A decade ago, Steam was a carefully curated PC game marketplace where you could be confident that the relative handful of titles that showed up for sale were at least worth considering. Today, Steam is a vast and bloated superstore cluttered with thousands of new titles every year ranging from AAA blockbusters to the worst of the worst shovelware.
Valve has taken a number of steps to limit the prevalence and reach of the laziest cash-in games on the service, most recently requiring developers to provide tax paperwork and an application fee through Steam Direct. Now, the company is collaborating with some of its harshest critics on YouTube to make further changes to fix what is widely called the service's "discoverability" problem—the issue of finding the good games among the thousands of bad ones.Jim Sterling and John "TotalBiscuit" Bain were both invited to Valve's Seattle headquarters recently to discuss these upcoming changes, and both YouTube stars posted lengthy videos laying out what they heard. For those who don't want to watch the videos, Kotaku has a pretty good summary of the changes Valve relayed to the two YouTubers.
The main focus of the efforts seems to be on you, the average Steam user, doing the job that Valve used to do in separating the good games from the bad. The Steam Curator program started this process back in 2014, and that program is now getting an overhaul. Curators will soon be able to embed videos, create top ten lists, and sort through Steam's massive collection in any number of customized ways. Developers will also be able to give game keys to influential curators directly, avoiding the hassle of tracking down and confirming their contact information outside the service.
More worryingly, as Kotaku summarizes, Steam is planning to give curators "more info about how their curations affect games’ sales" and will potentially even pay the most influential curators to keep at it. This seems like a system that could be ripe for exploitation, with unethical curators demanding direct payments from publishers based on how influential their recommendations are. Even more ethical curators may unconsciously skew their recommendations when they see precisely which of their opinions are the most popular with Steam's user base.
On top of the curation changes, Valve is also reportedly set to roll out a new Explorers program. Explorers will play through poorly selling games, looking for diamonds in the rough that they feel should be getting more attention. Explorers will be able to confer with each other and set up multiplayer matches on their own forums as well.
In theory, this is a great way to make sure quality titles aren't swept up in the algorithms that limit the visibility and viability of Steam's cheapest shovelware titles. In practice, Valve is going to have to work hard to make sure the Explorer problem isn't infected by the same problems of vote brigading and lowest-common-denominator pandering that infected Steam Greenlight practically from its inception.OK, why don't you do it, if you're so smart?
Overall, the changes Valve is proposing seem to show a continuing recognition that the job of filtering the vast Steam library is too big for Valve to do on its own or purely via algorithm. The company is essentially crowdsourcing the effort of filtering its vast library to a volunteer army of its most dedicated users.
Valve deserves some credit for its continued work on these user-powered filtering tools. Apple and Google have similar discoverability problems on their sprawling mobile app stores, and the basic five-star review system each has in place seems utterly unsuited to sifting through the unbelievable flood of available software. Steam offers users many methods to sort through its pile, from tags, top-sellers lists, and curated selections to algorithmic recommendations based on your friends and the games you already play.
At the same time, I'm skeptical that the "wisdom of the crowd" can really help discover Steam's hidden gems most effectively. The kind of people who are most likely to devote their free time to being volunteer Curators and Explorers on Steam are overwhelmingly more likely to have a specific set of gaming tastes—the kinds of tastes that make a curated list of games that run at an "unacceptable" 30 frames per second a thing, for instance. With Valve's new system, the games that appeal to the tastes of the most obsessive fans are more likely to be algorithmically recommended to the many millions of other Steam users.
Bring in the experts
With part of the money it's devoting to user- and algorithm-driven tools, Valve could hire a small army of in-house critics. These experienced professionals would be tasked with finding unheralded games buried in the Steam library and promoting them with thoughtful and considered takes.
Apple has done something similar with Staff Recommendations and other sections in which Apple employees manually select and promote worthwhile games and apps to the front of the App Store.
Valve has said publicly that it's against mimicking this system. "We don’t want a world where people feel like they have to get someone at Valve to give the game a stamp of approval or a thumbs up for it to ever show up in front of customers," Steam developer relations specialist Tom Giardino recently told VentureBeat. "There are games that launch every day on Steam that nobody at Valve has played before or familiar with that quickly end up on the front page of our store because they are delighting customers."
While I understand that point, I'd argue that Valve's in-house recommendations wouldn't have to be mutually exclusive with Steam's more user-centric algorithms. A list of professionally recommended titles offered by Valve could provide a more focused and considered counterpoint to the more user- and algorithm-driven system Valve has already set up, highlighting the kind of quirky, off-beat games that the masses might write off. This kind of service would just be another way to broaden the audience for games that might otherwise be unjustly ignored.
Yes, appealing to the expertise of a small, hand-selected group of in-house critics comes with its own set of problems. Still, I think mixing this kind of expert opinion with Valve's existing filtering work could be the best of both worlds when it comes to fixing Steam's discoverability problem.
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