This is most certainly not right. Negligence is not the right way to run a store. Because when you do have a store, you are responsible for what is being sold there. Would you say that a store that sold clothes made after SS uniforms, or merchandise that outright does not work is perfectly justified if they just went and said "it's not illegal, so we won't do shit"? Because Valve is letting shit like Active Shooter and AIDS Simulator, not to mention the "games" that don't even have working .exe files in the first place. So no, they are not justified because it is their job to police their own store, not to sanitize visual novels but to keep out the actual garbage.
I already knew Active Shooter had been removed before this, but I just googled AIDS Sim and
apparently that was also removed just after the recent announcement. So they
are still trying to keep out garbage, they're just trying to base it on community agreement (="Active Shooter is a scam") rather than personal moral judgements (="VNs are degeneracy"). From what little I've seen of their judgements so far, they seem pretty solid, though there is definitely room to improve.
The problem with expecting Steam to filter content based on taste such as the example of SS uniforms in a clothing store, is that Steam are not a retail chain, they're the #1 platform for almost every creator out there. If they start saying they shouldn't have this game because Nazis (Wolfenstein) and they shouldn't have these other games because sex (visual novels and dating sims) and they shouldn't have that other bunch of games because they're controversial "mass shooting" games (GTA, Postal and "Active Shooter" type games) then effectively, they're acting as a censor, not a store. If one store didn't stock those things, you'd have the choice to go to a different store. But Steam is almost a monopoly.
Not really, there's alternative stores for everything. Steam is almost a monopoly
because it's permissive; if they ban a certain variety of game, then a store will pop up to serve that genre. Look at Good Old Games, which runs off of two differences with Steam: They do sell old games which you can't get by other means, but they also sell a lot of games that are also on Steam, and make money off them primarily because all their releases are 100% DRM free. Some people really want that.
Being banned from Steam largely just means a publicity hit. Steam has a huge network of users that it has huge amounts of data on, so if your game is listed on it then you get an enormous amount of essentially free advertisement. So if they ban a genre it'll be somewhat stifled, but it's not like serious fans can't just go somewhere else.
Additionally, if they check every title before it's launched then that costs time and money (don't be ridiculous that it wouldn't), which they must of course charge to the devs. That would mean the $100 launch fee would be say $1000 instead, and probably not refundable. Sure, big games could afford that, but a lot of indie devs would be pushed out of the market, to places like itch.io which are the wild-west compared to Steam.
Steam relies on users to report infractions because that's the only way the whole idea is remotely economically viable. Without that, you've got Nintendo, with only AA and AAA games being viable to be launched on the platform.
Requiring someone to download, install and play every new Steam game (and naturally, to test every patch) would be ridiculously expensive. How many different system configurations should they maintain for this testing procedure? How many staff should be allocated to directly do this, and what sort of tech support do they need to get their job done. Could you certify a typical game in one man-day, e.g. 8 hours of total company time? Two or more man-days per game (you have tech support, reports, management and services) would be more likely. With 20 games per day, you'd want about 40 people in your testing department, and say your total departmental costs per person are ~$150k per year. That's $6 million per year in testing costs, split over 7000 games, so the cost (now non-refundable) to check each game becomes a set fee of say $1000.
Eh. Even if Steam
did make a flat 1000$ entry fee for their platform, I'm not so sure that would be terribly stifling. It's a fair chunk of money, yes, but it's not unaffordable for most indie devs--especially not those who actually get a ton of support. A
lot of indie devs crowdfund far more money than that, and even in a worst case scenario, they could just make the 1000$ on a more permissive platform than Steam, like Itch.io. If their game can't do that, it probably doesn't deserve to be on Steam anyway.
Also, Steam could easily vet all games without actually spending a penny, just by using volunteers.
Select a group of customers who are popular reviewers, one for each genre, and give them free copies of each game in that genre which wants to get on the platform. These users then play and review the games, and their reviews are used to decide whether it stays. Steam wouldn't even need to pay them, a lot of people would just be happy to be getting tons of free games in their favorite genre. Games wouldn't be assured to work on
every computer, but they would have to work on the most common ones, and "Game doesn't work" is already a valid refund reason anyway.
A good solution? Not really, but it
would cut down on the garbage entries more than their current policy, while being dirt cheap for Steam itself.
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Topic: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc (Read 271719 times)