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Valve is famously organized as a place where everybody gets to pick the problems they want to work on (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there...). Manually reviewing dozens of (mostly crappy) games every day in the hope of finding a few that are worth recommending is the kind of dull, grinding work that nobody would ever pick for themselves to work on.
I think you could use Steam Achivements and playtime to recommend games to people. If I've played a game to completion on the highest difficulty presumably I like it. Find me other games that people with the achievement also play and have the equivalent achievement on and you've got something basic.
Yeah, that's the real weirdness here -- that Steam/Valve can't come up with some way to leverage the absolutely staggering amount of data they must have on how people play the games in their Steam library to filter the wheat from the chaff.
1. Steam receives dozens of releases a day and it's difficult for developers/publishers to make their title stand-out without performing marketing.
2. Author perceives that Steam's display algorithm results in display of outliers (very good/bad).
3. Very low quality titles are released/being sold by Steam.
4. Reviews are a very poor metric as reviewers can be shills or rate content poorly out of pettiness or malice.
5. Author thinks that staff-curated titles are the solution.
My responses:
RockPaperShotgun is a game review site. Reviewing games is how they manage to make ad revenue (well, besides click-bait articles). If the defense is that more content comes out than RockPaperShotgun can review, then RockPaperShotgun should hire more people. If that's cost prohibitive, and there's market demand for it, then why are they asking Steam to do it?
1. Welcome to selling anything.
2. I don't know if this is true; I'm not rejecting this claim, but I'd love to see the data.
3. Quantifying "good enough to sell" is a risky game. I'm okay with spending $5 (most of a beer at a bar) on something kind of buggy if it's amusing for 30 minutes. For someone else, that amount may be double or $0 on principle.
4. If this subproblem gets solved without background checks on reviewers, you have a serious business that Amazon/Yelp/etc would love to buy from you.
5. Beyond catching content that simply _does not do what it says on the box_, this is all personal taste.
And as an aside, there's a "curious" market that exists in low-quality games that have DLC/content that ends up on the Steam Community Market (Steam gets a % of each transaction), so the "how did a broken game end up on Steam?" question has more depth than a casual observer would guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Max or close-to-max achievements for a game also is an indicator of skill, could be used to weight a games scores more towards "recommended by skilled players" vs. "recommended by casual players" ?
I would have a hard time equating achievement coimpletionism as skill, to me they are more of a measure of time spent in a game. Yes, some achievements in some games do require a mediocrum of skill, but most of them do not; they're used primarily as a form of feedback for the developer on how people play their game, and secondarily as a lure for completionists who want the points on their profile.
"Fail to evade 5 shots in a row with a full powered and upgraded engine."
It's almost pure luck. Wiki mentions ways that you can increase odds for you but still it's mainly luck.
Drop the achievements (do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?), drop the trading cards (I still don't know WTF those are for). Drop everything that isn't about selling a game to a player. Then hire some competent UI people to simplify and clean up that abhorrent interface that tries to do too much.
In fact, separate Steam from Valve entirely. Let Valve focus on producing games and let Steam focus on selling them, but put a wall between them.
I don't get what the ask is. Steam should be even more heavy handed? They should hire people to playtest other people's games? I don't see any alternative reality where they have already taken these actions and are less hated for them.
I'd rather Steam get back to the core business of selling games, rather than trying to be some sort of oddball social network. Drop the achievements (do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?), drop the trading cards (I still don't know WTF those are for). Drop everything that isn't about selling a game to a player. Then hire some competent UI people to simplify and clean up that abhorrent interfac…
If they dropped everything that isn't about selling games to players (Steam Matchmaking, social features, the Steam economy especially wrt CS:GO and Dota) I don't think Valve would be able to sell and host games as cheaply as it does, and I think more people would pirate games rather than getting them on Steam.
I don't get what the ask is. Steam should be even more heavy handed? They should hire people to playtest other people's games? I don't see any alternative reality where they have already taken these actions and are less hated for them.
I think the author wants to suggest a solution where anyone can submit a game, but there is still some sort of quality check before it goes on sale. Currently, we have floods of garbage hitting Steam, with no curation at all. Pre-Greenlight, Steam was a closed shop that was hard to get into. What is needed is a healthy balance, that doesn't have zero chances for an indie game to be seen because it's buried under all…
They are destroying their own brand by not doing it.
I'd rather Steam get back to the core business of selling games, rather than trying to be some sort of oddball social network. Drop the achievements (do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?), drop the trading cards (I still don't know WTF those are for). Drop everything that isn't about selling a game to a player. Then hire some competent UI people to simplify and clean up that abhorrent interfac…
In other words, it's not that Valve can't produce games right now it's that they don't want too. They're too busy with Steam/VR cause those things are new/cutting edge.
I consider it one of the main reasons Apple lost so much content market share to Amazon despite Apples first mover advantage - Amazon has better search and you can actually find the stuff you want. AFAIK Apple tried to start up an applied research group to fix the problem but they refused to pay enough and ended up with the dregs. They tried to hire me 3 years ago for $130K. It highlighted that they didn't understand the importance of the problem and we're likely to fail. I typically make ~$240 as FTE and more as a contractor. Apple also has a culture of secrecy where as search science is pretty open.
Anyway; I checked out Steam. The search there is clearly very poor and can easily be improved. The overreliance on tags is usually a good indication that they are not digging into their usage data for their recommendations.