I don't know how much blame I put on Steam for this. Steam is the biggest online storefront for PC games. I prefer that be a more open storefront than a locked down system like we see on consoles.
Yes but with those lockdowns on consoles, you get a LOT less blatantly broken stuff. They have a certification process to ensure that stuff actually works. It may not be fun to play, but at least it works. I have seen numerous videos of Steam games where stuff simply either will not launch, not accept user input, or in one case the developer didn't put the game's executable file on Steam. Obviously a full blown certification can't work on PC because of all the different configurations, but at least SOME sort of safeguards could be installed. You could argue that a very closed system could do some harm, but as we've seen with Steam's fully open system, the amount of crap is definitely overshadowing the cream of the crop. Speaking of the cream...
Sure there is a lot of stuff on Steam that I would consider pure crap but so what? The fact that it exists doesn't mean I have to buy it and the videos, forums, and user reviews on Steam give people plenty of warning before buying a game. Even if all of that misleads you the refund policy still allows you to get your money back if you buy a game and find out you don't like it.
I get that no one is forcing you to buy these games, but you also have to realize that Steam is a store, and it only has so much visible space available. The more crap you have out there, the harder it is to find the good stuff. I realize there's user reviews and those help but most people aren't going to do tons of research on something like a game, and if people have thousands of things they have to sort through, they're likely going to give up pretty easily. And yes I realize that over time this would become a problem anyways (too many games) but this isn't helped when you realize that in 2015 ALONE, 2,977 new games were added to Steam. Obviously a very small percentage of those are standard AAA/Regularly Published games, so the vast majority is smaller games, fighting to compete in an incredibly crowded market. If you don't allow SOME sort of curation/standards, then actual good games will potentially be lost in the shuffle. And it also leads to a lack of trust. People will be less willing to take chances on new games if the general consensus is that a game is likely to be bad. And yes, there are refunds, but not all games can be properly gauged over a two hour span. Ask PC Owners of No Man's Sky how they feel about Steam's refund policy, which got so hammered with requests that now the refund policy is listed on the game's page before the "Add to Cart" button is. Also note that they're using Pre-Release footage in the trailer that plays on the page load, which is NOT an accurate representation of how the game looks.
And yes I realize that most games aren't as "big" as NMS but simply relying on refunds isn't a great system either.
If people don't want to buy games from someone like Digital Homicide they will eventually stop making them because they aren't making any money. Maybe people like playing bad games from time to time just like they like watching bad movies for the fun of it. I would much rather let the market decide what games sell than have Steam turn into gatekeepers.
The problem is that Steam is not like other places. Yes in any regular market, people generally don't buy stuff that is known to be bad. But thanks to major sales and the abundance of bundles, there actually IS an incentive to make bad games, because you can still make good money off of them. As mentioned in the video I posted earlier, it is very easy for both players and developers to make money off of bad games. And it's not like DH didn't sell well. They sold approximately 2 MILLION units of their games. Yes it's over 20+ games, but that's still very impressive given the incredibly low quality of output. And it's estimated that just off of trading card sales alone (not counting boosters or foil packs etc) DH was able to bring in about $7,000 a MONTH. That's more money than I make a month, and my computer development job takes a LOT more skill and training than what they do. And let's not forget that Valve is also making money off of these transactions.
As far as the market deciding, that's also a double edged sword. You could argue that "the market" is the reason why Greenlight and Early Access are such messes. If Valve exercised more control and held more developers accountable then I bet it'd cut down on the amount of crap in there. And again, you can run into a case of the a few bad apples spoiling the batch. Good, legitimate developers having their stuff ignored because of users being so predisposed to ignoring anything on there.
Again, I'm not trying to in ANY way, shape or form downplay Digital Homicide's role in what happened to them. They made the bad games, they attacked critics, they tried to hide their dirty tracks, and they were the ones that tried to litigate their way to what they waned. My thing is that I want Valve to take some real, legitimate steps to preventing these sorts of situations from happening again. As it stands, its simply too easy to make money on Steam by putting out bad products. The idea that I can spend $1,000 in development tools and pre-made assets and flip that into a $7,000 a month income while hundreds of smaller developers pour their heart and souls into games and are sometimes lucky to even see that much money come to them. If you have a system where you have a better chance of making money by releasing a bad product as opposed to a good one, then that system needs to be fixed.
