I'd argue that Steam's huge library is at this point somewhat of a detriment. I remember back when Steam had some form of curacy in regards to what is available on its Store. This was the time when indies came to greater prominence along AAA titles, because Steam helped give these games a spotlight.
It started going downhill when they almost completely removed any sort of Store moderation, and introduced microtransactions via trading cards and other stuff in the Market. Each of these things sold on the market bring Steam small revenue, which probably amounts to huge sums given how much of the shit is sold. Hell, some "games" on Steam are basically just farms for this sort of stuff.
Yeah I basically argued this on FunnyJunk with some people and I got downvoted and told that I'm just not using the filtering tool properly.
Steam simply has too much crap on their store with no curation as to what goes up on it. They used to have the Greenlight program but I dunno if that even exists anymore. Like, there's games I've seen on the store where, I hate to be an asshole about this but; They're just shit games. The art design is not good, nothing is memorable, the gameplay is so basic bitch that it doesn't stimulate the itch that the genre is going for and the writing is trash, if there even is any writing at all.
Like, I'm sure that you are proud of the game you made, you put a lot of work into making it... But it's not good. And you're not the only one who made 'a game'. I want everyone who reads this post to do a little experiment, go to Steam, open up the proper search function for games, remove DLC's from the search and then just sort by release date and scroll down to January 1st of this year. That's 6.5 months worth of releases.
We are DROWNING in 'a game'. There's too many of them. Then we have the tag system on Steam that is being abused. Let's say I want to find xbox 360 AAA games, how do I do that? I don't remember them all. I don't know which are on Steam or not. I can't search by year 2005 and so on. There is no Xbox 360 port tag. So what am I to do? The recommendation system is dogshit because it recommends things that aren't even remotely close to what I'm looking at.
There is simply too much white noise that is being released. Maybe most of it isn't as bad as E.T. on Atari back in the day but it doesn't mean that most of the games are really worth playing in the first place. There isn't even a separation of the porn. There's non porn games with "sexual content" tag and there's porn games with "racing" tag.
And these games, unless pulled by the studios / publishers who uploaded them, are just gonna keep on piling up. Remember what I said about looking back at recent releases from now to January 1st? Well how many more games will Steam add by the end of the year? What about next year? What about the year after that? And what about all of the years prior?
At what point has the sea of shit become too big that you can barely find a gem in it anymore?
I don't know what the solution ought to be. Maybe a better tag system? Core genre, major tags and minor tags? (core genre is the primary gameplay loop, major tags are major mechanics in the game, minor tags are for smaller things, like maybe the game has a racing section then you can have racing in the minor tag) Maybe a nintendo seal of approval for good quality games with memorable art design? Better curator tools and clearer curator groups (and force groups to specify what they are curating and enforce their reviews follow the criteria they themselves set for themselves)? Separate the store into sections so that one section never has to intermingle with another so if you're looking for 90's PC games you get NOTHING but that? Update the recommendation system algorithm to be more exclusive?
At the end of the day, there's still going to be too many damn games on there. It's a downright chore to try and find interesting games at this point. I know they exist, sometimes I scroll through sales for like 40 minutes and I stumble upon something that looks interesting. So I know they're out there. But fuck me is there a lot of 'a game' to sift through.
