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The Jimquisition: An Episode About Steam Direct Being Better Or Worse Than Greenlight (Patreon)

Published:
2017-02-13 17:22:16
Imported:
2020-05

Content

Greenlight is finally dying after years of promises, to be replaced by... a thing. 

Steam Direct is Valve's latest attempt at finding a content-to-quality balance. What does your ol' pal Jim think? Let's find out!

Files

An Episode About Steam Direct Being Better Or Worse Than Greenlight (The Jimquisition)

http://www.patreon.com/jimquisition http://www.thejimquisition.com http://sharkrobot.com/collections/jimquisition-merch Greenlight is finally dying after years of promises, to be replaced by... a thing. Steam Direct is Valve's latest attempt at finding a content-to-quality balance. What does your ol' pal Jim think? Let's find out!

Comments

Ed

Ha--I've been saying for a couple years now that the Valve catalog is /not/ too big for manual curation. I was a little unsure about the Greenlight stuff, but sounds like it's not an unmanageable task either. It would just require a culture shift at Valve, who seem intent to stay hands off and let the customers do all the heavy lift (Curation etc). And, of course, be willing to hire one (maybe two) full-time people to do the work. :p

Anonymous

*Ahem* Digital Suicide *Ahem*

Anonymous

10/10 if only for the tonetta clip

Anonymous

You got the cord around your neck in the end though :P

Anonymous

Bomberman?! My God... These SJWs really need to stop 'trying' to influence vidya gamez!

Oren Barzilai
>>3919378

Really? Do you really think that the idea to replace a character with an almost-naked anime waifu came from imaginary SJW strawmen? Really?

Kraken

I think "throw money at it until there are enough people to curate properly" is an overly simple answer to a complicated problem. One: Valve hasn't expanded to the size of an Activision or an EA on purpose, despite there undoubtedly having been issues that a larger staff would have made easier to address long before this. One can argue that whatever benefit Valve gets from keeping their employee base to a size that can communicate and collaborate more easily is overshadowed by the problems of not having people to address problems like Greenlight issues, but I don't think one should simply dismiss it as an excuse. Two: Valve would need to come up with a far more rigid code of what makes an acceptable level of quality for submission, one that could be applied even-handedly by a significant number of new hires, without unduly singling out things like particular genres, engines, or subject matters. This isn't exactly a trivial undertaking in and of itself, and one that would probably generate a lot of hate while it tried to iron out the wrinkles. Three: Someone needs to be set to the task of finding people with the peculiar qualifications necessary for curating games, set them to the task, give them enough authority that they can do so (yet probably also watch over some sort of appeals process), and deal with the inevitable burn-out, especially in the early days, of people having to play dozens of crappy games and getting death threats or lawsuits because they turned away someone's nephew's Unity asset flip. Can you imagine having to do the equivalent of those videos about awful Greenlight projects without any recourse to turn away an uninteresting subject or the ability to snark- to be forced to turn your ire and/or nausea into a form full of numbers and check boxes- eight or more hours a day? My pity for that first round of curators would only be eclipsed by my pity for their manager- who, given Valve's small size, would undoubtedly have been pulled off a far more interesting project to do it. Now, all that aside, it's possible that Valve still *needs* to do all of this, that it would just have to accept the time, AND money, AND productivity, AND employee morale that would be lost to bring a new system into being. But it shouldn't be hand-waved as though it's just a company with more money than God refusing to portion out a paltry bit of its ill-gotten gains to do the right thing.

Anonymous

I'm a librarian and Valve's approach to content curation makes me froth at the mouth. Honestly, their entire approach to Steam’s information architecture and UI does as well but I'd be here all damn day ranting about that. Content curation is not hard. Libraries and stores around the world do it every goddamn day. The only reason Valve doesn’t do it is because either they’re too cheap, or caring about the actual experience of their customers is beneath them if it means they need to get their hands dirty. Actually, it’s probably a combination of the two. I know that GabeN and others like to tout that they have one of the best revenue/staff ratios in any industry, and we also know that Valve employees only work on things that interest them and content curation – proper content curation – isn’t sexy job. Just like frontline customer service. Funny that. Thousands of new books titles are published each week. Thousands of titles in other media are published too – comics, music, journals, magazines, movies and more. A big academic library will make hundreds of thousands of purchasing decisions a year in line with its purpose and collecting aims. It curates like a mofo and it doesn’t take a tonne of staff to do it. Even your tiny little underfunded local public library curates, and makes more decisions about what to stock in a month than Valve would need to in a year. You pay somebody to do it. In a big purchasing environment, you may pay several people to do it, and those people may even have specialised knowledge. But 100 titles a week is not a big purchasing environment. That’s barely a part-time job to a skilled curator, and the definition of skilled curator in this context is anyone with standards above gutter-level. You’re missing another part of curation, though, Jim, which is the flip-side of purchasing: weeding. You want a good collection? You’ve got to keep going through it and looking for the noxious shit and getting rid of it. In terms of Steam, if Valve wants good indies (and good big studio titles) to grow up and be beautiful, revenue-making flowers, it needs to tear out all of the poxy, ugly shithouse weeds that have already contaminated the garden. That means tearing out all of the clones, the asset-rips, the early-access-oh-wait-we-never-finished-it but we’re still going to sell it games, the Arkham-fucking-Knights so people can browse and buy with confidence. I don’t know – does Valve even care about their reputation as a company anymore? I guess not. They’ve gone from maker of good games to saviour of pc gaming to lazy purveyor of shit shovelware in the space of a few years.

Anonymous
>>3919319

Can someone explain who or what Tonetta is? I'm confused!

Kraken
>>3927752

With respect, the analogy doesn't stand up well to scrutiny. A library isn't a publisher, let alone the preeminent publisher of its chosen media. It chooses what its patrons will see in the library, not whether those choices will receive distribution at all. In the vast majority of its selections, it benefits from the work of those who have published its options before curation, those publishers having already deemed the works fit for print and having run them through an editing process. In many cases, it will have additional criticism of the work available to aid in its decision, whether literary or scholarly review or something like the New York Times Bestseller List, to help determine the likelihood that its choices will be well-received. The library's curation process is dictated by its mandate to serve its patrons. If there are already five books on its shelves on, say, watercolor art of the late nineteenth century, it likely only needs to decide if a new title on the subject brings anything to the subject not already addressed by the works presently on the shelf- and if so, likely, which current work should be removed to make space for the newcomer, its offerings having become redundant or obsolete. The physical space of a library, as well as its limited budget, dictate hard limits on the amount of physical media it can offer. And finally, the creators and/or publishers of a work not selected by a library are, in most cases, never going to be aware that their offering has been passed over; there's little likelihood of those responsible for a book refusing to sell a future book, or sending threatening mail to the library over its choice, or making noises about suing the library for its decision. By contrast: Steam IS the preeminent publisher of computer games, to the point that many developers with commercial aspirations can barely see a way forward to financial solvency without Valve's cooperation. This puts pressure on both the prospective developer and on Valve in a way a library never faces. Steam is often the FIRST viewer of a new work. While one would hope that many games attempting to find a place on Steam receive at least SOME sort of testing or evaluation beyond its creators, the current state of Greenlight suggests this is not the case. Much of what appears on Steam has never been through the equivalent of an editor's "slush pile", nor have its creators' built a reputation that creates a potential audience sight unseen; it would fall on Valve to sort dross from gold at a very low level. Steam has few limits as to what it CAN carry, nor an especially clear mandate on what it SHOULD, except in as much as there might be an audience. On what basis does one decide that THIS is one survival-crafting game too many? Or one zombie apocalypse game? Or one futuristic first-person shooter? How much time does one spend going through all the others if something should be pushed out? And how, in the presence of a nearly unlimited amount of space on a server's disk array, do you justify that decision to a developer who just saw their revenue stream cease? (Perhaps it never sold all that well; perhaps it hasn't sold a unit in months. Fair enough, but then what do you do if they re-submit with small revisions and a new name? Or protest that they were about to release an update? Or organize a review-bomb of their competition? Or a code giveaway to disguise its numbers? Or threaten a lawsuit?) As noted, Steam mostly does not share the physical limitations of a library, nor the questions of budget. New offerings on their "shelves" are largely an opportunity for them to MAKE money. And every single person who submits a game to Steam is completely, even urgently, aware of whether their offering has been approved or not. Every single ego who believes their game ought to sell a million copies. Every single indie developer hoping to keep their lights on for a few more months. Every single hack who is just as willing to make their money from a legal settlement as a hit game. Every single troll willing to throw a wrench in the works just for the fun of it. And I will say once again: It is entirely arguable that DESPITE all of the above, Steam should still go through an uphill climb through a minefield to make it happen, because in the end, the result would probably be better for everyone, including Valve. But I will not even pretend that there aren't powerful disincentives to begin to engage such a project, nor that the undertaking is an easy one, and their failure to proceed nothing more than greed and sloth.