OK so this is actually a very interesting move by Epic, and may be worth discussing some more. Epic are planning on taking the things that give Steam added value, and making them open to everyone. Indeed, this is the best way to take on the market leader when you have the resources to do so.
What’s Steam’s move going to be? This is like 3DFX when DirectX and OpenGL caught up to their tech. Are they going to be left holding on to their proprietary implementation while the world moves on to Epic’s open services? I’m going to bet that’s not it. They will probably open up their APIs to every store that wants it now, trying to preempt Epic. And given their first-to-market advantage, there’s a decent chance they’ll succeed. Steam has a lot less engineering work to do at this point than Epic does to offer their APIs for anyone to use.
So now I’m wondering if Epic revealed their cards too early, possibly as a way to limit the flak they had taken for their exclusivity policy. I could be reading into tea leaves here, but it’s going to be interesting.
I also don’t see any of the crap which goes up on Steam, because I’m using Steam’s home page, direct links from other people, curators I follow, and the “discovery queue” to find out cool stuff.
Works pretty well for me!
If you have to go out of your way to a third-party web site in order to see all of the crap published to Steam these days, then that to me proves that Steam has a lot of good tools which are working the way they intend them to.
But Turin was specifically talking about “garbage clones done with Unity’s assets”. He doesn’t see those. That’s a good thing.
You recommended going to a third party web site to see them. That’s a bad thing.
If you are separately saying that you can’t discover content which is interesting to you, which you know is on Steam, then that seems like a separate problem to solve.
I can see that problem being solved through Steam’s established features and mechanisms. For example:
Look for products which are tagged with the Space tag
View your queue and spend just a few minutes clicking “Not interested” on games you don’t care about, and “Follow” games you do care about, to help power the front page and other recommendations to show you what you want
Go to the Steam Curators page and search curators for “Space”. I quickly found Space Game Junkie who seems to do a good job offering all sorts of recommendations for space games. Nearly 30,000 people follow his recommendations and he seems to keep them up to date
Maybe that still isn’t exposing the games you want to see - which does stink!
But going by the same argument, how can I trust someone who recommends me 95% of the space games he reviews? Or who recommends so many I find mediocre?
It’s obviously not that simple, but it’s not simple for Valve either, though they should definitely do better. A fair bit better.
I’ll always be obsessed with video games, space games especially. Have been since I was 4 or 5.
100% agreed. I wish they would do better. I felt like getting rid of all curation at all on their part was a step in the wrong direction, but what do I know?
I dunno Brian. Your personal goal is to find every single space game even before it’s labeled by users. Most people don’t have that goal, and the steam tools seem more than sufficient. I can’t think of a search system that works better that I’ve come across, and I really think the best curation is a terrible rating. Since steam is the main hub for selling, better that it err on the side of letting games through rather than blocking them.
I think the main problem from Indies’ perspective is just that the algorithm gives you more of what you already like. And since most people buy AAA games, they’re shown more AAA games. A greater stress on exploring different experiences would benefit Indies greatly. Additionally, the algorithm could try to insert well reviewed but low sale number games rather than just popular ones.
I guess my problem with this thread is that I’m hearing tons of complaints and claims that Steam is catastrophically terrible yet I haven’t read anyone’s feasible suggestions at how they might fix things?
It seems like the tools Valve has provided help people curate the store to see things they like while avoid the carbon copy unity crap. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better and more flexible than every other digital store where anyone can publish anything they want.
Write algorithms that actually take into account the massive data store they have at their disposal? Maybe don’t just take a random tag from a game I’ve played in the last week + global popularity to decide what shows up in the recommendations?
But that seems reductive against what they’re doing - considering that I do see game’s which interest me, I and others here don’t see all the crap ware, and tools like curators and queues exist to fill the cracks.
I also seem to remember that Pinball FX and Pinball Arcade couldn’t get onto the store because Valve arbitrarily decided that there was already too many pinball games.
I agree with this – they need to move in the Netflix direction. At the same time, there will always be complaints about the algorithm, so I think they have little incentive to actually do it.
