this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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What's the solution here?
They used to curate everything heavily, but new studios and indies had a tough time getting their games reviewed and added. So they implemented Greenlight, their user-curation platform so users could tell them what they wanted to see. It just became a huge popularity contest, and getting your game on Steam became about how much marketing you could afford to buy. Now, they let anyone with $100 in, and it's very easy for an indie studio to get their game on Steam, but it's also easy for all of the garbage to get onto Steam.
What solution would you propose, that both lets legitimate indie studios get their games on Steam, especially studios producing games in less popular / niche genres, and also edges out the objective garbage, while not incurring huge costs on developers or using a bunch of Valve employee time to personally curate every submission?
Edit: For that matter...
Steam's refund system is one of the most generous, if not the most generous, in the industry. What are your complaints with it? I'm legitimately curious.
I'm not going to defend trading cards, because they're stupid as hell, but how many have you ever been forced to buy?
You know what Valve hasn't done? Gone public. It would make them - and Gabe personally - an incredible amount of short-term money, but they haven't done it, and thank fuck for that, because it'd be the beginning of the end of the PC gaming industry as we know it.
Edit #2: If you're one of the people downvoting and not commenting, you're a coward.
Plus, in the age of fighting for the right to repair our devices, the Steam Deck is a breath of fresh air. They could have locked it down with a proprietary OS like the Switch and pretty much every other console, but didn't.