After controversies regarding adult games and inconsiderate content, Valve has decided to take a definitive stance on games on its platform. Now, so long as a game 'isn't straight up trolling or illegal', it'll be allowed on Steam. In a post on Steam called "Who gets to be on the Steam Store", company staff described the troubles of trying to regulate games, as well as deal with laws in multiple different countries. Citing these issues, and the climate after the removal of the school shooting game Active Shooter, and the panic over adult content being targeted for removal, Valve wants to clarify that it's time to disclose their new policy.

"Everything" will now be allowed on the Steam Store, so long as it doesn't break any laws or isn't considered trolling ("trolling" was not defined) meaning developers will be allowed to distribute their games with no fear of removal. According to Valve, this will let them focus on other important features or components to the company, rather than "policing" content.

To combat potential issues this may raise, you'll now be able to block certain types of games, such as overly gorey, hentai games, and other undesirable subject matter. Valve states that even though controversial games that deal with racism, sexual themes, violence, varying quality levels, etc will make it through approval to be on the Store now, it does not mean Valve supports these types of games internally. If a game does turn out to be an issue, they will handle things on a "case by case basis".

Source

 

[Arras]

I'm sure they got a LOT more bad press by saying "fuck it, we cba with this policing shit, nobody is ever going to be happy, this is just going to be an infinite black hole money sink unless we just outright ban pretty much all indies until they hit a certain critical acclaim, I'm sure they would have received less backlash if they came forward and saif "we gonna ban everything", they were no doubt well aware of the probable backlash and figured stepping back and saying "do your own moaral policing" means less harassment of them every time someone finds something objectionable

personally I think people need to start accepting more responsibility for their own choices/decisions and stop expecting to get coddled and drip fed things like babies, take 5 minutes to research a game and eventually these "asset flips" and broken games will discover that its not profitable to make this shit any more, as long as people act like mindless puppets who just go "ooooooh new shiney thing buy buy buy" then the shit devs will continue making the same shit

The issue isn't so much that you have to take 5 minutes to research a game, the problem is that these games clog up the store and make it harder to find lesser known, but actually competent games.

Being made to play tedious games means that the people who played them can just stop playing after 20 minutes, give the game a negative evaluation and move on. That's their job. Also, that 3 million number is hilariously low when considered against Valve's operating profits. I don't know of any place to get some serious numbers, but here estimates in the excess of 3 billion, while Forbes back in 2011 has Gabe on the record saying they make in the "High hundreds of millions"

The 3 million, or even 10 million dollars they would lose by hiring a team of curators is laughably cheap in marketing to keep their store from losing it's hard earned brand identity with being the best place to buy games.

Ditch a game after 20 minutes? I've seen many people say "yeah the intro is slow, but it gets good later" about games. There's plenty of games out there that I wouldn't want to play at all, but also have a perfect right to exist - they're just not my type of game, or are aimed at a very specific audience. Should all of these games get negative evaluations?

 

[AbyssalMonkey]

Ditch a game after 20 minutes? I've seen many people say "yeah the intro is slow, but it gets good later" about games. There's plenty of games out there that I wouldn't want to play at all, but also have a perfect right to exist - they're just not my type of game, or are aimed at a very specific audience. Should all of these games get negative evaluations?

Are you telling me that these games that take "forever" to get going don't have any of the hallmarks of being a decent game in the first 20 minutes? I'm not saying every game gets exactly 20 minutes, but the asset flips and shovelware are blatantly obvious within this time that they don't deserve more time from the testers. Give me any game that takes a while to start, and I can give at least 5 reasons as to why that game would probably not be put down and given a negative evalutation in the first 20 minutes due to the playtester finding it tedious.

 

[Arras]

Are you telling me that these games that take "forever" to get going don't have any of the hallmarks of being a decent game in the first 20 minutes? I'm not saying every game gets exactly 20 minutes, but the asset flips and shovelware are blatantly obvious within this time that they don't deserve more time from the testers. Give me any game that takes a while to start, and I can give at least 5 reasons as to why that game would probably not be put down and given a negative evalutation in the first 20 minutes due to the playtester finding it tedious.

An admittedly very contrived example, but one that's on Steam nonetheless: https://store.steampowered.com/app/347720/Soda_Drinker_Pro/

 

[gamesquest1]

if you don't like steams curation you can always look for a third party site to curate your games for you, they will often link directly to steam and have a nice review listing pro's/con's etc, you can also find a site that holds similar values to your own so you can never run into any naughty games,

steam is effectly taking a step back and being primarily distributer, there is plenty of other people ready and willing to curate games and promote ones they find good and alert people to if one is bad

the only people who dislike this are people who want to impose their own moralities onto people similar to the big bad boogie man of Christians people like to point back and laugh at, if its legal its legal, if its shit its shit just don't buy it

it seems shocking many of the game "journalist" sites are throwing a wobbler, if anything this is a really good move for them, if people want to find good games they now have to look for third party curators which would drive traffic back to them.....why would anyone be upset by having more traffic sent their way

 

[FAST6191]

Being made to play tedious games means that the people who played them can just stop playing after 20 minutes, give the game a negative evaluation and move on. That's their job. Also, that 3 million number is hilariously low when considered against Valve's operating profits. I don't know of any place to get some serious numbers, but here estimates in the excess of 3 billion, while Forbes back in 2011 has Gabe on the record saying they make in the "High hundreds of millions"

The 3 million, or even 10 million dollars they would lose by hiring a team of curators is laughably cheap in marketing to keep their store from losing it's hard earned brand identity with being the best place to buy games.

If you are only going to play for 20 minutes then we are back at the same problem that the oxygen thieves at the various national rating boards face where you have to get devs to list things themselves.

Also repetition gets tedious -- I do not find COD a particular bastion of quality but they are certainly playable enough. Get me to back to back to back them one day/week and by the end I am going to be bored out of my skull.

Similarly you reckon reputation will be lost equivalent to the value of the wages and overhead? I am sure they could fund it, just the same as they could probably have a rounding error keep me in luxury for the rest of my life. Whether it is worth it for them is an entirely different matter which is where I was heading.
They have the numbers there in front of them and are not shy about using them, see also the left4dead2 petition when they went and saw how many that signed it actually went and got it in the end, and I am similarly sure it was considered for them.
The number of ultra puritanical people is getting lower by the day and while some may not care for it they still realise the internet is a big scary place and handle it anyway.

If Steam takes a kicking (something I am all too happy to see) then I so very doubt it will be from anything like this but enough people making viable competitors,

 

[AbyssalMonkey]

If you are only going to play for 20 minutes then we are back at the same problem that the oxygen thieves at the various national rating boards face where you have to get devs to list things themselves.

Also repetition gets tedious -- I do not find COD a particular bastion of quality but they are certainly playable enough. Get me to back to back to back them one day/week and by the end I am going to be bored out of my skull.

Similarly you reckon reputation will be lost equivalent to the value of the wages and overhead? I am sure they could fund it, just the same as they could probably have a rounding error keep me in luxury for the rest of my life. Whether it is worth it for them is an entirely different matter which is where I was heading.
They have the numbers there in front of them and are not shy about using them, see also the left4dead2 petition when they went and saw how many that signed it actually went and got it in the end, and I am similarly sure it was considered for them.
The number of ultra puritanical people is getting lower by the day and while some may not care for it they still realise the internet is a big scary place and handle it anyway.

If Steam takes a kicking (something I am all too happy to see) then I so very doubt it will be from anything like this but enough people making viable competitors,

Being made to play tedious games over and over again is what they are paid to do. It's effectively a second QA by steam themselves rather than the developer. I see this as a non-issue. It's already being done in the industry (or at east at one point was, the buggy states of games these days are making me doubt they have QA anymore), and I'm sure GOG does something similar when they make older games work on modern hardware. For a games' distributor to put one in place is hardly a large step.

As for the reputation value equivalence, it's something only Valve can address. I'm hedging my bets on the long term and seeing the damage that the ongoing shovelwave will bring. It may not play out that way, but this matter is purely speculation from any point of view.

Steam will definitely kick the bucket due to competitors. But the only thing that will differentiate those competitors will be their stock. If Valve continues to sell everything, then the only marked difference you can make for a competitor would be the stock, or rather lack thereof. Valve is in a virtual monopoly, and people have sunk obscene amounts of money into their accounts. Getting them to move elsewhere will be difficult. This is why I pin the long term damage from shovelware and the decreased visibility so high in price. There is always the chance that people will go to these other stores to find games and then buy them on Steam, but this is a tenuous bridge to tread on. The more people visit that other store, the more likely it is they will just buy there instead.

 

[gamesquest1]

ebay is full of crap, I was just buying a new screwdriver set, and sure if I just type in "screwdriver set" I get lots of crap, but if I'm concerned about the quality I type in a specific brand and bingo I don't see all the junk, it makes no difference to me if crap screwdriver sets are on ebay, I'm not going to start demanding ebay curate all screwdrivers to ensure they meet my strict demands

I still ultimately bought it from ebay, I'm happy, they are happy, and people who just want dirt cheap crap might not be happy, but they really need to learn to think before they buy, and on that note sometimes I just want something cheap and crap, I wouldn't be happy if all £1 USB hubs were banned because they are slow, sometimes people just don't care and just want something cheap and low quality for whatever reason, ultimately let the customer decide for themselves

 

[AbyssalMonkey]

ebay is full of crap, I was just buying a new screwdriver set, and sure if I just type in "screwdriver set" I get lots of crap, but if I'm concerned about the quality I type in a specific brand and bingo I don't see all the junk, it makes no difference to me if crap screwdriver sets are on ebay, I'm not going to start demanding ebay curate all screwdrivers to ensure they meet my strict demands

I still ultimately bought it from ebay, I'm happy, they are happy, and people who just want dirt cheap crap might not be happy, but they really need to learn to think before they buy

Congratulations. You did the effective move of going onto Steam and searching for "Bethesda". No one is arguing this works well when you know exactly what you are looking for, but this isn't the crux of the discussion. Window shopping is a term that exists. Whether in a digital or physical store, you evaluate batches of goods at a time to discern their quality. When a good or even halfway decent game gets packed in a list with 20 other garbage ones, chances are high that it is just going to be passed over, just like you did with all those screwdrivers on eBay; there may have been a good one in there, but you didn't want to waste your time searching through the trash to find it.

You are a perfect example of why Valve should, in fact, curate.

 

[RedBlueGreen]

Congratulations. You did the effective move of going onto Steam and searching for "Bethesda". No one is arguing this works well when you know exactly what you are looking for, but this isn't the crux of the discussion. Window shopping is a term that exists. Whether in a digital or physical store, you evaluate batches of goods at a time to discern their quality. When a good or even halfway decent game gets packed in a list with 20 other garbage ones, chances are high that it is just going to be passed over, just like you did with all those screwdrivers on eBay; there may have been a good one in there, but you didn't want to waste your time searching through the trash to find it.

You are a perfect example of why Valve should, in fact, curate.

If you buy something just because you see it while window shopping it's your own fault you got burned. Valve doesn't need to do a bunch of curation because people are impulse buying things.

 

[FAST6191]

Do you have a good source of people that could do this kind of somewhat high level but still ultra tedious work for peanuts ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/30/top-five-wrong-reasons-you-dont-have-testers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/01/26/why-testers/ )? Because that is a really valuable pool of talent you have there. Set yourself up as a recruiter (distasteful I know) and you will make a packet.
Being paid is almost inconsequential in this and I doubt you will get better results from being paid, or paid more. It really is just that tedious and that hard a problem.

QA in modern games. I would look to it being a function of there being the ability to patch things and the complexity of the code itself. A few main loops of a game for an 8-16 bit era thing you can be fairly sure are good, 500 loops for just animation of npcs and that gets harder.

As for shovelware I still reckon it is a problem immediately solved by implementing some kind of properly thought out meta analysis -- they have sales numbers, price points, fairly accurate play times, fairly accurate launch counts, time between launches, likely a time spent hovering over it count, probably multiplayer data for lots of things, something resembling a crash count, and that is before we get to general and external reviews, wish lists and what have you or even http://deepsound.io/music_genre_recognition.html . Who cares if new releases is a wasteland?

 

[AbyssalMonkey]

If you buy something just because you see it while window shopping it's your own fault you got burned. Valve doesn't need to do a bunch of curation because people are impulse buying things.

Then why should stores bother to display anything at all? They display things so they can sell them. If Valve is missing sales because people are passing over games they would have bought because it's surrounded by a bunch of shit, that should be a problem. People will go elsewhere when they see you aren't selling what they want. It's little to do with being an impulse buy, that is an issue you can't solve. What you can do is make people have a better opinion of the store when they do decide to impulse buy. Not only will it bring positive PR, but it will also make them far more willing to try new things from your store.

Do you have a good source of people that could do this kind of somewhat high level but still ultra tedious work for peanuts ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/30/top-five-wrong-reasons-you-dont-have-testers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/01/26/why-testers/ )? Because that is a really valuable pool of talent you have there. Set yourself up as a recruiter (distasteful I know) and you will make a packet.
Being paid is almost inconsequential in this and I doubt you will get better results from being paid, or paid more. It really is just that tedious and that hard a problem.

QA in modern games. I would look to it being a function of there being the ability to patch things and the complexity of the code itself. A few main loops of a game for an 8-16 bit era thing you can be fairly sure are good, 500 loops for just animation of npcs and that gets harder.

As for shovelware I still reckon it is a problem immediately solved by implementing some kind of properly thought out meta analysis -- they have sales numbers, price points, fairly accurate play times, fairly accurate launch counts, time between launches, likely a time spent hovering over it count, probably multiplayer data for lots of things, something resembling a crash count, and that is before we get to general and external reviews, wish lists and what have you or even http://deepsound.io/music_genre_recognition.html . Who cares if new releases is a wasteland?

I feel the goal of "Find a bug" and "determine whether this game meets a quality standard" are two different goals. Those articles are talking about rigorously testing code until they break. While similar in nature, I don't think they serve the same purpose nor require the same set of skills and intensity of scrutiny.

The second point of mention you make is an interesting one. I feel it is effectively doing the same work what the QA team would be doing anyway. The data and reviews could be used as a faux representation of QA attitude. However, I think this is ultimately putting the cart before the horse. In order for that data to be generated, you would need to sell that game in the first place, which will ultimately negatively affect games that would have been sold otherwise if discoverability wasn't an issue. It's a retroactive solution rather than a preventative one, and one that would seemingly kill the seeds with the weeds.

 

[gamesquest1]

Then why should stores bother to display anything at all? They display things so they can sell them. If Valve is missing sales because people are passing over games they would have bought because it's surrounded by a bunch of shit, that should be a problem. People will go elsewhere when they see you aren't selling what they want. It's little to do with being an impulse buy, that is an issue you can't solve. What you can do is make people have a better opinion of the store when they do decide to impulse buy. Not only will it bring positive PR, but it will also make them far more willing to try new things from your store.


I feel the goal of "Find a bug" and "determine whether this game meets a quality standard" are two different goals. Those articles are talking about rigorously testing code until they break. While similar in nature, I don't think they serve the same purpose nor require the same set of skills and intensity of scrutiny.

The second point of mention you make is an interesting one. I feel it is effectively doing the same work what the QA team would be doing anyway. The data and reviews could be used as a faux representation of QA attitude. However, I think this is ultimately putting the cart before the horse. In order for that data to be generated, you would need to sell that game in the first place, which will ultimately negatively affect games that would have been sold otherwise if discoverability wasn't an issue. It's a retroactive solution rather than a preventative one, and one that would seemingly kill the seeds with the weeds.

there are ways to mitigate, giving a longer refund period for new developers etc maybe even enforcing a "free 30 mins before even committing to a purchase" on all indie games to allow people to trial a game before buying and allow people to submit reviews based on the free trial period, ultimately once you make yourself the arbiter you will always be swamped with people looking to you to try force you to allow them to be the arbiter via proxy, so they bash you until you cave into pressure, then you face a backlash on the other side as your seen as the authoritarian trying to police peoples freedom of choice

maybe have a much smaller "self" submitted certification process for games that have a very small playability that might be usurped by the 30 minute trial period (although I would like to think most games have at least an hour of playable content unless its free)

ultimately allowing people to trial indie games for free would be a really good step and might even encourage people to try more games and essentially buy more games once they discover they like them, and would allow the moral police to go about doing their own policing without expecting steam to cave in and ban things they don't like, although I could see people bot farming positive/negative reviews to try skew results, but maybe they could limit the program to a handful of games per week and only for people who have purchased over a certain amount of games already to mitigate that

 

[FAST6191]

Different goals but similar enough skill sets and requirements that I will conflate the two. Certainly I imagine anybody good at one will be good at the other, give or take those QA peeps with some coding skills that might just be slumming it or something.

As far as "in order for that data to be generated". I dare say they have it right now and inertia, to say nothing of most of their users not being drooling morons and continuing to be quite capable of looking things up externally, will carry them for long enough to generate it if not. It might get better as time goes on but what they have now is surely good enough.
Weight it properly, promote some new stuff as part of it all and it will all be good. This is all if not a solved problem then one there are very big companies doing lots with -- all this neural network stuff is doing almost exactly that and it looks like Valve already have some skills in that arena
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/16/valve-may-be-using-a-neural-net-against-counter-strike-cheater/
It is not even entirely out of the realm of possibility* that they have bots play the initially unknown to them games and generate some stuff that way, especially if they get devs to give them a few hooks.

Videos for the unfamiliar with the concept


*



https://gbatemp.net/threads/mit-dev...-that-can-compete-against-top-players.462500/

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

Good. The QC is a slippery slope, you can allow in a product you like and then reject a product you dislike even if it's perfectly good. Let the market run free.

 

[mituzora]

I hear people complaining about this move, and I think to myself, are you guys just THAT lazy that you have to complain about doing some research before you buy something? online shopping has a very similar issue. sure, they have some regulations to stop a crap product, but at the same time, companies will do whatever they can to cut corners. so you know what you do before you buy a product that you've never heard of before? research it. Steam even makes this easy for you telling you if a product is getting good reviews or not, even before you actually select the title for details. Its not that hard to pick a game worth its value out of a game that's literally less enjoyable than a dog turd.

Yes, this will make crap games more common, but you know what else it will do? allow better creative freedom on a mass platform. it's about damn time. Use your own brain power to determine if a game is bad or not, just like you would in a physical store on an online shop. simple.

 

[SG854]

Ah, that was a huge oversight. It was a less a matter of quality control from other developers and more a matter of quality control within their own department, right?

Plus, now that I think about it, people buy consoles with an implicit promise that there will be a fair amount of high-quality games released for it. This is less the case with Steam, as they're much less of a manufacturer and more of a software provider, so less skin off their backs, I suppose.

That's an odd way of thinking about it; I guess it would explain the recent trend in micotransactions as a means of monetizing a game. I remember Jim Sterling talking about a need for more mid-budget in the market. By just lowering the budget on a few of these games, it might make it easier for developers to recoup production costs and avoid such a crash. Nowadays, though, it seems that everything's either a small indie game made by a few people at most on no budget, or a multi-million dollar endeavor with a large number of developers pushed out by a big-name publisher.

The crash only happened in North America. It didn't happen anywhere else in the world.
Not enough quality control from other developers, too many consoles, too many bad games, and pc were same price as game consoles. PC let you play games and did more then what game consoles can, so why by a game console? So Video Game industry dropped 97% in sales.

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

I hear people complaining about this move, and I think to myself, are you guys just THAT lazy that you have to complain about doing some research before you buy something? online shopping has a very similar issue. sure, they have some regulations to stop a crap product, but at the same time, companies will do whatever they can to cut corners. so you know what you do before you buy a product that you've never heard of before? research it. Steam even makes this easy for you telling you if a product is getting good reviews or not, even before you actually select the title for details. Its not that hard to pick a game worth its value out of a game that's literally less enjoyable than a dog turd.

Yes, this will make crap games more common, but you know what else it will do? allow better creative freedom on a mass platform. it's about damn time. Use your own brain power to determine if a game is bad or not, just like you would in a physical store on an online shop. simple.

Exactly but you know, people are too much of fucking pussies to check what they're buying so they need "Quality Control" to tell them. Honestly, the QC I trust is myself and that's why I research what I buy.

"Oh no Steam has a no-no game" ugh for fuck sake, don't buy it. Just move the fuck on. Seriously.

You're not little kids anymore, so stop acting like everything needs to be pampered for ya.

The crash only happened in North America. It didn't happen anywhere else in the world.
Not enough quality control from other developers, too many consoles, too many bad games, and pc were same price as game consoles. PC let you play games and did more then what game consoles can, so why by a game console? So Video Game industry dropped 97% in sales.

NA consists of three countries United States, Canada and Mexico, and among others. I know, most people refer to NA as United States but that's still incorrect then again, a lot of people are geographically challenged.

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

Here's a perfect example of a game stage that would never pass in today's 'modern' society:



Is this kinda offensive? I can see some would think so why but it's still fun imo. See? Offensive comes off as subjective, and will remain as such.

 

[Xzi]

People keep pushing the idea that you have to "sift through" a ton of asset flips just to find the game you want on Steam. When has this ever been the case? Assuming you know the name of the game, you type 3-4 letters in the search bar, and there it is. If you don't know the name, there are several methods of browsing/sorting that push all the shit to the last pages so you never see it. The people shouting the loudest about this are worried about a problem that already has many solutions in Steam.

 

[RedBlueGreen]

People keep pushing the idea that you have to "sift through" a ton of asset flips just to find the game you want on Steam. When has this ever been the case? Assuming you know the name of the game, you type 3-4 letters in the search bar, and there it is. If you don't know the name, there are several methods of browsing/sorting that push all the shit to the last pages so you never see it. The people shouting the loudest about this are worried about a problem that already has many solutions in Steam.

Just look at the window shopping analogy from earlier. People don't want to be responsible for poor choices they make like impulse buying something bad, so instead it's up to the store to only carry high quality products even though that will make them less money in the long run. Apparently they should sacrifice time and money quality checking every little thing because the customer can't use their judgement properly. Just don't feel the need to buy every little thing you see and you won't get burned.