Jimquisition: Steam Needs Quality Control

[Jimothy Sterling]

Steam Needs Quality Control

Valve is squandering its reputation in a bid to have more content than the other guys. Does more content mean anything when that content is crap?

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[Mangod]

Guise of the Wolf got onto Steam...


Jim, you could have just shown 5 minutes of that game and then say "case closed". Valve is in desperate need of quality control, because some things should not be allowed to be sold.

 

[lassiie]

Great video, as always. Have been noticing this same decline of Steam over the last few years. There at the very least needs to be some sort of filter on there, so I can say "Don't show me any Greenlight or Early Access Games". The only early access games I have actually liked so far are Starbound and Starpoint Gemini 2. Hopefully, they can get their shit sorted out before it's too late.

 

[Eamar]

Yeah, I found myself wondering where it all went wrong with Steam just the other day.

I used to be able to browse the store quite happily, finding plenty to add to my wishlist and making the odd impulse purchase.

Now, if I don't go into it looking for a specific game I'm completely fucking lost, and frankly, I can't be arsed with wading through page after page of potentially dodgy content.

It's a shame, because I now pretty much only buy games I've heard lots of good things about already. Gone are the days where I'd stumble across an interesting looking little game I'd never heard of and take a chance on it, because it's just not worth wading through the crap to find the occasional diamond.

 

[OWENR22]

Bloody hell, how much stuff has he got on that podium now?

 

[LordLundar]

Question: at what point are you going to make the same demands of brick and mortar stores and other online stores like Gamefly?

Because everything you are accusing Steam of happens in every store, physical or digital. To say that Steam needs to filter when no one else does is disingenuous at best.

 

[Dragonbums]

Bloody hell, how much stuff has he got on that podium now?

Not enough. There is one member missing on that desk, and that object is the Belladonna ***** Fist.

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

Question: at what point are you going to make the same demands of brick and mortar stores and other online stores like Gamefly?

Because everything you are accusing Steam of happens in every store, physical or digital. To say that Steam needs to filter when no one else does is disingenuous at best.

Point to the bit in the video where I said "and no one else does," please.

 

[Blachman201_v1legacy]

Yeah, Greenlight and the community reviews are some pretty broken systems. It is far too easy for the various con-men and amateurs out there to rig the votes, while far too many small and actually skilled developers, with genuinely good products to offer, are being stonewalled by the system and left out in the cold.

 

[anthony87]

That...."game" that was shown at the very end, that was just a Left 4 Dead mod wasn't it? They're not actually charging for that right?

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Maybe Valve is just a greedy company that wants money.

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

That...."game" that was shown at the very end, that was just a Left 4 Dead mod wasn't it? They're not actually charging for that right?

Ten bucks. And what you saw is the HEAVILY patched and improved version compared to what it was at launch.

 

[WashAran]

But if they put in quality control, devs are going to complain again about how long it takes to get there game in to the store. There have been enough articals about these complains in the last year.

 

[J Tyran]

The quality of content on Steam is only one of three things current gaming shares with the crash in the 80s.

1, Huge drop in quality with broken and barely functional games, with shit games from big and small publishers alike its easy to spend money on something you wished you hadn't.

2, Gaming machine spam, loads of rubbish consoles with no real market but companies are eager to cash in. See the amount of over priced Android consoles from loads of companies, including Madcatz and Amazon as well as the Ouya. The average consumer didn't really know where to spend money, there are loads of devices aimed at gaming from gaming tablets and handhelds to Android consoles, PCs and the offerings from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. The market is hugely diluted at the moment

3, Ever growing tide of consumer dissatisfaction, it mainly started against big publishers like EA and Activision but with dozens of incompetent small developers and publishers trying to chase dollar signs this is rapidly spreading to the once darling child of indie gaming.

Now I am not claiming there will be a crash at all just saying those three things where among the main causes of the big crash.

 

[Slash2x]

Ehhh... I go back and forth on this... Obviously the QC at the PS3 and Xbox 360 camp did so well with Aliens:CM.... BUUUT we seem to expect more from Steam because well it is PC(MAC/Linux). Right now the best thing we have to QC for steam is the player reviews.... But that means some poor SOB bought a turd of a product first, and that kind of sits raw with me.

Edit forgot to tell you thanks for telling me to avoid recoil I was looking that the other day!

 

[LordLundar]

Question: at what point are you going to make the same demands of brick and mortar stores and other online stores like Gamefly?

Because everything you are accusing Steam of happens in every store, physical or digital. To say that Steam needs to filter when no one else does is disingenuous at best.

Point to the bit in the video where I said "and no one else does," please.

All I heard was "Steam needs to, Steam needs to". I did not hear the same demands toward Gamestop (both physical store and digital), Best Buy, Gamefly, etc. In fact, the only mention of another store was GoG who does filter (and even then they have made mistakes) and that's mainly because because their primary market is classic games modified by them so they HAVE to issue that promise.

So I ask again: where's the demand for other stores to require quality control at the level you're demanding of Steam?

 

[Gennadios]

Question: at what point are you going to make the same demands of brick and mortar stores and other online stores like Gamefly?

Because everything you are accusing Steam of happens in every store, physical or digital. To say that Steam needs to filter when no one else does is disingenuous at best.

Stores have limited shelf space, and people have to go through the added inconvenience of of physically going there. That alone is enough incentive for store managers to stock games they know will sell and people will at worst not mind, since it guarantees customers will keep going back.

For me, I think the democracy system of Greenlight is a failure. People just vote up the drek on there by concept alone and few people actually bother with the no vote, guaranteeing that the game will eventually get enough votes to get through. That's why we have 3 sandbox zombie games on steam, none of which are worth it and only one of which has potential.

For me, Greenlight jumped the shark when Dragon's Lair was released. Say what you will about it's significance to gaming history, all it is is a cruel satire of the current state AAA games industry where interactivity is slowly bleeding out in favor of a pretty presentation.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Well we can all agree that Greenlight is not doing the job. Outsourcing your quality control onto your users when your users have proven they'll buy Early Access games that aren't even functional was a bad idea.

 

[Lightknight]

Jim, I think one of Valve's big pushes is to create a relatively open environment with reasonable access (while making even more money for doing so, of course). There's a difference between unplayable and ugly/glitchy/bad. How do they walk the line between the worlds of relatively open access vs closed and controlled? Who sets the standards and how are they gauged? There are some truly innovative indie games that wouldn't pass most standards but end up being great to play.

I think I'd rather see them implement a much more reliable customer response to games. Just something that can't be controlled by the developers like it is now. A steam equivalent of metacritic. Most of the crappier games have no link to metacritic and so you have to go off-site to review them. Even likes aren't always displayed. This nonsense of forced lack of critical information is the most valid point anyone has mentioned for Steam's content so far (so thanks for bringing that to my attention, can't believe that developers control customer content on steam).

I know steam benefits when people unknowingly buy shit. I mean, free money and they're likely to buy another game sooner because they're not going to spend more time playing that garbage? Yeah, it benefits them multiple ways. But informed consumerism is a conerstone of a healthy market.

 

[EvilestDeath]

$15 for this? It may be broken but I paid $60 for Battlefield 4 at launch sold it, got it again for christmas months later and it was and is still in an poor state, so maybe Steam is not the ones we should focus on maybe, the devs perhaps who let their products come out in these kind of ways?