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...

Industry Money Grubbing Rant

I go off on one about the games industry being filled full of twats who don't want to deliver quality products but damand great deals of money anyway...IN VIDEO FORM!

Steam Early Access Needs to Fuck Off

If you want a way to guarantee yourself a lost sale on your video game, release it as an early access title on Steam because then unless it's gifted to me I'll never fucking play it.

If you don't know what Steam Early Access is, it's a thing where a developer can release their game on Steam basically before it's finished.  They allow people to play it to get feedback on their game, improve things, maybe drum up a bit more money to make it even better, that kind of thing.

When Early Access first became a thing I thought it was a kind of neat idea, I didn't mind it, but now it just pisses me the hell off.  Right now, half of the games on the "top selling" part of my Steam are fucking early access games.  The only reason it's not more than that is because Darksiders is on sale right now and the pack is taking up a spot and the same thing with a Star Wars pack.  If those two things weren't on sale, I guarantee there would be early access games clogging up the damn list.

Maybe I wouldn't be so upset about it if the top selling game wasn't fucking DayZ for a whopping £20!  TWENTY POUNDS, for an unfinished game, that I've been told by 100% of people I know who have played it is a buggy piece of shit that they want to enjoy but can't!  Now I've not played DayZ so I'll hold off on my own judgements but it's not going to get me to shell out £20 on a game that barely fucking works.  Until I hear something remotely positive about DayZ being simply playable I might consider it, but right now, based on the feedback I've had from friends, DayZ can go fuck itself.

Worse than that there's a game at the bottom of the list called 7 Days to Die, a game I've heard nothing about really so I suppose I can't say anything about the game itself BUT it's £26.99!!!! That's borderline full fucking price, for an UNFINISHED game, Jesus Christ.  Oh, and it's another zombie survival game, so original!

I remember when I bought Minecraft back when it was in it's beta or it's alpha or whatever the fuck stage it was in.  Sure, it was an unfinished game but Notch was only charging something like £5 for it AND he had a free browser version working to at least show me what the game was like, so I knew going in that I was getting a playable game for a really cheap price.

If the Steam Early Access games did this, and the prices were a fraction of what they are now, I'd be more forgiving, but they are asking you to pay full price for their game and worst of all there isn't even a guarantee they will finish the damn thing.  If the project goes under, well fuck you enjoy your broken ass buggy game.

There is some good in Early Access, I can see why people would WANT to support their favourite upcoming games, but just stop mixing it in with the normal store.  I'm so sick of seeing a game that looks sort of interesting, then it having "early access" written on it, turns me RIGHT off. 

If you want my money, finish your fucking game first!