I genuinely do not see what Valve can do to fix this. Should they hire their own internal QA department to individually test these games? If not, should they start filtering games based on some kind of merit system with players?
Because all I see is the double edged sword of an open platform. There have ALWAYS been shitty games on the PC being sold as gold, you don't even have to look far back to find them even before the Steam platform existed. There have always been GAMES being sold as gold, that's where our term 'shovelware' comes from.
We also get into the benefits of an open platform that would be severely damaged if we try to apply a filter to games based on arbitrary boundaries. How can one distinguish in this market between a game such as Garry's Incident and Garry's Mod? Garry's Mod is one of the best selling games on steam, but even I, someone who loves the game with all his heart, will admit that the game is extremely flawed and for a niche audience. During the Gmod 10 days (when the game first started being sold), a crash every hour was to be expected, you could not save your work to a universal system that allowed you to save your contraptions, and typically online multiplayer was a crap-shoot at best. The difference is that Garry's Mod became better eventually, rising on its unique gameplay to the top of the store page, while Garry's Incident will likely never get a patch to make it less than a digital abomination.
If we apply even the smallest barriers of entry to games, we suddenly lose the same indie games that Steam is currently thriving on. How can you pitch a sale of a game like "The Stanley Parable" to a supposed gatekeeper of steam? The two-paragraph elevator pitch on the store page doesn't even begin to do the game justice, nor does it actually describe what kind of enjoyment a player would find in the game. At best it can be described as a walking simulator with the humor of Portal thrown in. Something that dozens of other games already strive for and typically fail at. Stanley Parable would never find a home on a console, or a market, or any place where it had to justify itself to people who don't actually understand games or the enjoyment that comes from playing them. Neither would a lot of games we take for granted as being part of steams backbone.
If you want the indie scene and the small business market to continue to exist on steam, we can't just start drawing lines in the sand to get the games we consider 'bad', finding out if a game is bad before people buy it requires too much inspection from the standpoint of Valve the distributor, so I'm going to need further justification as to why Valve should suddenly change policy because crapware is slipping through the cracks of the rather loose guidelines for release. Unless you admit that Valve should be testing every game that gets onto its platform, then there's really nothing anyone can do. If it comes down to Valve having to perform rigorous QA on each game before release, then expect the storepage to become very, very empty.
EDIT: Also I find it to be very alarmist of you, Jim, to say that quality is 'disappearing entirely' while there are still new good games coming out at a reasonable pace on Steam. While there are still games on Steam that are genuinely worth buying on the front page. While there are still new hits being released on Steam that are not trying to fleece customers, then the skies are in fact not falling.
Because all I see is the double edged sword of an open platform. There have ALWAYS been shitty games on the PC being sold as gold, you don't even have to look far back to find them even before the Steam platform existed. There have always been GAMES being sold as gold, that's where our term 'shovelware' comes from.
We also get into the benefits of an open platform that would be severely damaged if we try to apply a filter to games based on arbitrary boundaries. How can one distinguish in this market between a game such as Garry's Incident and Garry's Mod? Garry's Mod is one of the best selling games on steam, but even I, someone who loves the game with all his heart, will admit that the game is extremely flawed and for a niche audience. During the Gmod 10 days (when the game first started being sold), a crash every hour was to be expected, you could not save your work to a universal system that allowed you to save your contraptions, and typically online multiplayer was a crap-shoot at best. The difference is that Garry's Mod became better eventually, rising on its unique gameplay to the top of the store page, while Garry's Incident will likely never get a patch to make it less than a digital abomination.
If we apply even the smallest barriers of entry to games, we suddenly lose the same indie games that Steam is currently thriving on. How can you pitch a sale of a game like "The Stanley Parable" to a supposed gatekeeper of steam? The two-paragraph elevator pitch on the store page doesn't even begin to do the game justice, nor does it actually describe what kind of enjoyment a player would find in the game. At best it can be described as a walking simulator with the humor of Portal thrown in. Something that dozens of other games already strive for and typically fail at. Stanley Parable would never find a home on a console, or a market, or any place where it had to justify itself to people who don't actually understand games or the enjoyment that comes from playing them. Neither would a lot of games we take for granted as being part of steams backbone.
If you want the indie scene and the small business market to continue to exist on steam, we can't just start drawing lines in the sand to get the games we consider 'bad', finding out if a game is bad before people buy it requires too much inspection from the standpoint of Valve the distributor, so I'm going to need further justification as to why Valve should suddenly change policy because crapware is slipping through the cracks of the rather loose guidelines for release. Unless you admit that Valve should be testing every game that gets onto its platform, then there's really nothing anyone can do. If it comes down to Valve having to perform rigorous QA on each game before release, then expect the storepage to become very, very empty.
EDIT: Also I find it to be very alarmist of you, Jim, to say that quality is 'disappearing entirely' while there are still new good games coming out at a reasonable pace on Steam. While there are still games on Steam that are genuinely worth buying on the front page. While there are still new hits being released on Steam that are not trying to fleece customers, then the skies are in fact not falling.
