this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Seriously steam really needs to add a quality gate, the amount of garbage they have in the store is absurd and eventually it's not going to be worth the tiny fee they make from these games.
I dunno. I kind of remember when it was hard to get on steam. I wonder how many cool games we have now that we wouldn't have had of they had to go through some sort of arbitrary checkpoint. There always seemed to be some controversy over who and what got in.
Do those trash games even matter? I feel like I basically never see them unless I go looking for them specifically. Steam is far, far better at content discovery than Google Play is, despite both platforms having an abundance of shovelware.
The content discovery on steam is being built up by massive community effort. It's maybe difficult to find the most egregious asset flips, but it's trivial to find tons of rpg maker games or similar, especially with the discovery queue.
Nah. I understand the ask for a more curated store, but I don't want to make it harder for developers to get their content out there.
Adding minimal requirements isn't going to block any indie game the average gamer has heard of. In fact blocking asset flip games may actually help devs get more exposure in the new release lists. Heck just banning people that upload only asset flip garbage would probably be a big help.
They do have a $100 submission fee, which the developer can recoup once they have $1k in sales. So that alone cuts out a lot of the nonsense since low selling games won't make enough to be worth the effort.
Maybe there's an argument that the fee should be higher, but at a certain point you're just making releasing a passion project impractical.
I disagree. They're pretty good about not shoving shovelware in your face. I don't think games should be prevented from entry to the store just because they're perceived low quality. Where would you draw the line?
A minimal level would be analyzing assets used and if more than say 90% are known free assets then block a game.
What if you have a fun game idea but aren't big into graphics? You could just use a bunch of CC-BY licensed assets.
Then find a way to purchase or otherwise create 2 out of every 10 assets you do use. You likely need some level of customization to make your idea a reality.
That's a very significant additional cost!
I feel you, I'm not denying a correlation between free assets and shovelware but why punish good quality games using free assets? Steam has a pretty generous (relatively speaking) refund policy letting you refund games you've bought in the past week that you have played for less than two hours. I feel like most games and especially shovelware games you can know if they're shit in under two hours. Better to let too many shitty games in and not risk keeping a good one out and let folks get refunds for shitty games than to potentially keep good games out because they don't meet some weird criteria they can't quite meet.