You argument is that its cheap to review. Sure, but why should all review sites duplicate the work? Why can't valve do the review, stop the crap at the source. Stop apologizing for shitty content making it to the store shelves.
  - Retric 10y ago
    > or an industry group that supports several review sites. So, no I don't think any one site needs to take on this cost rather anyone can get it off the ground for a few months and then sell a feed to other people thus defraying the costs. Sure, steam could have higher standards, but IMO there is value in letting poor games into their ecosystem that may be improved with time. UnReal World for example been in development by one guy for 26 years and right now it's a solid game though dated game. But, 20 years ago it was a buggy mess that would only really interest a tiny group of people even though he had been working on it for 6 years.
    - 10y ago