RPS: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems
- Thread starter Renekton
- Start date
It does but it's too late now, it's turned into the shitfest mobile gaming has always been.
TheRedSnifit
Member
Refunds are bad.
Huh.
Huh.
nopenopenope
Member
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You've missed the point on refunds. He's not saying they're bad - he's saying it's another way of Valve passing the buck to players. It's "you try it and see if it's broken."
And yeah, there's a shit load of games released every day - use the "All new releases" tab rather than the popular one.
Difficult to disagree with most of his points in this. Steam is a real shit show.
GhostTrick
Banned
No it doesnt. I dont need someone to tell me if this game is for me or not.
It's funny how people keep talking about shitfest mobile when I only see good games on first page. Now of course you may be talking about new releases. But I thought GAF was about people who knows about games, so it shouldnt be a problem.
He's not suggesting people tell you if the game is good or not, he even says that.
He's talking about games not fit for sale.
No of course not. It's addition is great and has saved me money when some things haven't run or stuff just isn't for me.
I get what he means though.
GhostTrick
Banned
That's why there's a "popular releases" or best sellers list. To see what people likes.
It's funny how we're talking about shit show for having the choice to play what you want. Maybe we should indeed have curated content. I'm sure a lot of devs and publishers would be indeed happy.
There's a lot of devs you can ask about their thoughts about curation on gaf. Namely dev of Assault Android Cactus or Cook Serve Delicious.
Or even publishers like Degica with Cave shoot em ups or XSeed.
GhostTrick
Banned
That's what curation does though. Telling you what is good or not for you. Games not fit for sale ? Even that is a stretch. What do we call not fit for sale ? Games suffering bugs ? Cause that'd cross off even AAA releases on any platform.
I don't understand the premise that Valve needs to invest a ton of money to seriously curate Steam. Who exactly does that benefit? Storefronts shouldn't be walled gardens. I think content discovery can be improved, but ultimately no matter how you improve it, it's still going to be down to the customer how much they want to use it. And that's how it should be - it should be a choice. How interested are you in customizing and personalizing your store experience? I'm happy to be able to see everything and just search for what I want. I don't want the store telling me what it thinks is good for me and keeping games which it could be selling away because of some arbitrary quality consideration. Framing refunds as a way to "pass the buck" to consumers is a super weird way to look at anything.
If that is your idea of releasing more good games (through ease of publishing) than ever before, per year, than any other platform in history, then show me the phones!
The solution here is content discovery and coincidentally it's where Valve is focusing on. When you shop on Amazon, or buy a book for your Kindle, you have access to thousands upon thousands of products, such as $13K Diamond HDMI Cables. How does this sorcery work you ask? Content discovery. Their algorithms surface products to you based on your personal preferences and the better or popular products when you search for something. There should not exist gatekeepers that determine what is quality content. That is the view of the closed-platform, of the console, and one which I whole-hardheartedly disagree with.
Again - that's not what he's talking about.
I don't need to browse the top sellers on steam - it's going to be various early access survival games, some AAA stuff, football manager and the latest Civ game - and that's fine.
He's not suggesting people tell us what games are good or not. He's suggesting there's a team at valve who checks to see if games are fit for sale or not - do they run, do the controls work, is the store page representative of the product etc
Sword Of Doom
Member
I'm not sure if they're passing the buck because refunds probably cost steam money.
If "good" games are lost in a sea of garbage, then that doesn't benefit anyone. It's a difficult problem to solve and I guess people aren't happy because it doesn't seem like steam is putting a lot of effort into solving it.
The Dutch Slayer
Member
But seriously when you have no stakeholders and no competition and billions of $ why would you?
Sword Of Doom
Member
But seriously when you have no stakeholders and no competition and billions of $ why would you?
Was thinking the same. whatever they have works and they don't have a lot of incentive to improve.
cookie-monster
Member
I haven't used the steam application to discover games for years, because it's fucking garbage.
Until Steam loses revenue, nothing will convince Valve in the least to change their approach. This is just purely ideological. If you want such a store, go somewhere else. GOG is certainly more locked down then Steam, and even GOG only started to become bigger when they opened up to modern games and stopped being just about old games.
And btw, the idea that a few Youtubers and journalists with a fraction of the data that Valve has, can tell them what the best course of action should be is laughable.
And btw, the idea that a few Youtubers and journalists with a fraction of the data that Valve has, can tell them what the best course of action should be is laughable.
Seems to be working.
Steam Discovery 2.0 analysis: Valve shares latest metrics
Two important metrics in measuring customer satisfaction are how much money and time are spent. Since the introduction of the Discovery Updates, per player purchases have nearly doubled, with each customer purchasing an average of 8.3 new packages (containing one or more games) in 2016.
With that in mind, we wanted to make sure that our changes to Steam weren't just serving the same small group of highly marketed titles. A healthy ecosystem should be able to support a range of games of various scales and potential audiences.
To examine this, we looked at the metric of how many games earn at least $200k within 90 days of their release. We used this figure as a rough approximation for success.
The data shows that more and more titles are achieving this benchmark each year, while Steam is also seeing more and more runaway successes.
This is ultimately only a problem if you are considering Steam to be the primary form of discovery for any product. But it shouldn't be. Like any other product, there are various forms of discovery for someone seeking something good outside of a store.
cookie-monster
Member
so it's better for people that still use it, great
I won't be in those metrics though, so I find fault with this conclusion.
I get my information on what I want on Steam from sources outside of Steam, like NeoGAF and other places. So I don't need any real curation on Steam itself. What would be an actual problem is if some game I was interested in wasn't on Steam. So I'm glad they just heap everything on there for the most part.
There is, and I mean this truly, a mountain of garbage on Amazon and I rely entirely on user reviews to find stuff worth buying, as well as information on sales and so forth scoured from elsewhere.
That's how I see it.
Yes, Valve has both the resources and clout to enforce a high amount of curation for Steam... but such a hypothetical Steam would no longer be Steam, and a Valve who would do this is no longer Valve as we know it. Effectively, RPS is asking "why isn't this thing some other thing instead?"
That's how I see it.
Yes, Valve has both the resources and clout to enforce a high amount of curation for Steam... but such a hypothetical Steam would no longer be Steam, and a Valve who would do this is no longer Valve as we know it. Effectively, RPS is asking "why isn't this thing some other thing instead?"
Soodanim
Member
These threads are always moments of realisation for me, as like someone else said early on I don't see any of the low level throwaway stuff at all. My end user experience contains the same sort of thing it always has.
Thats not to say none of this matters, more that there's this layer of shite at the bottom of Steam that's invisible to me.
Will Valve ever change the way they run their business, though?
Thats not to say none of this matters, more that there's this layer of shite at the bottom of Steam that's invisible to me.
Will Valve ever change the way they run their business, though?
It hasn't turned into that but it's fun to pretend it has I guess.
Phrozenflame500
Member
While I agree that games that do not run or are misrepresentative are inexcusable and probably should be curated out as a bare-minimum type of thing, I'm not sure that would fix the fundamental problem with independent games getting so little exposure and accessibility. I don't think that is a curation problem as much as a marketing problem. How do we ensure that indie games that are genuinely good get marketing space, and aren't just immediately forgotten within the 30 mins they're pushed off the new release list by the dime-a-dozen trash? Valve's solution (to push word-of-mouth as the most viable curation method) while often ineffective is the only one that I can really think of without closing the store entirely.
Good games aren't being buried by shovelware, they're being buried by other good games.
Phrozenflame500
Member
I mean, looking at Steam's new release page I beg to disagree.
Even their semi-curated popular new release section moves very quickly and often feels at least 50% covered in mediocrity.
Vigilant Walrus
Member
I disagree. I don't want Valve to focus their service aspects to police content quality. Although Steam has some stinkers that has retained a lot of popularity, I do not see the validity in the people proposing that steam is like a mobile shitshow.
99% of mobile games are garbage. Their curation is terrible. The most popular games on Steam are not garbage: steam/stats . You got a healthy dose of genres, you got stable populations, you got franchises, and you even see retentation across multiple installments.
There is a good dose of new games, and you can see, when a new update is coming out for a game, the player count increases significantly.
This tells us that a lot of steam users know where to go and what to play when something is happening.
The weird omission I can recall is Knight Online. It has sometimes crawled up to 20,000+ players playing during peak, but this is apparantly bots that is inflating it. It's not a common problem.
Early Access shit, youtubers tenacity towards garbage open world survival games and the crowdfunding debacle are things that have to sort itself out as peoples taste change. We're still figuring these things out. Valve doesn't need to police or moderate or "fix" this.
People will be get over survival games. We just have to hang in there and the fad will change to something else.
My big fear is that if Valve starts investing a lot into their service sector and take up a lot of additional responsibilities it will mean higher costs and less value for the free services, sharing and consumer value as well as less sales, and higher profit cuts they snap from developers.
I want them to improve the UI and UX aspects. The overlays needs to be more snappy, there needs to be better responsive animations. There needs to be a better level of resolution independent GUI features that lets you scale.
Curation is pretty good. It's not spotify, but the main problem is the tags. They are not easy enough. I want to search for female protagonist, story rich and good soundtrack all at once.
Your user home screen is too busy, and there are too many hidden features hidden away in sub sections. The way the browser windows open inside the steam overlay is annoyng. The way the video player is slow and has delay is annoying.
99% of mobile games are garbage. Their curation is terrible. The most popular games on Steam are not garbage: steam/stats . You got a healthy dose of genres, you got stable populations, you got franchises, and you even see retentation across multiple installments.
There is a good dose of new games, and you can see, when a new update is coming out for a game, the player count increases significantly.
This tells us that a lot of steam users know where to go and what to play when something is happening.
The weird omission I can recall is Knight Online. It has sometimes crawled up to 20,000+ players playing during peak, but this is apparantly bots that is inflating it. It's not a common problem.
Early Access shit, youtubers tenacity towards garbage open world survival games and the crowdfunding debacle are things that have to sort itself out as peoples taste change. We're still figuring these things out. Valve doesn't need to police or moderate or "fix" this.
People will be get over survival games. We just have to hang in there and the fad will change to something else.
My big fear is that if Valve starts investing a lot into their service sector and take up a lot of additional responsibilities it will mean higher costs and less value for the free services, sharing and consumer value as well as less sales, and higher profit cuts they snap from developers.
I want them to improve the UI and UX aspects. The overlays needs to be more snappy, there needs to be better responsive animations. There needs to be a better level of resolution independent GUI features that lets you scale.
Curation is pretty good. It's not spotify, but the main problem is the tags. They are not easy enough. I want to search for female protagonist, story rich and good soundtrack all at once.
Your user home screen is too busy, and there are too many hidden features hidden away in sub sections. The way the browser windows open inside the steam overlay is annoyng. The way the video player is slow and has delay is annoying.
The conclusion that you think the discovery is terrible despite not having used it since many significant updates since then?
I don't understand your point. It's like you entered a Xbox One thread and started to rant about the online DRM they announced before the console was released.
I think they should go to a more App Store-like approach on this, where they don't curate the store per se - basically anyone can get in the App Store - but they editorialize it, where actual human beings go through and find the cream of the crop of new stuff and promote it on the front page or in categories.
Valve's solution to this is, eh, let TotalBiscuit and Sexy Anime Waifu Lovers do it.
Nearly 40 percent of all Steam games ever released were released in 2016. And waaaaaay too many of those are shitty asset flips. That is the issue. People who are just trying to make a quick buck with a bunch of Unity assets cobbled together in a barely running, barely functioning state.
Pokemaniac
Member
Did you actually read the article? It's not really about full curation, it's largely about basic "does it run"-level quality control. The point is that instead of taking any sort of measure to prevent non-functional crap that is, by any reasonable definition, unfit for sale from reaching the storefront, and instead expect users to just deal with it via reviews and refunds. Reviews and refunds aren't bad by themselves (though based on the description in the article, Steam's review system may be considerably more deficient than I thought it was), but as the only tools to deal with this kind of crap they simply aren't sufficient. The only purpose this kind of stuff serves being on Steam's storefront is hurting Steam's reputation and giving people more crap to wade through.
False, Steam Curators are a thing.
The App Store "editorializing" is done through the curators. Find the group that align to your taste. For all of you asking to add 'human touch' to the storefront, you pretty ignore the most human in the form of Steam Curators, non-corporate entity, extremely helpful, yeah, questionable sense of humor sometimes, but they do the job all of you are asking.
yeah right, the editorial staff from the appstores play ten thousand games to let you find the creme de la creme.
If those editorial choices are not bought from the developers than there is most probably some kind of searchbot behind it. The "same" technology behind the discovery queue.
Apart from Bloody Boobs, this seems like a quite decent list.
You're having the faulty assumption that somehow the problems encountered by the RPS dude are universal, instead of possibly being situations that happened on his particular system. And Valve is never going to go and test all the game that are uploaded daily individually in a bunch of different hardware and software configurations. It just isn't realistic.
Yes, I was directly referring to Steam Curators by saying "Valve's solution is to let TotalBiscuit and Sexy Anime Waifu Lovers do it", the joke being those two comprise two of the most popular curators.
And considering the premise of the article is "Valve is outsourcing quality control to its customers", arguing "actually Valve lets users curate its games" kind of proves the point!
They obviously don't play literally every game or use every app, but yes, there are actual honest-to-God humans doing editorial on the App Store. (And no, they don't sell Editor's Choice spots.)
CecilRousso
Member
It's worth pointing out that his situation is an exception, with him saying that he is actively going through all new releases. If you browse it "normally" and put some use of the filters and discovery queues, you're not going to see 95% of the stinkers and asset flips.
And for those who manages to avoid those, the refund function is only a positive thing.
People noting the weirdness of how Steam refunds are written about here, should also note that the author (John Walker) has always viewed them as a (somewhat) negative. He's more than once noted that the system can be gamed with DRM-free games and card money... So bear that in mind.
Odd that this article comes after news of Steam Direct incoming, which is a way to ensure some very basic quality control and to help deal with copyright infringement issues.
Odd that this article comes after news of Steam Direct incoming, which is a way to ensure some very basic quality control and to help deal with copyright infringement issues.
It's only natural to see a lot more games now. Ease of publishing has caused an Indie boom, and there are more good games than ever before. Early Access naturally increases this number a lot. Virtual Realty also made its debut this year, accounting for somewhere around 1300 of those 4200 games.
Steam Direct should be an improvement (assuming the recouped entry cost is ~$1K or below) in that it keeps the doors open, but should discourage some of the fraudulent releases, and those with no intention of selling a real product.
Don't know why he would lump refunds with the rest of the negativity but looking more into the writer he's actually not a fan of the system so there's that. And yeah there's a lot of games coming out but it's not literally 20-30 a day.
And I have no idea why he doesn't think Steam Direct is actually a thing.
Pokemaniac
Member
Apart from Bloody Boobs, this seems like a quite decent list.
You're having the faulty assumption that somehow the problems encountered by the RPS dude are universal, instead of possibly being situations that happened on his particular system. And Valve is never going to go and test all the game that are uploaded daily individually in a bunch of different hardware and software configurations. It just isn't realistic.
I think you overestimate how many of these kinds of issues require that kind of exhaustive tests to find. I mean, Jim Sterling has reported downloading a game on Steam that didn't even have an executable.
I'll be honest and say I haven't read the entire article, but it comes across as someone ignoring facts in order to push a narrative. So being ignorant of Steam Direct makes sense when you think of the article like that.