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Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

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Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#51

Post by ramy_d »

Retric wrote: post #46
ramy_d wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking review sites to sift through the dredges in the spirit of "more business is better!" is naive. Jimquisition comments regularly on this and it has turned into a longstanding and ever constant critique of Valve and its "Whatever goes" attitude to getting on their Steam platform. At 20 or 30 new games _a day_ consumers don't have time to go on review websites and see what's on the "do not touch list". What a monu…

Paying someone 10$ an hour to do a quick look at a game for 2 hours * 30 new games a day ~= 220k/year, double that to pay for games and your looking at ~450k/year which is not free, but that expensive either. Really this could stand on it's own as a product either as a review site or an industry group that supports several review sites. PS: An yes that seems like a high estimate the average is less than 20$/game and…

You argument is that its cheap to review. Sure, but why should all review sites duplicate the work? Why can't valve do the review, stop the crap at the source.

Stop apologizing for shitty content making it to the store shelves.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#52

Post by researcher11 »

Retric wrote: post #47
researcher11 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically the union of Information Retreival, Big Data, and Machine Learning. There is a lot of good and bad info out there. It's best to tailor your learning around a problem so you can get feedback on what works. Building bespoke search engines is expensive and often not worth it until the problem is big enough. Machine Learned optimization is even more expensive. So in the likely instance that your problem is…

Page rank was very useful when they started, 19 years ago. It was killed by their own success as normal people stopped posting link sites, and bad actors added their own.

The people that I know at MS and Yahoo told me that Page Rank was never as good as meta-documents. And meta-documents was more than sufficient to explain the improvement in relevance.

Of course this is anecdotal and I would be happy to see evidence to the contrary.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#53

Post by JamesBaxter »

elcapitan wrote: post #43
JamesBaxter wrote: post #3

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.

Wouldn't that just motivate developers to hand out lots of achievements early and often (lets say with 4 levels, 75% in the first level, 15% in the second, 5% in the last two each), so that the people who play the game even just a few hours "recommend" the game by the high number of achievements?

Yeah I thought about that, you could use the achievement rarity as I noted below.

Whatever system you use developers will try and game it but I think there are ways of cutting out obviously bad achievements

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#54

Post by majewsky »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #39

People love to demand that Valve or Google hire lots of people to do manual curation or phone support. Yet that costs money, and people would buy their games elsewhere it it's two cents cheaper.

I don't know. There might well be websites or apps where $game_that_i_buy is 2 cents cheaper, but I don't even bother with anything else than Steam. I've just decided to buy into the ecosystem. The question then is: How common is my behavior among Steam users (or gamers in general)?

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#55

Post by majewsky »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #25

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…

> do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?

I anecdotally do.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#56

Post by Retric »

ramy_d wrote: post #51
Retric wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying someone 10$ an hour to do a quick look at a game for 2 hours * 30 new games a day ~= 220k/year, double that to pay for games and your looking at ~450k/year which is not free, but that expensive either. Really this could stand on it's own as a product either as a review site or an industry group that supports several review sites. PS: An yes that seems like a high estimate the average is less than 20$/game and…

You argument is that its cheap to review. Sure, but why should all review sites duplicate the work? Why can't valve do the review, stop the crap at the source. Stop apologizing for shitty content making it to the store shelves.

> or an industry group that supports several review sites.

So, no I don't think any one site needs to take on this cost rather anyone can get it off the ground for a few months and then sell a feed to other people thus defraying the costs.

Sure, steam could have higher standards, but IMO there is value in letting poor games into their ecosystem that may be improved with time. UnReal World for example been in development by one guy for 26 years and right now it's a solid game though dated game. But, 20 years ago it was a buggy mess that would only really interest a tiny group of people even though he had been working on it for 6 years.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#57

Post by kelvin0 »

SixSigma wrote: post #50
kelvin0 wrote: post #42

I've been using Steam for many years and I play 5-10 hours a week. I simply find it great, to purchase games and play them (unlike EA origin and all it's clones out there, last time I checked) The way I decide to purchase a game is simple: 1) I see/read a review about a game 2) If it piques my interest I go check out some videos and read a few more reviews 3) Add it to my wishlist 4) Purchase it when it's on 'special…

try Gog.com

Cool, but how is it different\better than Steam? Thanks for your suggestion.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#58

Post by SixSigma »

kelvin0 wrote: post #57
SixSigma wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try Gog.com

Cool, but how is it different\better than Steam? Thanks for your suggestion.

No login needed to play games once downloaded

All games DRM free

Games are tested before being listed

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#59

Post by ramy_d »

Retric wrote: post #56
ramy_d wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument is that its cheap to review. Sure, but why should all review sites duplicate the work? Why can't valve do the review, stop the crap at the source. Stop apologizing for shitty content making it to the store shelves.

> or an industry group that supports several review sites. So, no I don't think any one site needs to take on this cost rather anyone can get it off the ground for a few months and then sell a feed to other people thus defraying the costs. Sure, steam could have higher standards, but IMO there is value in letting poor games into their ecosystem that may be improved with time. UnReal World for example been in developm…

There's "Early Access" (which wasn't even touched upon!) for titles like those.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#60

Post by jon-wood »

tdb7893 wrote: post #35
elthran wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam's startup time is completely reasonable. What would a reasonable time for startup be in your eyes beyond 5-10 minutes before you play your games once a month? 1 minute? Instant?

I would prefer it if the update is unimportant if it downloaded it while steam was running and installed it when it starts up next time. But at least for me I seem to always have to wait for a download, which is especially annoying when trying to play with friends

If you leave Steam running in the background that's exactly what happens, and it does the same for any games installed.
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