Jimquisition: Salt Of The Earth - A Steam Fail Story

[Alterego-X]

steam should at least take away the dev's ability to delete threads and posts

The best solution to let them have the ability to delete comments, but in a way that users can still see them if specifically chosen. Works against NSFW and most types of spam, but still gives people an option to reveal foul play.

 

[PG]

That's the thing though--the whole point of crowd-sourcing is that the crowd is supposed to make that decision, not Valve. Valve just needs to give gamers the proper tools to do our thing.

If the customers don't want anything other than instant gratification, with no interest in providing constructive criticism...then that's just how it is. Pre-order sales have existed for a long time, and customers get even less for them, so clearly it's a thing people want.

No it isn't, that's the point of Greenlight, a completely separate system. And people want to throw shit at old ladies for a laugh, doesn't mean we should let them.

 

[Kitsune Hunter]

I don't know whether I should laugh or be disgusted at the way Muxwell is behaving, he's acting like a child who got caught stealing from the biscuit tin before dinner. I just hope when the whole thing comes out, the critics including yourself Jim come down hard and show no mercy

 

[Hutzpah Chicken]

I would not say that Steam is failing as a platform. Sure, they have a large sum of games that aren't worth purchasing (by the way, if one finds a terrible game, one does not need to purchase it) but Steam still has a slew of great games within their catalog. Steam is not going to fail because it is an open platform. It may lose some people who are foolish enough to continuously buy sub-par games, but that damage is no where near critical.

The very openness of Steam is a factor to its popularity. Quality control is something that should be left to the players. All one needs to do is see how others react to a game and proceed at their own risk. With an office of Quality Control, or however a company branded quality control organization is branded, the decision to make a game available is subject to a small group of people. The chances that this group of controllers share the same views as the larger Steam public is very slim. The rating system within Steam, the incredibly large community that reviews games, and the judgement of each and every one of us is a far superior method.

Remember, if there is a game that doesn't look good or is overpriced, don't buy it. If you do buy something that is terrible, then learn from your mistake and move on.

 

[Abnaxis]

That could work. I'm not sure how I feel it tbh. My thing is about drawing a distinction between functionally complete but shitty games versus broken incomplete games.

I don't want anyone dictating what's a shitty or good game to me. Frankly, there's a number of games that most people would find shitty that I love.

Oh no, I don't think anyone should decide whether it's shitty--the decision is, whether it's used. Again with the shirt metaphor, if I buy a shirt--wear it for a day, get it dirty and stretch it out--and try to take it back, I think it's reasonable for the vendor to say "Hell no," because I already got what I paid for (though plenty of stores will still take it back even then). OTOH, if I buy a shirt, take it home, and find out the pants I wanted to wear with it clash, it's fair game because I never really "used" the shirt

By the same token, if I buy a Guise of the Wolf, boot it up, and find it an ugly mess with no redeeming factors after five minutes of play, I should be able to give it back. however, if I buy Mass Effect 3, play through the whole campaign, then get pissed off by the ending, I got all the hours of play that I paid for, even if I consider the product shitty.

Quality isn't really of issue, whether you've "used up" the product is. The problem with that is, hours of gameplay vary so wildly from title to title, so it's not easy to come up with a standard for saying "alright, you've gotten enough entertainment, now you're stuck with it."

 

[Mydnyght]

I think I shall visit the Troll Tavern for a good laugh. Anyone else?

I just did. Sure takes up a good portion of your day.

So anyway, with all that shit piling up there, it's only a matter of time before Muxwell finally gives up and caves in. He can't hide behind that meme avatar forever, can he?

Also saw Sterling's "early access squirt" playthrough. My condolences to him for putting up with that garbage, from the lousy bullet visuals to the really loud and out-of-place motor revving and metal clanging... to that generic sky picture that gets mirror-imaged below the game map's plane.

Really.... $19.99 for... that? And how Muxwell is handling all this criticism.... I'd hate to think how he'd act if he ever came to this site.

 

[NortherWolf]

So, let me get this straight. One asshole releases a shitty product. The fault is his, but the real villain here, the mastermind of madness, the dictator of darkness...Is VALVE! They(or , Steam as they've apparently renamed themselves) are the true blight upon PC gaming! They, as the owners of a gaming store should enforce draconian rules so as not to sully the genepool of the master race!

Why, of course this is so, just the other day I tossed excrement at a Game Shop employee for daring to carry a bad game. It is my duty as a Member of the PC Master Gaming Race after all. We cannot allow free choice...

Shame about you Jim, thought you had some good stuff for a while, but your "STEAM NEEDS TO ANSWER!" stuff is a bit tiresome. Steam is a damn store, the only thing Valve need to answer is refunds and keeping obvious scams gone. But people here seem to want for steam to crash so they can roll around in their own smug filth and go "Told you so! Filthy pleb!"

 

[Glaice]

This game and others (Guise of the Wolf, Day One: Garry's Incident, etc) are clear examples why Early Access and Greenlight need to be fixed.

 

[jehk]

That could work. I'm not sure how I feel it tbh. My thing is about drawing a distinction between functionally complete but shitty games versus broken incomplete games.

I don't want anyone dictating what's a shitty or good game to me. Frankly, there's a number of games that most people would find shitty that I love.

Oh no, I don't think anyone should decide whether it's shitty--the decision is, whether it's used. Again with the shirt metaphor, if I buy a shirt--wear it for a day, get it dirty and stretch it out--and try to take it back, I think it's reasonable for the vendor to say "Hell no," because I already got what I paid for (though plenty of stores will still take it back even then). OTOH, if I buy a shirt, take it home, and find out the pants I wanted to wear with it clash, it's fair game because I never really "used" the shirt

By the same token, if I buy a Guise of the Wolf, boot it up, and find it an ugly mess with no redeeming factors after five minutes of play, I should be able to give it back. however, if I buy Mass Effect 3, play through the whole campaign, then get pissed off by the ending, I got all the hours of play that I paid for, even if I consider the product shitty.

Quality isn't really of issue, whether you've "used up" the product is. The problem with that is, hours of gameplay vary so wildly from title to title, so it's not easy to come up with a standard for saying "alright, you've gotten enough entertainment, now you're stuck with it."

That's a pretty good argument tbh. I think a standard could be found. Hell, a half hour with a game is usually enough for me.

I don't think it would ever fly though. Too many bigger corporations would lose their shit. Steam's basically giving their customers a mini demo. Extra Credits did a episode on that.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Oh lord, I saw a thread on the Steam board where Muxwell admits that he couldn't charge more than $20 for an early access game.

He's basically admitting the entire game is a scam and he'd have scammed people for more money if he could.

 

[Deadagent]

I'm pretty sure that guy didn't read any of what you said to begin with

I did, but his wording was such that it definetly left that possibility there so I asked for clarification

and I find it comical that he somehow looped Sarkeesian into this.

I was only pointing out that Jim is perfectly fine calling out this Muxwell for his scam, but will defend another

He says "it's pc and there is no quality control on an open platform and that's ok" but then goes on about a woman that did a kickstarter to produce videos based on the works she's already started but that is somehow wrong because there's, apparently, quality control on the internet.

I never said that internet has quality control nor did I imply so either. Strawmanning ain't getting you anywhere. Also I am saying that open platforms tend to have more crap on them by default, thats just how it is. Valve specifically want's to open up steam for everyone, and if thats their goal then inevitably they will end up with more crap as well. Now trying to get that crap to sink to the bottom as quickly as possible is another matter entierly. But my point stands, steam dosen't need quality control. At least not traditional quality control

And the kicker is pretending like there was nothing but civil conversations and arguments against her views and then brushes off the hundreds of rape threats and terrible behavior like defacing web pages or calling her a scammer which really isn't the case. I find it shameful that there are people out there that are more offended by her ideas than the fools that threatened her with rape and murder.

I never brushed off the death threats, I fully acknowledged them, you on the other hand brush off everyone critising her as a troll. Civil discussion was happening and I even sent her a perfectly polite e-mail asking about what shes using the money for, unsuprisingly she still hasn't responded. Also death and rape threats are not a rare occurence at all. Anyone with an opinion on the internet has gotten their fair share of hatred, male or female. And yes that includes death and rape threats for men too. Why are you pretending that this is an issue of gender instead of being one of simple disagreement.

So, let me get this straight. One asshole releases a shitty product. The fault is his, but the real villain here, the mastermind of madness, the dictator of darkness...Is VALVE! They(or , Steam as they've apparently renamed themselves) are the true blight upon PC gaming! They, as the owners of a gaming store should enforce draconian rules so as not to sully the genepool of the master race!

Why, of course this is so, just the other day I tossed excrement at a Game Shop employee for daring to carry a bad game. It is my duty as a Member of the PC Master Gaming Race after all. We cannot allow free choice...

Shame about you Jim, thought you had some good stuff for a while, but your "STEAM NEEDS TO ANSWER!" stuff is a bit tiresome. Steam is a damn store, the only thing Valve need to answer is refunds and keeping obvious scams gone. But people here seem to want for steam to crash so they can roll around in their own smug filth and go "Told you so! Filthy pleb!"

Thank you, my tought's exactly

 

[PG]

So, let me get this straight. One asshole releases a shitty product. The fault is his, but the real villain here, the mastermind of madness, the dictator of darkness...Is VALVE! They(or , Steam as they've apparently renamed themselves) are the true blight upon PC gaming! They, as the owners of a gaming store should enforce draconian rules so as not to sully the genepool of the master race!

Why, of course this is so, just the other day I tossed excrement at a Game Shop employee for daring to carry a bad game. It is my duty as a Member of the PC Master Gaming Race after all. We cannot allow free choice...

Shame about you Jim, thought you had some good stuff for a while, but your "STEAM NEEDS TO ANSWER!" stuff is a bit tiresome. Steam is a damn store, the only thing Valve need to answer is refunds and keeping obvious scams gone. But people here seem to want for steam to crash so they can roll around in their own smug filth and go "Told you so! Filthy pleb!"

I don't think anyone's saying that Valve is somehow being malicious here, just that their execution of Early Access has some pretty big holes that need to be patched up if it's going to continue. I don't think it would take the whole service down with it, it'd just get marginalised and everyone would adapt and ignore it, but Valve should probably aspire to better than that.
And treating it as some libertarian bastion of the industry isn't healthy either (not directed at you, just saying in general).

 

[Pete_alreadyinuse]

I wonder what can be done about suppressing criticism by moderation. Maybe take the option to entirely delete a Post away, just collapse it instead and give users the option to read it anyway. That way you can't completely hide unwelcome opinions. However it wouldn't work well against massive amounts of spam. Moderation coming directly from steam would of course be a better option, but they would need to hire a massive moderation staff.

(I do not particularly care about a shitty overpriced early A game since preventing that simply is not what I want from a shop. I do prefer being able to get what I want over stream without having to hope that it got through their process. I don't expect amazon to not have shitty books either, I just expect the books to be physically intact and complete. And if they actively recommend something to me or advertise it I hope they do some QA. However giving a short time to try and return games again would be a nice feature.)

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

steam should at least take away the dev's ability to delete threads and posts

The best solution to let them have the ability to delete comments, but in a way that users can still see them if specifically chosen. Works against NSFW and most types of spam, but still gives people an option to reveal foul play.

well it would be atleast better than the current solution

 

[softclocks]

So, let me get this straight. One asshole releases a shitty product. The fault is his, but the real villain here, the mastermind of madness, the dictator of darkness...Is VALVE! They(or , Steam as they've apparently renamed themselves) are the true blight upon PC gaming! They, as the owners of a gaming store should enforce draconian rules so as not to sully the genepool of the master race!

Why, of course this is so, just the other day I tossed excrement at a Game Shop employee for daring to carry a bad game. It is my duty as a Member of the PC Master Gaming Race after all. We cannot allow free choice...

Shame about you Jim, thought you had some good stuff for a while, but your "STEAM NEEDS TO ANSWER!" stuff is a bit tiresome. Steam is a damn store, the only thing Valve need to answer is refunds and keeping obvious scams gone. But people here seem to want for steam to crash so they can roll around in their own smug filth and go "Told you so! Filthy pleb!"

Exactly what I was thinking.

Steam should certainly try to pick up on obvious lies and games that aren't playable (like the EA ones that were shut down), but this just seems like a bad game. Is he upset because people are going to be looking to him for reviews now? So that he might have to start doing his job? : 3

Game reviewers have been a joke the last 4-5 years now. They should be grateful someone's making them useful again.

 

[shrekfan246]

Whatever. If not for Steam, that guy could still do the exact same thing on his own website. PC gaming is an open platform.

It makes much more sense for Steam to grab for all of it, than to be a small walled garden somewhere inside of it. More like an universal marketplace for the whole platform, than a brand that's pre-filtered products you "trust".

If they would try to appeal to quality control and a reliable lineup, they would accidentally filter out at least SOME potential gems, and that would give an opportunity to other webstores to gain a foothold by gathering those. It makes more sense to let in ALL the developers, good ones and shitty ones, and let others build inner recommedation lists and branded lineups inside the platform they own.

That's exactly how the video game crash of '83 happened, you realize.

There was zero regulation on what was flooding the marketplace, leading to endless numbers of terrible clones and unfinished shovelware being pushed out and completely saturating the market, bursting the bubble and causing people to basically stop buying games because they couldn't put any faith that what they were buying was actually going to be good.

The exact same thing is now currently happening with Steam.

The problem with the complete lack of oversight put on Greenlight and Early Access is that consumers will support things based on an idea rather than any hard evidence. In an ideal world, that would be fine. But we don't live in an ideal world. When you combine that with the fact that Steam allows publishers to dump their entire back catalogs onto its service and how many publishers have recently taken to shoving mobile ports and Facebook or Flash-esque games onto the platform, it all coalesces into a horrifying congealed mess that makes Steam impossible to navigate and simply hides and takes publicity away from the games and developers who actually deserve it.

Or to put it more simply, it's just bad business for Steam to allow this. PC gaming is an open platform, but Steam is the biggest "storefront" you'll find on it. For the longest time, many games simply would not be successful on the PC if they weren't released on Steam. By allowing anything and everything to be released on Steam now, people will be burnt out on trying to sift through the sheer amount of complete crap found every day on the front page, and eventually they'll stop bothering. I know, it's already started happening to me. The weekly deals and daily releases on Steam are almost uniformly terrible and not worth even looking at, and at a point it becomes no longer worth trying to cycle through all of the crap to find the good stuff.

EDIT: And it has been confirmed by many indie developers in the past that being on the front page of Steam matters. It creates a huge spike in sales, and when their game moves off the front page they get a dramatic drop in overall sales until it gets discounted.

 

[Abnaxis]

No it isn't, that's the point of Greenlight, a completely separate system. And people want to throw shit at old ladies for a laugh, doesn't mean we should let them.

Greenlight is not a crowd-sourcing platform, it's a market research tool. There doesn't need to be any finished product for Greenlight, it's just developers sticking ideas up and seeing if people like them or not. No money changes hands. No resources are gathered for development. Valve just takes Greenlight approval as de facto evidence that a game has enough appeal to add to their platform.

Early Access, OTOH, collects money for gamers on an unfinished product, presumably to fund further improvements to the unfinished work. It's similar to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, except the bar is...let's say it's in a different place than those Crowdfunding services.

To me, the point of Early Access is to get crowdsourced funding and crowdsourced testing, giving it funding and criticism to make a better product.

Fundamentally, for crowdsourcing any resources given to the developer come as a result of broad support. It's not up to Steam to decide how broad that support is going to be ahead of time--the crowd needs to have final say in crowdsourcing. If a game is a POS, then it won't get any money, never get any better quality, and stay at the bottom of the shit heap like it deserves.

And there's a world of difference between letting people spend money on whatever they bloody want (no matter how stupid) and letting people throw shit at old ladies.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

So, let me get this straight. One asshole releases a shitty product. The fault is his, but the real villain here, the mastermind of madness, the dictator of darkness...Is VALVE! They(or , Steam as they've apparently renamed themselves) are the true blight upon PC gaming! They, as the owners of a gaming store should enforce draconian rules so as not to sully the genepool of the master race!

Why, of course this is so, just the other day I tossed excrement at a Game Shop employee for daring to carry a bad game. It is my duty as a Member of the PC Master Gaming Race after all. We cannot allow free choice...

Shame about you Jim, thought you had some good stuff for a while, but your "STEAM NEEDS TO ANSWER!" stuff is a bit tiresome. Steam is a damn store, the only thing Valve need to answer is refunds and keeping obvious scams gone. But people here seem to want for steam to crash so they can roll around in their own smug filth and go "Told you so! Filthy pleb!"

I don't think anyone's saying that Valve is somehow being malicious here, just that their execution of Early Access has some pretty big holes that need to be patched up if it's going to continue. I don't think it would take the whole service down with it, it'd just get marginalised and everyone would adapt and ignore it, but Valve should probably aspire to better than that.
And treating it as some libertarian bastion of the industry isn't healthy either (not directed at you, just saying in general).

while i dont think standard quality control (reviewing each release individually) would benefit standard releases considering what steam aims to be (a more open store) i think normal QC could work for early access, i mean i think early access is meant to be a program that shouldnt apply to all games, just certain ones in need of feedback and funding, the problem would be commig up with appropiate criteria for early access games, how early should be the build?

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

No it isn't, that's the point of Greenlight, a completely separate system. And people want to throw shit at old ladies for a laugh, doesn't mean we should let them.

Greenlight is not a crowd-sourcing platform, it's a market research tool. There doesn't need to be any finished product for Greenlight, it's just developers sticking ideas up and seeing if people like them or not. No money changes hands. No resources are gathered for development. Valve just takes Greenlight approval as de facto evidence that a game has enough appeal to add to their platform.

Early Access, OTOH, collects money for gamers on an unfinished product, presumably to fund further improvements to the unfinished work. It's similar to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, except the bar is...let's say it's in a different place than those Crowdfunding services.

To me, the point of Early Access is to get crowdsourced funding and crowdsourced testing, giving it funding and criticism to make a better product.

Fundamentally, for crowdsourcing any resources given to the developer come as a result of broad support. It's not up to Steam to decide how broad that support is going to be ahead of time--the crowd needs to have final say in crowdsourcing. If a game is a POS, then it won't get any money, never get any better quality, and stay at the bottom of the shit heap like it deserves.

And there's a world of difference between letting people spend money on whatever they bloody want (no matter how stupid) and letting people throw shit at old ladies.

thats a valid observation of early access


needs some form of accountability tough, maybe a limited refund program

 

[Thanatos2k]

So, let me get this straight. One asshole releases a shitty product. The fault is his, but the real villain here, the mastermind of madness, the dictator of darkness...Is VALVE! They(or , Steam as they've apparently renamed themselves) are the true blight upon PC gaming! They, as the owners of a gaming store should enforce draconian rules so as not to sully the genepool of the master race!

Why, of course this is so, just the other day I tossed excrement at a Game Shop employee for daring to carry a bad game. It is my duty as a Member of the PC Master Gaming Race after all. We cannot allow free choice...

Shame about you Jim, thought you had some good stuff for a while, but your "STEAM NEEDS TO ANSWER!" stuff is a bit tiresome. Steam is a damn store, the only thing Valve need to answer is refunds and keeping obvious scams gone. But people here seem to want for steam to crash so they can roll around in their own smug filth and go "Told you so! Filthy pleb!"

If crime is high in a city, in order to lower crime do you blame the criminals or the police?

Valve is the police here, if you didn't get the analogy.