Alterego-X said:
So... who is being abused? The handful of reviewers who have bought Air Control specifically to rant about how bad it is, and profit from the video views?
Or the mythical "ordinary Steam user" who supposedly buys games at random browsing the "latest released" list, yet clearly the critically approved games sell well while these get hundreds of sales, and most of these AFTER they went viral for being bad?
The average users just want to buy Watch Dogs, and they could do that on either site, it might as well be Steam whether or not it also sells Air Control. The only people who would certainly be affected by tighter Steam quality control would be the handful of shithounds who intentionally look up games like this, but with the potential risk of genuinely popular games like Goat Simulator or Rust also getting kicked out of Steam before they could go viral.
Exactly.
It absolutely
confounds me how so many on this site; of whom generally demand acceptance of such things as fair use, non-censorship, user/customer choice, and creative freedom; can sit there and
demand Valve add some form of "quality control" to Steam.
What metrics do we use for such a system? What qualifiers do we use to define what constitutes a "good game" and a "bad game"?
Is it defined by whether or not the game functions well on PC? If that be the case, many popular triple-A games wouldn't make it onto Steam. More recently, Dark Souls 2 and Watch Dogs would be considered utter shit by this metric and would therefore not be sold on the Steam store.
Well obviously these people wouldn't want
that, so that can't be our metric. So what metric do we use instead?
Is it based on a game being a blatant scam, exploiting customers, or false advertisement?
Such blatant scams and entirely non-functional games have already been pulled from the Store and refunds sent to those who asked for them; while others have seen their devs forced to alter their game or risk being pulled. So this can't really be the metric we're looking for since it already exists.
So what's left? Do we judge a games "quality" by what enjoyment a user derives from it? If so, that's the
very definition of a subjective metric - which leaves us with a conundrum. Namely: Who gets to decide which games are fun and which aren't?
If I was in that position, there's no way Dark Souls 2 would make it onto Steam. That game, to me, is abysmally dull, tedious, and just awful to play; whereas something like Rust, even in its unfinished state, yields hours and hours of entertainment. Likewise, there are plenty of gamers that derive more enjoyment out of those dime-a-dozen simulator games than they do out of, say, big-budget games like Watch Dogs.
Everyone here seems so angry that Steam doesn't have a "quality control" system in place; desperate to see one implemented. However, it also seems like many of them haven't really considered what such a system
actually entails and what kind of effect it may have on an industry predicated almost entirely on creative freedom.
Alterego-X said:
I would rather have an absolutely free platform that has Air Control and Earth 2066, but ALSO has games like Minecraft, Goat Simulator, or Rust, than a platform that has neither, just a series of solid traditionally good games.
The ability to censor reviews should be taken away, and user-made storefronts should be set up inside the system, to make it a bit easier to make an informed judgements, but kicking games off from the system is not the solution.
I swear you and I are on the
exact same wavelength about this. I 100% agree with this sentiment.
