Ignorant question here, but it relates to discovery issues I have on Steam, so maybe this is the thread for it. Is there a way to filter by multiple tags? It’s entirely possible I’m just dumb, but I find the tags system useless without that ability. I don’t want to see every FPS on Steam, I want to see specifically Singleplayer, Story-Rich FPS games with an emphasis on Weapon Customization and Environmental Destruction (for example). I’m on mobile at the moment and that query doesn’t seem possible via the app, but I’ve had similar issues with the desktop client as well. My experience is that I can only browse one tag, which is not especially useful most of the time.
Like I said, this seems like something that I’m just missing, and I’m willing to eat a big helping of humble pie if someone can set me straight.
I mean… I don’t disagree that it’s the best non-curated platform, but… that’s still not good.
I don’t disagree that many indies and even mid-sized studios should be more realistic about their potential, and I do agree that for a gig economy-style algorithm the crowdsourced tag system works pretty well on Steam and has more granularity than the jankier phone store app equivalent.
But it’s still 100% algo sorting and it’s still 100% driving ancient GaaS to the top and fossilizing it there. If you can’t muster a trailer at one of Keighley’s gigs or a massive influencer campaign you get exactly one shot at clearing the algorithm bars for Steam’s front page and then the algo will dump you all the way down to the pits. I know for a fact that a bunch of indies and AAs are playing the exact same sort of SEO games and algo reverse-engineering you see on phone shovelware. Steam plays in that league.
I think there are pros and cons of that against a fully curated front page, and it’s probably easier to at least have a chance here than back when first party certification was an actual investment, but I’m not sure I necessarily like what comes out the other end at scale.
One problem: so many small/solo devs are terrible at listing their game.
I’m not talking about sophisticated marketing. I’m talking about extensive tagging, a flashy description, good well-framed screenshots, and taking a few minutes to search for and gift some YouTubers in your niche. Whatever their situation, the devs can do this.
And I’m shocked by how many don’t.
It’s… not hard. Not compared to game dev.
I don’t know a solution either, as I don’t understand why basics are skipped. Maybe they’re kinda in a bubble/isolated?
Perhaps Steam should be more forceful about tagging and describing games before they can be listed. I get Valve don’t want to be “restrictive gatekeepers,” but that is not a high barrier.
I mean… yeah, have a good Steam page, for sure.
But while that may be “one” problem, it’s not “the” problem. Pleny of well presented games get trounced by missing the bar on week 1 of New and Trending, which is a death sentence without a massive marketing budget, or by narrowly missing out on the positive side of reviews, which is easy to do if your launch has any tech issues.
Steam is a better version of the phone stores, but it’s still one of those. It’s gamedev as gig economy and it’s yielding very similar results, with chart-topping games becoming decade-old fossils and new games struggling below.
Fair.
What’s to be done about that, though? Steam does not control social media, and customer attention is finite.
Is the issue organizational? Should all these solo/tiny devs have better ways to collaborate so they make fewer, better games?
Or is it mostly a structural problem with the Steam Store?
There are two ways to do this, as far as I’m concerned:
You can come up with an algorithm and let it cook, which is how Steam handles almost everything…
…or you can have an editorial team curate your storefront, negotiate sponsorships and marketing deals and manually set up promo slots based on their judgement.
Both have pros and cons, both prop up a certain type of game and hide others. Neither is particularly great if you’re a tiny dev with no budget, though, unless the storefront in question actively curates for that specific type of product (which no current first party really does outside Itch).
I don’t think you’re going to get fewer, bigger indies. The real problem the original corpo guy is forgetting to flag is that there is no longer speculative investment in gaming, so all that venture capital money went to AI.
Games are about cash now, so there’s no room to fail. Unless you have money in the bank to make many games, failure means you’re out. It doesn’t matter if your game is big or small. Gamedev costs what it costs if you need to pay for the devs’ salaries directly from your game’s sales with no investment cushion.
That leads to a mobile-like landscape. The big stay big forever, the small fry keep gaming the algo hoping to go viral. It’s a bit grim.
I’d argue that if Steam played kingmaker based on less math and a bit more discernment they are in the best position to split the difference. Instead, you weirdly get more of that from Sony, Nintendo and… well, what’s left of MS for as long as it exists as a gaming first party.
And that’s what I think is needed. If Steam wants to be the Google of gaming that’s fine… as long as someone else is competing with a different approach to split the difference. Just Steam’s approach by itself would be bad, I think.
That’s pretty much all the feedback indie devs that barely get any wishlists on their steam pre-release pages get on the gamedev subreddit.
A lot of, “I have no idea what the game is supposed to be from the trailer. Is their a narrative? Can’t tell from the trailer. Not much going on in the screenshots. That name isn’t very google-able. You barely have a description and there’s no media in the description either to flash it up. Do you not have any tiktok/Instagram/YouTube presence? YouTubers/Steam curators/Twitch? Did you submit for the Steam Indie Game/Next Fest? Have you submitted to any indie publishers and received feedback? You may be better off with a publisher if you’re not willing to do social media and help with trailers and screenshot selection and writing your Steam page.”
I have to agree with that statement. Any AI slop being made nowadays should not be made, and that includes even the AAA slop we see today using it.
Not all AI output is slop and not all slop is AI output.
All AI output is slop unless you can prove it’s not made on stolen content and it’s not eating an insane amount of electricity and water to be made.
I agree tho, not all slop is AI, but I never said so.
I believe we have different definitions of slop. Slop isn’t the input to me but the output. You can get all the best ingredients to make a pie but if you mix it wrong, you get slop. Same goes for low quality input being moulded into a gem.
AI doesn’t always output slop.
And if you’re focusing on input, then all your electronics are slop. It’s almost guaranteed that child labor and exploitation was involved in collecting the resources required to build it. Your chocolate is most likely slop tooby your logic - if you bought any big brand or no name chocolate, child labor was almost certainly involved. And those children were likely also sold by their parents. There are also US products made from slaves (they call them prisoners, but is it really OK to lock somebody up for stealing a cookie and forcing them to work 8 hour days for cents per hour?) and in China Uyghurs are also forced to work unpaid. If you drink tea or coffee, boy is that all slop. The amount of land that ceded place to the large tea plantations (and let’s not get started on products with palm oil) and underpaid, overworked workers (mostly women BTW) are almost guaranteed to make that tea or coffee = slop.
Also and I hate to say it, a lot of indie titles are shit.
Like yes I cant do it, yes its a big achievement for an amateur, massive respect for having a go but… Bruh this just isnt very good.
Agreed.
I know it’s lemmy and love to blindly praise indies… But a lot of indies just look like somone’s school project or are plain ugly, people say the gameplay is fucking great but they are honestly mid at best.Like Schedule 1, Peak or Mega Bonk, like sure the potential is there but it just feels like it was never meant to be a full game and the graphics are… Not there.
Also a lot of indies with the edgy style like a Newgrounds animation from it’s early days, just plain grotesque and that is all they got going.
Not just a lot of indies, a lot of games in general. The only difference between a shitty indie game and a shitty big game is the marketing money that makes you belive the game is good even though it’s shit.
The CEO’s take here is actually pretty on-point. The article title over-simplifies, a bit.
The problem he points out is that a “failed” game that doesn’t sell well, or even sells moderately, is still a valuable game, and experience for the developer(s), but it also often means financial ruin for the studio. In his opinion, it’s that such studios aren’t recognizing when they’re releasing into an over-crowded genre, and need to adjust their budget expectations down.
Cause yeah, people SHOULD be able to make shit little games, without having to re-tool their entire career if it doesn’t do terribly well.
Adding an “AI art” tag to filter against would go a long way
Steam already requires AI disclosure, I wonder if that’s one of the store preference options you can toggle already.
He’s right, its brutal that a single “failed” or even a break even title can end a studio and all the talent and experience gets lost.
A bad game is often valuable dev experience, even if it doesn’t feel that way when you’re going through it.
I bought Dispatch and now 90% of my suggestions are hentai “dating” sims.
Their discovery system needs work.
I can’t even block them because there’s a never ending queue of them each time it refreshes it shows new ones.
There is a tag for dating sim and another for visual novel that you can exclude
you can make it so individual games don’t impact your recommendeds, one way is to go to the store page of the game and click ignore. another is to find the section on the store page named “recommended based on the games you play” and clicking the “explore and customize” button to the right of it.
Edit: apparently you can also find the latter menu by clicking “recommendations” in the top bar of the store and then “interactive recommender”.
You can in fact block those, specifically, at least by disabling AO+ rated games from showing up in your queue at all. I don’t know if there are other categories or filters that can do this, but I know for sure nsfw games can be since I use it.
There are some non-porn games that get caught by that setting, unfortunately. I had to disable it back when… I want to say when the Witcher 3 was released? Not sure, but it was some huge release that got filtered.
Also blocking hides them completely, you can’t even find them if you search by name. I just want to take them out of the recommendations.
Yeah I blocked those ages ago and the only game that I was actually interested in that got blocked was baldurs gate 3. Easy to hit “show games blocked by my filters” to get the one game that was the exception, which I already knew about without Steam telling me so
You don’t even get to date malevola so dispatch is pretty shit as a dating sim.
That’s a bit of a problem. Is that not, however, calling for censorship? On the AI front, that I understand.
Not censorship, but not massively overindexing like that.
The on route to getting recommended this stuff is way too open without a way to tell it stop.
When I go in my top recommendation is “Fetish Locator S&M Studio”, and these are all in my top recommendations at the top of the store:
Meanwhile my library looks like this:
I will say recommendations based on games I play is pretty good, but I’ve also dismissed “5 hearts one roof” and similar a ton of times.
I guess the next step to improve recommendations is to better consider what the user doesn’t play.
Don’t be so be ridiculous.
You don’t see the link between Cities Skylines II and Fetish Locator: S&M studio?
Have you not tried the San Fernando Valley expansion pack for C:S2?
There is a link, same type of ppl would buy those games, more likely than a cod player
You can remove content/tags/genres from your discovery queue. In the settings somewhere.
I’ve removed VR so I get no results.
Edit
Yeah I think I filtered out like anime or hentai or something years ago, so I don’t see that kind of game anymore.
I’ve got kids, so yeah… it’s a great feature. When I remember to keep it updated… which is currently a great reminder too!
My computer is usually locked and kids have their own, but things can happen.
You degenerate!
A way to filter out certain categories by tags would be great, if they haven’t added that already.
You can filter tags in your settings.
Hooray!
I haven’t had a reason to yet, awesome that it is there if I ever do.
