shrekfan246 said:
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.
This, all of this is exactly how I've felt about Steam the past 2-3 years, I've hardly been interested to even bother sifting through Steam's front page and even then the genres (which still seem cluttered and wrongly placed at times).
The recent indie titles on my Steam list were mostly Early Access games gifted to me by friends and a good chunk of those turned out to suck and in general become something awful with only PA RTS and Starbound being the tiny exceptions on my list, the rest are older AAA titles of slightly new and old that I knew were great in general without having to visit site after site, watch video after video to be told if the game sucks or not.
Before I hopped onto Steam and played on my PS3 and eventually the 360 I knew exactly what i was getting into when I;d bought those games for those platforms, I hardly had to do any form of special research or rely on someone like TB or Angry Joe like some total messiah that will lead us to the promised land of gaming, back then things were more or less decent and simple.
Now I don't even feel like looking at the front page of Steam at all, I'm just entirely put off by it and now all I rely on is after closing a game that Steam has a popup to let me know one of my old bookmarked games is on sale that I know are good to begin with, that's really all I have left.
I'm in your boat but at the same time the few here that say we should be allowed the bad and the good feels the equivalent of saying "you don't like the bad shit, leave because I was here first and what we say as a people goes", it's more worse than the actual store itself...
I'd much rather walk into a store like HMV and at least know what's in there isn't bootlegged crap or shit I have to forcefully sift through and mostly ask complete strangers "yo is this bootlegged beetles album any good?", I'd rather Steams old QA than Community and no QA at all, I don't want oversaturated shit and a random stranger certainly should never be put in charge of the store I'd want to shop at.
In short Steam still needs to get it's crap together, people need to really get over the user controlled "open environment" because it just goes against other people in the long run or forces your will on theirs, get over it and let Steam return to what it should be, a store front with store controlled QA, other popular world renowned stores exist in this world with their QA, steam can god damn do the same and live.
Also Steam still has it;s own flaws and that too needs to be acknowledged, don't ask, just do not, realise and understand.