Steam Direct
July 30, 2018 9:39 AM   Subscribe

Recently, Steam (a digital game storefront owned and operated by Valve) has changed the way that games are published to their platform. Valve eliminated its long-running 'Greenlight' program, which was a voting driven pathway for independent games to get onto Steam given customer interest, and moved to a simpler, fee-based system called 'Steam Direct', which is instead run entirely by Steam moderators and automatic administrative systems. Amid a number of controversies around the decision (summarized below the jump), there are recent reports (link goes directly to a Steam Community page) that a game approved through the 'Direct' initiative was serving as a trojan horse for cryptocurrency mining malware.Eurogamer summarizes the scam in this article.

In the blog post announcing the move to Direct, Valve rationalized the change as such, "We want to make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences. The updates we’ve made over the past few years have been paving the way for improvements to how new titles get on to Steam, and Steam Direct represents just one more step in our ongoing process of making Steam better." Overall, this proved to be unpopular for users, who pointed to a new glut of games designed around sexist and racist themes, developed specifically to farm achievements, and increasing numbers of adult games. Despite an initial promise of openness and transparency, Valve began targetting adult visual novels for removal, as described in this previous post.

Last month Steam again addressed fan concerns about Direct, writing in a blog post, "So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn't be the ones deciding this. If you're a player, we shouldn't be choosing for you what content you can or can't buy. If you're a developer, we shouldn't be choosing what content you're allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable."
posted by codacorolla (42 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
Gaben needs to stop being a cheapass enchanted by the pipe dream of automation, and hire some fucking curators. Having malware slip through should have been a wakeup call.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:46 AM on July 30, 2018 [24 favorites]


Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

That’s one of those statements that at first blush sounds reasonable, but breaks down when 1) humans get involved and especially 2) when some of those humans are actively trying to harm others.

Plus the truth is that having a real, proactive, human-centered moderation framework run by actual people would eat into their profits. A common theme on this modern Behemothic Internet.
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:48 AM on July 30, 2018 [5 favorites]


Oh, and that blog post is so much bullshit. As a gamer, I want Steam enforcing standards. I want them holding developers to basic standards like "not malware", "not an asset flip", and "is an actual game".
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:49 AM on July 30, 2018 [32 favorites]


Exactly.

It's clear that Valve would rather be running a CDN rather than a storefront, but instead they have both, tied inextricably together. Steam these days is like if every S3-hosted site could only be accessed through the Amazon.com interface. It would be madness, and the only reason anybody uses it anymore is inertia.

At this point, I only use Steam for games that literally cannot be purchased/activated anywhere else.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:57 AM on July 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


Valve is the poster child of dysfunctional flat organizations. I don't think they realize how much damage they have inflicted on their brand by these recurring news of bad management practices, especially as future employees are concerned.

Steam has always sucked at curation but these days I rarely bother exploring the Steam store. I get my recommendations from youtubers and streamers, check prices on isthereanydeal.com and just finalize the purchase on Steam.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:57 AM on July 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


Ah, the great tradition of spinning your failure to enforce basic standards as “freedom of choice.”
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:58 AM on July 30, 2018 [11 favorites]


Yah, it's interesting how this feeds in to larger narrative in "what's wrong with the Internet" in 2018.

I've never been ideological about free speech, but in my youth I certainly found the (early) internet appealing for its lack of moderation and frontier quality. Which is why it's been surprising to me to realize how much moderation is essential for a functioning medium/platform/community. Metafilter errs on the right side in this, and most anything else I can think of (i.e. facebook, twitter, now steam, etc...) fails. It always sounds reasonable to "let the community decide", but it turns out that free community interaction does not naturally result in some democratic equilibrium, but rather quite the opposite. Moreover, the entities which support these communities seem to always claim innocence with regards to the consequences of their "open platforms", but its becoming more and more clear that these claims are not in good faith, and the companies involved simply want to have their cake and eat it too.
posted by Alex404 at 9:58 AM on July 30, 2018 [8 favorites]


Oh, and that blog post is so much bullshit. As a gamer, I want Steam enforcing standards. I want them holding developers to basic standards like "not malware", "not an asset flip", and "is an actual game".

I'd add "not games unironically celebrating Nazis/rapists/etc" as well, but their bullshit "hands-off" policy is tailor-made to let the fascists take over.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:00 AM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


One interesting side effect of all this is the rise of "indie publishers", small outfits whose main job is getting someone, anyone to notice your indie game. Reading the above made me realize how SEOish the whole thing is.

In any event, Steam will either be fixed or sold the day it starts to really feel a market share impact from how crappy it is. I have no idea when that'll be, though.
posted by selfnoise at 10:03 AM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


They should be thankful it was "just" a miner, although if anything, judging from some stuff I've heard over the years, I'm suspecting there's at least a couple of the brilliant minds running the company now thinking "we should have used the client as a btc miner and give random TF2 shit to those that opt-in" instead of "maybe we should use the 30% we take from every sale to have a team of people curating and running analysis on everything we put up for sale".
posted by lmfsilva at 10:22 AM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've never been ideological about free speech, but in my youth I certainly found the (early) internet appealing for its lack of moderation and frontier quality.

We as a society mythologize the frontier as being free, while ignoring how that routinely meant in practice that one was actually chained to their land, lest they starve or worse, and that many on the frontier saw being connected to civilization as freeing.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:26 AM on July 30, 2018 [13 favorites]


in my youth I certainly found the (early) internet appealing for its lack of moderation and frontier quality

This was definitely an appeal of the early Internet (and before that, BBSs) to me as well, but as I've looked back on it, what I saw as a free-for-all lack of rules was actually a lot of implicit rules and behavioral nudges. There wasn't a single list of "Things You Can't Do On The Internet", but if you did the wrong thing in the wrong place, boy were you going to take it in the neck.

Somehow I don't think the Valve guys really got that. Automated moderation sucks. It's stupid, it's inflexible, it's prone to perverse edge cases, it's almost always trivially gameable in a way that creates ongoing cat-and-mouse games, and in my experience it tends to make otherwise cooperative users withhold their buy-in from the rules and act out. It's lose-lose for everyone, unless you're just trying to wring cash out of people in the short term.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:10 AM on July 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


I want them holding developers to basic standards like "not malware", "not an asset flip", and "is an actual game".

I definitely want them enforcing the "not malware" standard. Not at all sure I want the biggest games store on the internet refusing to sell me a game I want because somebody there thinks it's "not a real game" or "made with too much off-the-shelf graphic assets." I've got the entire rest of the internet to do curation for me. I don't need my stores trying to do it too.
posted by straight at 11:18 AM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


The "lack of moderation and frontier quality" kinda worked when the web was completely or mostly unconnected and it took some effort to find anything you wanted. Anyone was more likely to be radicalized by some rando with questionable ideas IRL than finding some crank with a Angelfire homepage that is WORK IN PROGRESS worker.gif, but was last updated on February 1997 with his hot takes on the holocaust, slavery and phrenology.
Then came more efficient web crawlers meaning you didn't need directories and rings, better CMSs and web design programs that made adding content more easy instead of hammering very basic tags on notepad, and with Web 2.0 all hell broke loose with comments, blogging platforms with site-wide searchable hashtags and finally social media sites that attracted a large percentage of online users.

The "frontier quality" of the early WWW was kinda endearing because everything was so small and the odds of being drive-by radicalized were equally small and there weren't any deep holes you'd sink into. Now is no longer the case, imagine having frontier law in a modern city. That's what the internet has turned into.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:26 AM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


If Valve continued to moderate their store by rejecting games that aren't "real," games like We Know the Devil could never have reached the audience they did, because the old moderation system rejected visual novels on sight. Standards would be welcome, but do you really want Valve to be the one setting them? I just don't trust their judgement to be the ones who can make or break a small developer's career.

It's obvious the discourse around Steam is screwed when a news story of "cryptocurrency-mining malware discovered in game" appears and we immediately segue to "also, Steam shouldn't sell games I don't like." For what it's worth, the game in question and other games from the same developer have been removed from Steam. So it appears to be more a failure of process than policy in this case.

(Just a note: that YouTube fella is extremely gamergate-aligned, and I don't love seeing the front page of MeFi sending him traffic.)
posted by skymt at 11:28 AM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


Bring back WON.
posted by gucci mane at 11:36 AM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Asset flip doesn't just mean "uses a lot of purchased graphic assets"; it refers to games where those assets have been assembled with minimal to no original gameplay or attempt to create a cohesive game, including in some cases just slapping a new name on a completely-unchanged demo game. You can use lots of purchased assets and make a game that is totally not an asset flip, but if you went and learned Unity over the weekend and spent $100 on assets and just barely got the game into a state where you can walk around and shoot things, it doesn't belong on Steam.

And where people these days talk about "is an actual game" in this context, it's almost never in terms of "is Gone Home an actual game", it's in terms of "did this actually come with a functioning executable", or "does this game actually function even vaguely in the manner it's advertised to function" kind of stuff. There's such a thing as taking a broad view of what a game is but still having some things that do not meet the criteria of being a game. If what you get is a loading screen that will never enter an actual game, you are not selling a game. I'm really comfortable with some things being deemed not-games without it threatening the state of the less traditionally game-y contributions to the genre.
posted by Sequence at 11:40 AM on July 30, 2018 [14 favorites]


Thanks for the heads up about the YT reviewer. I was unaware of his affiliation, and agree that we shouldn't be directing traffic to him. I flagged the post and asked the mod team to remove it.
posted by codacorolla at 12:11 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Mod note: codacorolla if you could send the edits you'd like to the contact form, we can get that fixed for you.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:16 PM on July 30, 2018


Mod note: edited out the problematic link per OP request, carry on
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:41 PM on July 30, 2018 [5 favorites]


If Valve continued to moderate their store by rejecting games that aren't "real," games like We Know the Devil could never have reached the audience they did, because the old moderation system rejected visual novels on sight. Standards would be welcome, but do you really want Valve to be the one setting them? I just don't trust their judgement to be the ones who can make or break a small developer's career.

Sorry, but this is the same sort of "but look at what bad regulation can do" argument that you see libertarians use to argue against regulation as an idea. The fact that Steam has struggled with visual novels (and is currently struggling with erotica) is not a sign that curation is bad, but that Steam needs better curators.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:08 PM on July 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


Steam is also selling software, but most important, documentaries, tv shows, anime, stand-up specials and movies on the platform. Adding a "visual novels" would be pretty damn easy and a gesture of good will, but you know, laissez-faire.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:30 PM on July 30, 2018


Whether Steam should sell malware and hate-speech (obviously: no) and whether Steam should sell 'bad' games are two different questions with very little in common, and it does the discussion no favors to lump them together under the umbrella of 'curation'.
posted by Pyry at 1:56 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Alex404: Which is why it's been surprising to me to realize how much moderation is essential for a functioning medium/platform/community. Metafilter errs on the right side in this, and most anything else I can think of (i.e. facebook, twitter, now steam, etc...) fails.

Metafilter's style of moderation works for Metafilter, but it is not and never will be the One True Way of doing moderation on the Internet.

Steam clearly needs some sort of in-house curation, but getting it right is super hard and I can see why Valve is reluctant to do it. Asset flips and malware are the obvious cases, but to really be useful and to fulfil the community expectation they'd also have to start evaluating content ("is this good enough for Steam?"). That really is a whole different minefield to navigate and eventually will nix things that are Interesting But Different (say, for example The Stanley Parable or Gone Home) or just Janky But Still Fun (say, that little thing called PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds or just something like Rimworld).
posted by Soi-hah at 2:38 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sorry, but this is the same sort of "but look at what bad regulation can do" argument that you see libertarians use to argue against regulation as an idea. The fact that Steam has struggled with visual novels (and is currently struggling with erotica) is not a sign that curation is bad, but that Steam needs better curators.

I agree that curation would be welcome, but I believe that Valve specifically is constitutionally incapable of sensible curation. Attempts by Valve to tighten standards beyond specific, well-defined bounds (like "legal," "not a virus" and "runs") would almost certainly result in a return to their old, pre-Greenlight practices that were a gigantic roadblock between small creators and the only significant audience available to them. Hate speech is the sticking point here, in that it's morally imperative to disallow it but the bounds are much harder to fit into an unambiguous policy that can be universally applied without close inspection. I have absolutely no clue how to solve this problem, because Valve has repeatedly demonstrated that they're far more inclined to curate away sex than hate. "Burn it down and buy everything on itch.io instead" would be tempting if that wouldn't leave the dominant PC game platform to online fascists. All I can think to do is continue to hold Valve's feet to the fire when they screw up.
posted by skymt at 2:40 PM on July 30, 2018


Whether Steam should sell malware and hate-speech (obviously: no) and whether Steam should sell 'bad' games are two different questions with very little in common, and it does the discussion no favors to lump them together under the umbrella of 'curation'.

Is anyone calling for that, exactly, though? I read NoxAeternum's "is an actual game" as meaning "the executable runs" and "there appears to be a way to control the game" and "the game is approximately what has been advertised". I know I would be happy with "bad" games being approved as long as they at least run and do something.

For a litmus test, should Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (SLAVGN) have been approved? I think that's about where I draw the line personally, and I wouldn't be frustrated if it were approved.
posted by thegears at 2:41 PM on July 30, 2018


Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

Like functional search engines that let you exclude tags (and features often not currently tagged, like publisher, VR, and early access), sort by price range, and allowing tags like "mobile port" and "nazi propaganda"... all of which Steam doesn't have.

I'd believe Steam's claim of, "oh, we want YOU to be able to decide!" if they provided tools for that.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:52 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Attempts by Valve to tighten standards beyond specific, well-defined bounds (like "legal," "not a virus" and "runs") would almost certainly result in a return to their old, pre-Greenlight practices that were a gigantic roadblock between small creators and the only significant audience available to them.

As opposed to now, where the giant wall of shit makes it impossible to get noticed unless a third party covers your game so that people know it exists? There's more than one kind of roadblock.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:57 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Followup: I know decent search options are possible on Steam, because someone made a tool for it.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:59 PM on July 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


Asset flips and malware are the obvious cases, but to really be useful and to fulfil the community expectation they'd also have to start evaluating content ("is this good enough for Steam?"). That really is a whole different minefield to navigate and eventually will nix things that are Interesting But Different (say, for example The Stanley Parable or Gone Home) or just Janky But Still Fun (say, that little thing called PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds or just something like Rimworld).

Actually, curation done right would bolster such games, both by championing them (a good curation team would be looking out for the interesting and unique to serve up) and by forcing developers to rely on more than novelty (PUBG is getting its lunch eaten because while it has novel ideas, it has executed on them poorly.) There is a mentality that curation is equivalent to censorship, and that is completely wrong.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:31 PM on July 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


Steam clearly needs some sort of in-house curation, but getting it right is super hard

No, it's not. It can be time-consuming, especially if they're starting with a huge un-curated mass, but it's not overly difficult, especially with the resources they have (reviews onsite, game activity statistics, reviews on other sites).

What's difficult is retaining high sales while being honest about what standards they're using. They're not avoiding curation; they're avoiding transparency - that's why the gradual shift from in-house decisions to greenlight to the total-open option: they don't want to tell anyone what they think is okay.

They don't want to say what standards of nudity they think are acceptable; they don't want to admit they stand behind asset flips; they don't want to inform the public that they're raking in money on partially-broken mobile ports packed with microtransactions. And of course, they don't want to admit that racist, sexist, fascist games are just fine with them, as long as people are paying for them.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:48 PM on July 30, 2018 [8 favorites]


Actually, curation done right would bolster such games, both by championing them (a good curation team would be looking out for the interesting and unique to serve up) and by forcing developers to rely on more than novelty (PUBG is getting its lunch eaten because while it has novel ideas, it has executed on them poorly.)

Curation done right according to whom? We can't forget that curation has both a curator and an audience, and commercial curation chooses works by what the largest part of the audience will spend money on, not by high-minded artistic integrity. A large portion of Steam's population would insist on dropping weird/artsy/confrontational games on the trash heap with the cynical stuff like genuine asset flips, because they're actually unwilling to acknowledge a difference. Curation that champions work pushing the medium forward would be considered unacceptable by quite a lot of noisy people whose money Valve wants. Also "novel ideas executed poorly" describes quite a lot of art I love.
posted by skymt at 4:38 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


(PUBG is getting its lunch eaten because while it has novel ideas, it has executed on them poorly.)

Dang, I sure wish someone would eat my lunch like that. I'd never go hungry again.
posted by straight at 5:38 PM on July 30, 2018


Like functional search engines that let you exclude tags (and features often not currently tagged, like publisher, VR, and early access), sort by price range, and allowing tags like "mobile port" and "nazi propaganda"... all of which Steam doesn't have.

I have to admit I am baffled by the idea of wanting a video game storefront so small you could browse it rather than just going and typing into the search bar the name of the game you want that you learned about from your favorite video game website or the people you follow on Twitter or MetaFilter or wherever.

Do you buy books or watch movies based on Amazon/Netflix recommendation algorithms?
posted by straight at 5:45 PM on July 30, 2018


Do you buy books or watch movies based on Amazon/Netflix recommendation algorithms?

I have. I watched Krrish because I went looking for "superhero" movies on Netflix and wanted to try something different. (I don't use Amazon for recommendations because they're a mess.) When I go to a physical store, I want to see similar things grouped together on the shelves; I don't think it's unreasonable to want a digital store to be able to show me groups of similar games.

I regularly go through my queue at Steam and often buy games based on what comes up. But I know my tastes are weird and my methods won't work for everyone; I have the max list of 12 terms blocked (and I would block about 10 more if I could), and what I like mostly isn't mainstream games. There's a lot more chaff in the "RTS" and "FPS" categories, which I don't have to worry about because I know I'll never want to play those.

I would buy a lot more games if I could find the ones I'm likely to enjoy.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:56 PM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


(PUBG is getting its lunch eaten because while it has novel ideas, it has executed on them poorly.)

Dang, I sure wish someone would eat my lunch like that. I'd never go hungry again.


Their userbase is somewhere between a half and third of what it was just 6 months ago. Obviously when you're coming from a very high number that's still a ton of people, but the trend is pretty bad, and it certainly seems like the sort of thing that could turn into a liability pretty quickly if new people have stopped buying the game and the existing userbase of people to buy the in-game clothes and whatever keeps dropping.
posted by Copronymus at 6:21 PM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


Is anyone calling for that [conflating curation for malware and hate-speech and curation for quality], exactly, though? I read NoxAeternum's "is an actual game" as meaning "the executable runs" and "there appears to be a way to control the game" and "the game is approximately what has been advertised".

I mean, NoxAeternum implied that PUBG should have been rejected for being "executed poorly", so yes, people are definitely starting with the strong argument that Steam should aggressively 'curate' against malware and hate-speech, and then subtly shifting to the claim that Steam should 'curate' against games that are bad (insufficiently polished, asset flips, lazy mobile ports, etc.).

I certainly have no love for asset flips and mobile ports, but they are in an entirely different moral category than trojans and fascist propaganda, and need to be addressed with different arguments. It is entirely possible to have a marketplace that takes a stand against hate while taking a laissez-faire attitude towards game quality (see: itch.io).
posted by Pyry at 2:47 AM on July 31, 2018


Their userbase is somewhere between a half and third of what it was just 6 months ago. Obviously when you're coming from a very high number that's still a ton of people, but the trend is pretty bad, and it certainly seems like the sort of thing that could turn into a liability pretty quickly

They've sold 50 million copies of the game. If PUBG completely disappeared tomorrow, never to be sold or played again, it would still be one of the greatest successes in video game history.
posted by straight at 3:57 AM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


so yes, people are definitely starting with the strong argument that Steam should aggressively 'curate' against malware and hate-speech, and then subtly shifting to the claim that Steam should 'curate' against games that are bad (insufficiently polished, asset flips, lazy mobile ports, etc.).


Well yes, for two reasons:
* Bad games decrease the signal/noise ratio, which in turn impedes the discovery process for end users.
* Forcing developers to tackle the issues in their games is not a bad thing - PUBG wouldn't be facing the issues they are right now if they had been forced to deal with the structural issues.

Your use of scare quotes around the word "curate" makes me think that you're trying to make the argument that curation is censorship without stating it. Curation is not censorship, because no storefront owes you a slot. And I'm at the point where a storefront that doesn't actually care about quality is one that is functionally unusable for me, because I no longer have either the time or the wherewithal to search through fields of dross to find titles that I might enjoy.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:12 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


And hey, we have another scam enabled by Valve's hands-off approach:
Yesterday, an issue that’s been simmering below the surface of Steam for a few weeks came to a head: Unscrupulous developers were releasing games that contained dummy items masquerading as Team Fortress 2 and DoTA 2 rarities that sell for hundreds of dollars. Now Valve has addressed the issue.

Yesterday, Valve removed two different games from the Steam store for peddling fake items, and now it’s trying to cut those scams off at the pass. If a Steam user is receiving items for a game they’ve never played or that’s been recently released, they now get multiple warning pop-ups before trades go through. If you think you’re trading for a long-sought TF2 weapon, but actually it’s a fake listing connected to some game nobody’s ever heard of, you’ll know that something fishy is going on.

Posting on the Steam subreddit, Valve developer Tony Paloma said that more security measures are on the way.

“We also started requiring approval for app name changes, and have more planned to address this sort of problem that we couldn’t get done in one day,” Paloma wrote. “We are hopeful that having to dismiss two warning dialogs will be sufficient to make people think twice about trades containing forged items, but this is not the end of our response, and we’ll continue to monitor, of course.”

He also noted that anybody who was scammed prior to these warnings being in place will get the item they traded for a scam item back.

It’s an uncharacteristically fast response from Valve, who’s been known to take weeks or months to patch up even the spurting-est of Steam leaks and loopholes. Perhaps it’s a sign that the company is turning over a new leaf. Or maybe it just decided to laser target this particular issue because scammers’ latest low blow hits Valve right in its bottom line. As ever, Valve works in mysterious ways, but it definitely likes money.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:26 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


And I'm at the point where a storefront that doesn't actually care about quality is one that is functionally unusable for me, because I no longer have either the time or the wherewithal to search through fields of dross to find titles that I might enjoy.

May I suggest that I think it makes more sense to consider something like Rock Paper Shotgun's The 50 best strategy games on PC
or Kotaku's The Best Video Games To Play With Kids as the equivalent of going down the local bookstore and browsing through what the employees have grouped together and what they feature on display.

Steam is more like when you ask the employee to order a book for you. I wouldn't want a bookstore to say, "We won't order that for you because we don't think it's a very good book." (Although I would be fine with them saying they refuse to sell a book because it is vile Nazi propaganda or actively fraudulent in some way.) I wouldn't go into a bookstore and walk behind the counter and say, "Hey can I just look through your book-ordering computer?" And if I did, I think it would be perverse to say, "Hey, how come this isn't designed for browsing? This interface sucks for discovering more books like the ones I like."

I feel like there should be online stores where you can pretty much buy any game or book or movie that you want. I think that curation is better handled by other groups, groups that have competing visions of what is good and worthwhile, rather than have any one group's ideas deciding what should be allowed to offer for sale at all.
posted by straight at 3:59 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I wouldn't want a bookstore to say, "We won't order that for you because we don't think it's a very good book."

I don't care for Steam to curate quality. I want them to state up front what their standards are, then then help users find the works they want - just like any bookstore would. Some bookstores say, "we don't carry children's books" or "we don't carry erotica;" that's fine. But they don't mix "The Happy Hooker" in with the "self-actualization" books just because it has "happy" in the title.

I want them to label/sort better: Come up with genre tags and definitions, and require those be used; if it says "runs on Linux," that needs to mean "all the features available in Windows also work on Linux;" games run well on the hardware requirements listed.

I want better search options: In a bookstore, I can flip through the pages and read an excerpt of my choice, not just read the cover blurb and look at three paragraphs chosen by the seller. I can tell if a book is "several hours worth of reading" or "20 minutes of reading" at a glance. I can tell if it's written at 4th grade level or is a college textbook, both by the packaging and by flipping through it a bit, if the cover is misleading. Since games aren't going to provide more demos (I understand why not), better labeling will help people find the games they're willing to buy. It also avoids burnout from wading through page after page of games in the same rough category and giving up before you find the one you want.

Most of us wouldn't care how much cheap crap there was on Steam if we had a way to filter it out - and those who like dredging through cheap indie games looking for that one surreal gem can do so.

I want better customer service: The return/refund options should not take the attitude, "we refund on request and therefore we don't need to make any changes to the stock." If a dozen people want refunds because "this won't work on my machine," Steam needs to find out if the publisher is lying about the hardware requirements. If a dozen people want refunds because "this is sexist, racist softcore porn, with a downloadable package sold elsewhere that removes the 'softcore' aspect," Steam needs to review the work, and decide if it fits its publicly-stated standards.

And so on. Bookstores have a much higher standard of genre labeling and product searchability than Steam does, and that's before we get into the actual, "does this function at all?" issue - bookstores don't have stacks of books on the shelves where half the pages are glued together, but they'll give you a refund if you take the effort to bring it back.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:35 PM on July 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


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