Steam Has a Real Slop Problem | Unpacked
This week's episode of Unpacked is now available!
Comments (6)
Steam HAD a slop problem. The greenlight program was a floodgate of absolute knobs for years.
Seems like this is an area where a strong critical apparatus could be useful. Steam might not be willing to sort the wheat from the chaff, but journalists/critics could, both by figuring out who is making these games and determining whether they're worthy of coverage.
Stephanie Sterling was talking about Steam's quality control almost 12 years ago, sad to see not much has changed and AI has only increased the problem. However Valve really does not care - their answer is using everyone's personalised algorithm so that everyone gets there own perosonalised store front experience, if you don't like the slop games then it gets filtered out, though to the point in the video when you have devs ripping each other off on such a grand scale then it might start being a problem. The filter then will be quality based on user review which Valve has changed in recent memory. The problem with that is who does the first review? How are games found in a sea of infinite copies? Ultimately Valves argument will be simple - the refund system is there if you don't like the game
I guess it depends on how much they care about events like Steam Next Fest to act as a marketing tool. Right now it’s just a stinking pile of AI slop that erodes trust in the platform.
I'm a solo dev who watches Second Wind for the trends in the gaming industry. Most trends, good and bad, don't affect me much at all as a solo dev. But this one might, and it kind of frightens me.
After watching this and learning about BioWare, I have to ask myself if there’s any good news in the gaming industry.