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I always cringe when I see someone make art and then get mad/blame others when it isn't more successful.
I'm like, dude, do you have any idea how many people make great art and it goes unnoticed? Be glad you had the opportunity to make it in the first place.
But let's be a real. Most of these 'people' only do it for the money and then throw a tantrum when they don't get it.
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'm pretty sure I can filter by multiple tags on PC - they're just checkboxes so you can click a few at the same time. I'll update the comment in 1 hour or so to report back
This query made me think of this sketch as steams' search techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMboDekgvz0
The problem with that is what do you do if a game doesn't match all of the tags, do you hide it or do you show it. How many of the tags does it have to match in order to be shown?
For example Teardown is a story rich, FPS with destruction mechanics. But it don't have much in the way of weapons customisation, so do you want it, or not?
I don't think of that as a difficult problem. No, I am not interested in Teardown if I'm searching for that particular set of tags, and I don't want Steam guessing at whether to show me a game or not. That's fine on the home page, or in the discover queye, but If I search for 5 tags, and a game only has 4, the game doesn't meet my criteria and ought to be hidden. I forget what the number cited in the article is, but there is a deluge of a games added to Steam every single day. Enough that there's almost certainly a fair chunk of games which meet my hypothetical criteria exactly, so I don't want to wade through games which "might interest me". There are other section of the store dedicated to that concept, including on the pages of the 5 tag games I'm browsing for.
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.
Mostly agree.
90% of the time they are asking other indie devs who are also bad at descibing their game. They have very likely never been told their Steam page looks awful or is described poorly.
The YouTuber part is difficult. If you go to contact them, many straight up say don't send me your games to check out on their contact page, and out of the ones that do accept keys, you're usually looking at a very small chance that they'll stream it.
The skills sets just don't necessarily overlap
Thing with steam is you have to build hype and wishlists long before you release. Like months and years.
Some people make the game and then start thinking about releasing it. Like you have to do that in pretty much the opposite order.
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 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.
FYI I didn't get a Lemmy notification to your reply. This is really annoing, and its just about pushing me to try Piefed...
But yeah, I buy this. But problems:
It costs Valve a lot more money.
It requires more employees, or at least contractors/grants.
It requires finding expertise/passion in niches, and categorizing a whole lot of games.
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.
Given Valve's sort of libertarian/hands off ethos, I don't think they're going to take the "1st pary editorial team" approach. Heck, they seem to be aware of the issue, hence the Steam Curators program, but its not the same as bankrolling an editorial team that does it for a living.
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.
i just though Steam could take out twitch by just having a streaming section for Steam users
twitch and kick would just be left with the cesspool irl/chat/hot tub streams
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.
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.
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.
No, it's not a toggleable preference.
It's similar to the EULA and third-party account disclosures where they're mentioned on individual store pages, but you can't specifically filter them out of searches without setting them up as tags
Probably worth emailing Gabe over ig.
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.
and all the talent and experience gets lost.
The people are still alive, lol.
Most people leave the industry when you crunch through a game and then get laid off anyways when the studio closes.
Even so, its the team's collective experience that's important. An individual themselves might have a lot of experience shipping games, but getting laid off and joining a new team just means they'll get to watch the new management make the same mistakes they just went through.
Edit: Fixed getting laid -> getting laid off lol
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 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 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 don't even get to date malevola so dispatch is pretty shit as a dating sim.
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.
last i checked you only need 50 reviews (with atleast 75%+ positive) for steam's algo to aggressively start promoting your game on front-page to fans of the relevant tags. i'm honestly surprised there arent some cheap bot-farm ran by "influencers" for this exact purpose, 50 reviews really isnt that many but so few people bother to leave any that reaching that threshold is pretty crucial for serious game devs.
You need to clear the algo bars right away to make the New and Trending tab, and then you need to keep it up. If you drop off, you're out.
So dropping to Mixed or starting soft gets you written off (barring viral late pickups or otherwise getting external promo to make your game blow up elsewhere). That means you need to hypermanage your launch and SEO the crap out of it to "own a tag" or keep above water with the trending tab.
I'll say that at least that's a tool for even a single person marketing owner to micromanage a Steam launch effectively, but it's still SEO and algo gaming, which still leads to the same discoverability rat race mobile gaming has been stuck on for ages. And how survivable that process is depends a lot on what you need. I'd argue that very small devs that can make do with a few thousand copies sold may have an easier time there than slightly larger releases that need months of at least some sales to make their money back. Steam sales are either a flat line for a decade or a two week spike followed by zero engagement in your game forever.
i mean...still not sure what anyone expects steam to do here. engage with your playerbase and ask them to leave reviews or be ignored, can't expect valve to do all that. literally anything they do/don't do will piss someone off, they start actively curating shit and soon enough devs and players both will start accusing them of being paid off to promote more mainstream stuff or something
besides...this all is just kind of how the entertainment business works...it's a highly competitive field with a finite supply of attention to fight over, and as more great stuff is released your competition gets harder compete with. that goes for more than just games, music/movies/everything. even making something good and properly advertised/marketed is no guarantee anyone actually buys it, that's why publishers became a thing in the first place (that they then tend to abuse their positions is it's own problem)
I strongly disagree with that take, but also the actual alternative is not better for some of the people involved, so let that caveat be up front.
The alternative is a manually curated storefront, which is still being done in other platforms to some degree. You can absolutely sell entertainment or videogames without it being an entirely hands-off, algo-driven gig economy setup. Valve's entire business model is cutting off all internal costs and automating the thing so it prints money by itself, but that's not the only possible business model for media, as the previous century of media clearly shows.
Now, the caveat is that this doesn't particularly help the small fry, which may be just gatekept out of the entire loop instead of being simply crushed by the soulless machine of making dream paste out of independent media. Whether that's better or not I'm genuinely not sure.
Nostalgia tells me that the old industrial model where you only got to play in the pool if you could afford to do it right was more consistenly professional and less sloppy. Also that fewer things fell through the cracks, so if you wanted to make shovelware you at least had to put some work in to get it published, which was somebody's paid job. Steam (and the similar mobile stores) have put all the cost and risk on the developers, especially since investment dried up and indie publishers have morphed from financers to service providers that come in after the job is done to sell you marketing and storefront SEO.
So I guess I personally would want Steam to hire a small army of content reviewers and moderators led by an editorial team that selects what to feature based on both business and creative considerations. But what I personally would want may not solve the problem the small indies this guy's talking about have, just... maybe not allow them to get that deep into the hole by keeping them from being able to get started in the first place. Mileage may vary on whether that's preferable. My personal choice is probably a side effect of being old.
This thread on Steam might help?
Let me know if that's what you meant.
Genuinely can't tell if spam or non sequitur.
🤦 replied to the wrong person 🤣