Enigmatic_Oddity wrote:
There is probably some middle ground that would make more people happy, but I am trepidatious at the idea of increased restrictions with a store that has such presence in the industry. I would much prefer to see everything, including all the junk on Steam, than to have someone making decisions what can go on there. It's a slippery slope, but not much further down that slope you have stores like Apple using that to engage in anti-competitiveness and occasionally to push their business, political and moral agenda.
When I have my own government making tons of decisions on what my little impressionable mind can handle, I don't need a business doing that too.
Almost all businesses do that, though. Every type of store and industry you can think of. They dont make the products, they dont come up with the ideas for the products, but they sure as hell do decide what you find on their shelves. Hell, good example in the industry from way back when: The NES. When it came out, ALOT of retailers were refusing to stock video games any more. The crash had happened, you see. The entire reason why the thing was able to be stocked (at least here in the US) was actually because of ROB, which allowed Nintendo to market the NES as "more than just a gaming system" by making it look like a "toy" as well (yes it's stupid, but they still were forced to do it to appease the corporate gods). Keep in mind, the consoles nowadays do ALOT of this too (just not with that level of absurdity). Like, a ton. There's a reason why most things dont end up on them. You cant get anything onto a console without either A: loads of money and influence, or B: going through a very extensive approval process. You think Apple is bad at that? Ye gods, no. Compared to the console process, Apple barely even bothers. Hell, even I could get a mobile game onto iOS if I felt like it. Apple actually doesnt curate things as badly as you think: It's just that their actual STORE setup is awful. I play ALOT of mobile games (and I dont mean the "Angry Birds" casual sort, I mean the same sort of things I find on PC), but I dont use the store itself to find them. I use other tools, just like how I use Steam's activity feed. Both storefronts have exactly the same problem.
Anyway, it's not that Valve should be making decisions on actual games. We all know that things like niche games exist after all, not everything needs to be a game that appeals to a bazillion players at once. It's that they dont even bother to do something about scammers (which are the real problem) even when the scammers have been completely exposed. The ONLY time they do something about it is if the situation blows up so badly that it starts to make Valve look bad (as in the case with Digital Homicide). They dont bother to do anything about other types of rulebreakers as well (of which there are many). That is why you hear so much about Steam's lack of curation.
20 Jan 2018, 5:15 am
