
Evolving Steam - larsiusprime
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751
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jnwatson
With any pretense of curation gone, I'm afraid Steam will go the way of the
Apple App Store. It is a swamp of copycats and low quality half-efforts. Sure,
there's quality in there, but it is awfully hard to find.

I hope they make the entrance price high. Steam is already clogged with a lot
of subpar stuff. Perhaps if a developer has to put down a chunk of change,
he/she will think twice about publishing the 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic
(but PG!) visual novel.

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jlg23
> I hope they make the entrance price high [..] Perhaps if a developer has to
> put down a chunk of change, he/she will think twice about publishing the
> 37th zombie-tower-defense erotic (but PG!) visual novel.

Please not, the 37th is the best of all!

Seriously, you are arguing that developers should be hindered from making
software so that you don't have to make a selection from so many titles.

Alternative solution for your problem: Replace the generic ratings with
ratings calculated only from my friends' and my ratings (or with people
matched via ratings of games I played and rated as well).

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cosinetau
I like alternative solutions to this problem, but I don't think yours solves
all cases of the problem. What if someone keeps a tightly knit group of
friends? Your solution relies on having a substantially sized community of
friends that play a wide variety of games, of which, they write reviews for. I
feel this is a really tight use case, and one Steam might need to retrain a
community for. Do you still think it would work?

There's also the argument that other providers are out there, too itch.io.
This compels me to think that the problem isn't really that these software
engineers/game developers aren't really hindered in terms of how they're
exposed.

Which app store 'gets it right' and how close to do you feel it's use case is
to Steam's?

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jlg23
> I like alternative solutions to this problem, but I don't think yours solves
> all cases of the problem.

If I cared enough about solving "all cases of the problem" I'd probably not
post my solution here but patent it and live off royalty fees for the
remainder of my life ;)

Honestly, my solution collides with the aim of any game provider: I want
recommendations based on trust, games providers want to sell games. If steam
implemented my solution, it might work out, but it also might lead to a
decline in sales (because I suspect most people to buy stuff based on some
arbitrary "rating").

> Which app store 'gets it right' and how close to do you feel it's use case
> is to Steam's?

None, because the store's and my goals are mutually exclusive (at least as far
as "app stores" work for now): I want stuff I like, the store wants my money.
There is no incentive to implement my solution because, as of now, there is no
evidence that the store makes more money by not pushing unwanted apps into my
face.

PS: Thanks for your feedback, it forced me to reflect upon and spell out
things I usually take for granted because I live in my own filter bubble.

~~~
ecnahc515
Reading this made me realize how common this is among modern "free" to use
communities. Steam doesn't directly charge us any money to use Steam, only for
games. Thus, there is no direct fiscal consequence for showing lower quality
games. As long as they have games people want that you can't get elsewhere or
have some quality overall, people will use it.

It reminds me of when Facebook was testing a redesign of the site. Users
reported how much they liked it, and Facebook found that users had an easier
time navigating around. But this also reduced the amount of time users stayed
on Facebook, by quite a lot, so they never went forward with the new design.

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ihuman
This sounds like they're re-launching Steam Greenlight, but without the
pretense that only quality games will get through. Hopefully the fee will be
high enough to stop asset-flips and shovelware, but low enough to allow
smaller indie devs in.

~~~
smacktoward
I think (assuming I'm reading the announcement correctly) there's an extra
wrinkle here, though.

In the old model, the way to get your game onto Steam was to put it through
Greenlight, where if it gathered enough support it could get promoted to the
main storefront. You had to pay a fee to Valve to submit games to Greenlight,
but it was a _one-time_ fee ($100, IIRC), after which you could submit as many
games to Greenlight as you wanted.

In the new model, Greenlight goes away; you just submit your game directly,
and after you pay a publication fee, the amount of which is still up in the
air (anywhere from $100-$5,000), it goes into the storefront. _But,_ and this
is the wrinkle, now you pay the publication fee for _each game you submit_
rather than just paying it once. So if you submit ten games for publication,
you pay the publication fee _ten times._

So why the change? My guess is that Valve has decided that the essential
premise of Greenlight -- that community curation would surface the gems within
the vast pile of dross that gets submitted -- has been comprehensively broken
by tactics like voting rings and giving out free keys in exchange for votes.
So this represents them abandoning that idea and replacing it with a more
blunt filter: a per-title publication fee. In the old model it cost the same
to submit a thousand games as it did to submit one, so developers just threw
lots of things against the wall and prayed one would stick. Now there will be
a financial incentive for developers to put more wood behind fewer arrows, as
the saying goes.

The big question is whether this will improve the overall quality of games on
Steam, or reduce it further (if that's even possible). I'm honestly not sure.
A lot will depend on where precisely they set that publication fee -- too high
will drive off cash-starved indie devs, too low will mean the crap merchants
will just swallow it as the cost of doing business.

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fnordsensei
I wonder what they mean by "recoupable" fee, though. Will it count towards
per-purchase fees?

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WillPostForFood
I would assume recoupable will mean that you get 100% of sales revenue up
until the point you've earned the publication fee back. Then Valve will start
taking their % cut on sales thereafter.

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larrik
Steam has come a long way in recent years, but it would be nice if some of
that fancy store logic they've written could be used on library management.
I've collected over 700 steam games, and looking through them became unwieldy
after I hit 150 or so.

Careful usage of categories can make up for some of it, but even that is
clunky and not something I want to spend time on.

~~~
pmoriarty
Does the typical Steam user have enough games to make this an issue for them?

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larrik
Buy a few Humble Bundles, where you don't specifically know what some of the
games are, and it happens quick.

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leadingthenet
This is a bit underwhelming in my opinion. Providing a more streamlined
publishing experience is great, but it's not even close to the biggest problem
Steam is facing. What about the interface (which is definitely showing its
age) being an unresponsive mess, or the fact that support STILL has not
improved in any major way? It reminds me of iTunes a bit, especially since
this update has the potential to actually make Steam Greenlight even worse.

Valve definitely does not seem to have a clear vision for the future.

~~~
zelon88
Realistically they never had a vision for the future. It seems to be a
combination of a bunch of visions. Nonetheless, I can't see much about Steam
that took 360+ people 13 years to develop. It seems to me that there is a fear
of commitment in an environment that tries to foster comfort for it's
workforce. Maybe they need someone to point their finger at a goal and start
demanding that progress be made to achieve that goal.

Finish the HL2 story arc for crying-out-loud. Or just cancel it so your fans
can move on.

~~~
leadingthenet
Exactly. They're doing even worse in terms of vision for their game
franchises, which is what got them where they are in the first place.

This is a gaming company that hasn't really done anything major for gaming in
nearly a decade. How is that even possible?

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WillPostForFood
They don't make the games you want (or I want, i.e., Half Life), but they
clearly are still making games, and games they have made in the last decade
are currently #1 and #2 in concurrent players:

[http://store.steampowered.com/stats/](http://store.steampowered.com/stats/)

Also in the last decade: Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2.

~~~
MetallicCloud
I used to be a huge TF2 fan, I've got about 2k hours logged. But I haven't
played in a long time, it really needs a breath of fresh air and to bring out
TF3. I get that they are still making a killing off in game purchases, but
they could do the same thing with a newer version, allowing people to bring
items over with a 'vintage' like characterisation.

My main competitive game I play now is overwatch. They took a winning idea,
and improved upon it with many more classes than TF2, and took elements from
other genres (ie dota and 'ultimates')

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webwielder2
Trading cards were added to make people happy?

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Zikes
The gamification of the games platform. People will buy games just for the
trading cards. The more trading cards you have, the better your odds of
completing a set and turning it in for XP and leveling up your Steam account,
unlocking new profile and friends list features.

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ansible
Yeah, I never got that. For a while I would just sell the trading cards as
soon as they were awarded. I think I got some cheap DLC for free from that
money... it probably wasn't even worth my time to do that.

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pmoriarty
There's probably an age demographic involved here. It's probably not worth
your time because you're an adult and earn a good income. But most kids under
a certain age don't have a job, don't think of their time in monetary terms,
and might find collecting and trading cards to be fun.

Steam probably has a ton of such demographic information that would make for
some really interesting articles and research.

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steaminghacker
i think this is bad news. "We will ask new developers to complete a set of
digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar
to the process of applying for a bank account."

It's all about control and stopping real indie development. "low as $100 to as
high as $5,000." That's _per title_ ! and it will whatever they can get away
with. $5000 to publish a game is not indie anymore.

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Latty
Valve aren't looking to make money here (well, obviously they are, but not
directly from this like you are implying). $5k a game means literally nothing
to them - the amount they make from sales makes that a joke.

This is a matter of competing pressures. We want indies to be able to publish
as easily as possible, but customers don't want to see lots of bad games.

The easier you make it for indies, the easier you make it for people pushing
out crap. This is clearly a response to people's complaints about the lowering
quality of the average content in the Steam store, after their attempts at
providing better game discovery methods and curation systems haven't solved
the issue.

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steaminghacker
point taken. but it need not be solved by increasing the barrier to entry.
instead it's a ranking problem; make the poor titles sink to the bottom.

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socialist_coder
Wow, this is really exciting. I love the idea for a fairly high recoupable
application fee in order to weed out the crap.

