Wednesday 19 August 2015

What the Hell is Happening to Steam?

I love Steam, the convenience it brings along with the insane sales that it does is amazing.  I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression either, despite what I'm about to say I still love Steam and I have absolutely no intention to stop using it.

However, something weird has been going on recently with the games that are being released, probably mostly the fault of Steam Greenlight but more and more the latest release list is making me unhappy.  There used to feel like there was some degree of quality about the games on Steam.  Not that every single game was good but there was at least some degree of quality control when it came to which games got put on the market and which were not.

But then Greenlight came along and shit started to get weird.  Now there's all these weird fucking indie games which look like they have 0 production value put into them and they cost about 40p to buy.  Not only that but there's lots of fucking RPGMaker games which by itself isn't a bad thing but I'm so sick of clicking a title only to find it's been made in that.  RPGMaker is fucking game development on easy mode, hell, I'M in the process of making a game in RPGMaker and I'm a fucking idiot.  If I ever finish it I sure as fuck won't be charging any money for it and I'm not using any of these original assets but games made in that engine feel cheap and shitty, at least to me. 

The one thing that really gets me though is the fucking visual novels.  I don't mind a good visual novel, I've played and enjoyed a good handful of them (not on steam) but the ones that get released on this platform are the fucking lowest kind of crap.  All about fucking anime girls doing bullshit or created by westerners who got their hands on Ren'Py.  I know this is an extremely shallow case of judging a book by it's cover (almost literally) but I'll happily eat my fucking shoes if ANY of them even come close to the levels of quality of games like Kamaitachi no Yoru and 999.

The weirdest thing of all when it comes to this shit are the censored porn games that are available.  Shit like NekoPara and Hunnipop which you can buy on Steam but are censored so that all the nudity and sex are left out.  Why would you even play a game like that if not for the gratuitous anime porn that's available as a reward for putting up with it's cringe-moe BS.  NekoPara is a particularly interesting example of this because if you want it on Steam with the censoring removed you have to buy the fucking game TWICE!  At that point why even bother with the Steam purchase at all?

And before I finish, let me just take a minute to bitch about Early Access again because it's fucking awful.  Stop charging for early access because you're asking for money for an unfinished product which is just lazy bullshit.  I don't care if your game plays "like it's finished" (lookin' at you Necrodancer and Darkest Dungeon), the fact is that it's not and your trying to charge me money for it and that's not on.  If you want to drum up interest for your game then make a fucking demo instead of charging full price for your shit and then just promising that you'll do it.  Just have the end of the demo link to your kick starter or whatever and then you don't need to clog up steam with all this unfinished yet expensive bullshit.

Anyway like I said, Steam is still great and there is a lot of great stuff being released.  That said, finding the good stuff is getting progressively harder thanks to them allowing all this stupid crap clogging up the market lists.  I guess this is why they introduced Steam curators...

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