Cleaning up Steam, your suggestions?

[Bombiz]

look fellas, youd be hard pressed to find someone who loves steam more than i, im certain if it wasnt because of it, me and a couple of friends wouldnt be into gaming, atleast not legally, thanks to trading i have been able to earn some awfully needed money off steam in the past, the company behind Steam, Valve, has made some of my favorite games ever and i deeply admire em for their pro-customer and pro-dev morals and their desire to push the industry foward


in short, all Glory to the Astute, Benevolent and Extraordinary Newell

HOWEVER!

recently there was been a huge influx of shovelware on steam, and while i didnt entirely dismiss the problem i thought it wasnt that big of a deal, until now, after reading about dead games being sold on the store and watching this TotalBiscuit video in which he shows an old game so badly ported to new systems, it needs to be burned into a CD in order to run properly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLNh5HPbQPo

the video also shows a few nice features which would help to clean up the storefront

personally i also think Valve could add a recommended selection to the store page, personalized just for you, they could use the data theyve gathered with the steam user reviews and game tags to provide a more or less accurate selection, they could even allow this selection to be refreshed each day or even each time you visit the storefront, im not talking about the recommended section btw, i mean something like "Recently updated" or "Featured PC games"


what features do you think steam needs to properly push quality games to the front page?

People need to stop being so reverential to valve and Steam. It's good but it needs to face fiercer criticism than it has done in the past. It seems to have become something of a sacred cow in the gaming community and this needs to change. A good kicking once in a while is healthy for any company. Sony learned from the ps3 and hopefully microsoft will learn from the xbone.

I don't want to talk about boycotts or anything, but if more people complained and made a fuss i'm sure they might at least take notice.

i dont see that happening in the near future since valve is by far one of the most pro-customers and successful video game companies around, there really isnt much else they could do better


but well, as i said i am a huge valve/steam fan, believe me when i tell you i have my reasons

Steam need to hire more staff and try and get some quality control. They won't because people are afraid of critiquing them. Steam are not your friends, valve are not your friends, they are a business. I've said it before, the 'customer friendly' image is just that. If they were truly customer friendly they would refund when someone gets ripped off.

Steam was a good platform, it can be again. But it's letting vast amounts of crap onto it. Use the ideas in the video. Hire more staff to check games before they hit steam.

of course valve is a business ive never said otherwise, they dont go out of their way to screw over customers, and for me thats worth a lot, plus theres some stuff they do that shows they do care atleast a little bit for their customers

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/06/27/steam-workshop-now-lets-creators-give-back-to-their-supporters/

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/12/25/left-4-dead-2-is-free-on-steam-until-tomorrow/



the thing with quality control is, it might not be the best solution and Valve knows this, they are trying to move to a more self-publishing model, and having to check every single game that gets into steam might just make the whole thing clunkier, it wasnt that long ago back when indie devs complained about how hard it was to get into steam, i dont think Valve wants steam to go back to those days

as much as i love Valve and Steam, im not afriad to critize them, i just think your solution would the best for the direction Valve wants for Steam

The thing is, if you run a site that hosts peoples content then you are to a certain degree responsible for the content that appears on that site. Stores like amazon try this and while occasionally stuff slips they are far better at dealing with customer complaints than Steam. Consumers have rights, I don't think someone buying a game they dislike should warrant a refund BUT a clearly faulty game should. If Steam don't want to refund customers then they should employ a level of quality control. Simply deduct the money from the publisher when a customer asks for refund, much in the way a marketplace seller on Amazon loses its money.

If anyone can stick whatever they want onto Steam what's to stop far right organisations sticking racist/homophobic games onto Steam.

Steam are a big platform now. They can hire more people. Have them test the game before it hits. It would not be that difficult.

like i said im not sure thats the best solution


but improving the customer service when it comes to refunds might be a great way to deter broken games from appearing on the store, since devs wouldnt get money off of them

I agree on the refunds part.

BUT.

Steam NEEDS some form of content/quality control. Even if its just looking more closely at the thumbs up/downs at the bottom of the screen and listening to the people using the games.

It also needs to make sure no one is sneaking games like Rapelay or stuff like this...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_fLfBZaDMw

They are responsible for the content they host.

well recently people discovered valve is testing some sort of report feature precisely to avoid something like rapelay and other problematic products finding its way into the store

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/03/13/steam-will-allow-you-to-report-a-product-for-malware-pornography-other-reasons/

its a better solution than quality control i just hope it doesnt get abused like game tags initially where, since the abuse could have far worse consequences than some vandalism and i hope you dont actually have to buy shitty games in order to report em

apparently you can report games for pedophilia. which if Valve isn't checking the games they put up on steam for that, I don'y think they can be trusted to due content quality control.

also they talked extensively about this on polaris podcast this week. it was basically the only thing they talked about.

 

[Sight Unseen]

Whether you like the titles on Steam or not they have a right to be there. They pay money to put their game up. At the end of the day Valve is a business (who gets roughly 30% of sales on Steam) and it's about making money. The only times games should be removed from Steam is when they are literally unplayable, meaning they don't launch or end support (there is a clause that the developer must support their games to an extent or be removed).

The problem comes when these no name publishers take their old shovelware games from 2005 and put them on the steam store bit by bit and they get first page "new release" status alongside other ACTUALLY new and potentially good games.

There's so many games released every day now (most are crap or early access too) that the actually good games dont have a very long shelf life on the "New releases" page, which TB has shown directly correlates to increased sales. They're just getting pushed out by all the shovelware. Also some of these games we're seeing now ARE barely playable. Have you seen TB's Guise of the Wolf video? or his Desert Gunner one? These should not be allowed to masquerade as actual games with all the other real, working games, and they should not be allowed to charge actual money for them.

OT:

Steam actually does have a "Recommended" tab on the store page. You get it by hovering your mouse over store and clicking "Recommended" from the dropdown menu. I never actually use it though so idk how functional it is.

I like the new tags feature for steam games but it seems like Valve is spending a lot of time curating that instead of the actual games it posted. They are banning plenty of tags, including many useful ones like "bad port" and "Mobile port" which are actually important tags for some people. Instead of moderating their tags they should be moderating their games.

 

[DoPo]

This is rather insignificant, but allow renaming or manual sorting of games in your library. Certain series like Tomb Raider, Hitman, have inconsistent naming conventions, which makes working out release order a bit irritating - especially when the number in the series isn't included in the title.
And it would be so easy to incorporate into the Steam client!

This is so annoying with Heroes games, since Ubisoft, for some rather stupid reason[footnote]Well, technically they probably do want to group the entire M&M franchise together...which still doesn't make much sense as "of Might and Magic" is a well established naming convention for literally decades. In fact, one of these decades belongs to Ubisoft themselves. And even then, most of the time nobody refers to the games by the full name - Heroes is enough to identify the game, same with Dark Messiah and so on. The namespacing is not really needed and actually gets in the way. So yes, the naming convention is rather stupid overall[/footnote] decided to name the new one Might & Magic Heroes 6, rather than Heroes of Might & Magic which means any time I need to find it, I go to "H" first, then scroll to "M" after briefly wandering why am I missing a game. It's annoying. And for the times I don't use the client to launch it (for, I actually have those things called "shortcuts" which I use to launch games from) I am still mislead, for I immediately go to the more recognisable icon of Heroes 3 SOD and then I need to find the new one again.

At any rate - a possible solution is adding the games to a category in the client[footnote]which lets me get back to my gripe with Ubisoft - WE CAN ALREADY HAVE OUR M&M FRANCHISE TOGETHER. If we choose to, at least. The namespacing is doubly idiotic when you take into account that we DON'T NEED IT in order get its effects. You can have categories in Steam or just groups of shortcuts on your PC. Pretty much any way of launching the games would offer some way of grouping them. And that is IF one even wants them grouped - technically M&M itself is really rather different than Heroes, so I, at least, would not want them in the same place - I would prefer to have games similar games together, so games like Heroes would be with Heroes, not...other completely unrelated stuff.[/footnote]. Not an ideal solution at all, but a solution, at least.

 

[Callate]

I agree with Totalbiscuit's point that better filters should be employed, and companies should be obliged to publicize when their games were first released, rather than simply that they're "new to Steam".

...But as far as curation goes, I suspect it's a manpower issue. It doesn't take much time for someone to note that a dozen titles are new and hot on any given day, but going through hundreds or thousands to distinguish that game X from 2003 is a cult classic but game Y from 2003 is shovelware is the sort of thing that could require multiple new positions entirely devoted to the task. What separates Valve from many other companies, in a big part, is that it's a relatively small company in which people are free to pursue passion products. Hiring on people to do such drudgery isn't exactly their usual modus operandi.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

look fellas, youd be hard pressed to find someone who loves steam more than i, im certain if it wasnt because of it, me and a couple of friends wouldnt be into gaming, atleast not legally, thanks to trading i have been able to earn some awfully needed money off steam in the past, the company behind Steam, Valve, has made some of my favorite games ever and i deeply admire em for their pro-customer and pro-dev morals and their desire to push the industry foward


in short, all Glory to the Astute, Benevolent and Extraordinary Newell

HOWEVER!

recently there was been a huge influx of shovelware on steam, and while i didnt entirely dismiss the problem i thought it wasnt that big of a deal, until now, after reading about dead games being sold on the store and watching this TotalBiscuit video in which he shows an old game so badly ported to new systems, it needs to be burned into a CD in order to run properly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLNh5HPbQPo

the video also shows a few nice features which would help to clean up the storefront

personally i also think Valve could add a recommended selection to the store page, personalized just for you, they could use the data theyve gathered with the steam user reviews and game tags to provide a more or less accurate selection, they could even allow this selection to be refreshed each day or even each time you visit the storefront, im not talking about the recommended section btw, i mean something like "Recently updated" or "Featured PC games"


what features do you think steam needs to properly push quality games to the front page?

People need to stop being so reverential to valve and Steam. It's good but it needs to face fiercer criticism than it has done in the past. It seems to have become something of a sacred cow in the gaming community and this needs to change. A good kicking once in a while is healthy for any company. Sony learned from the ps3 and hopefully microsoft will learn from the xbone.

I don't want to talk about boycotts or anything, but if more people complained and made a fuss i'm sure they might at least take notice.

i dont see that happening in the near future since valve is by far one of the most pro-customers and successful video game companies around, there really isnt much else they could do better


but well, as i said i am a huge valve/steam fan, believe me when i tell you i have my reasons

Steam need to hire more staff and try and get some quality control. They won't because people are afraid of critiquing them. Steam are not your friends, valve are not your friends, they are a business. I've said it before, the 'customer friendly' image is just that. If they were truly customer friendly they would refund when someone gets ripped off.

Steam was a good platform, it can be again. But it's letting vast amounts of crap onto it. Use the ideas in the video. Hire more staff to check games before they hit steam.

of course valve is a business ive never said otherwise, they dont go out of their way to screw over customers, and for me thats worth a lot, plus theres some stuff they do that shows they do care atleast a little bit for their customers

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/06/27/steam-workshop-now-lets-creators-give-back-to-their-supporters/

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/12/25/left-4-dead-2-is-free-on-steam-until-tomorrow/



the thing with quality control is, it might not be the best solution and Valve knows this, they are trying to move to a more self-publishing model, and having to check every single game that gets into steam might just make the whole thing clunkier, it wasnt that long ago back when indie devs complained about how hard it was to get into steam, i dont think Valve wants steam to go back to those days

as much as i love Valve and Steam, im not afriad to critize them, i just think your solution would the best for the direction Valve wants for Steam

The thing is, if you run a site that hosts peoples content then you are to a certain degree responsible for the content that appears on that site. Stores like amazon try this and while occasionally stuff slips they are far better at dealing with customer complaints than Steam. Consumers have rights, I don't think someone buying a game they dislike should warrant a refund BUT a clearly faulty game should. If Steam don't want to refund customers then they should employ a level of quality control. Simply deduct the money from the publisher when a customer asks for refund, much in the way a marketplace seller on Amazon loses its money.

If anyone can stick whatever they want onto Steam what's to stop far right organisations sticking racist/homophobic games onto Steam.

Steam are a big platform now. They can hire more people. Have them test the game before it hits. It would not be that difficult.

like i said im not sure thats the best solution


but improving the customer service when it comes to refunds might be a great way to deter broken games from appearing on the store, since devs wouldnt get money off of them

I agree on the refunds part.

BUT.

Steam NEEDS some form of content/quality control. Even if its just looking more closely at the thumbs up/downs at the bottom of the screen and listening to the people using the games.

It also needs to make sure no one is sneaking games like Rapelay or stuff like this...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_fLfBZaDMw

They are responsible for the content they host.

well recently people discovered valve is testing some sort of report feature precisely to avoid something like rapelay and other problematic products finding its way into the store

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/03/13/steam-will-allow-you-to-report-a-product-for-malware-pornography-other-reasons/

its a better solution than quality control i just hope it doesnt get abused like game tags initially where, since the abuse could have far worse consequences than some vandalism and i hope you dont actually have to buy shitty games in order to report em

apparently you can report games for pedophilia. which if Valve isn't checking the games they put up on steam for that, I don'y think they can be trusted to due content quality control.

also they talked extensively about this on polaris podcast this week. it was basically the only thing they talked about.

the system isnt in place yet, Valve wants to move Steam to a self publishing model in the future, thats what the system is for