Yeah but whatever, having them on the store doesn't mean that they're selling or even being suggested, it means that someone paid $100 to get it listed and available. Steam doesn't bother with organic marketing until you have at least ten positive reviews from people who didn't get the game for free, anyway; so this is kind of a non-issue.
If a whole bunch of people are now capable of putting honest games together, I call that a win. If it's AI it's already pretty much against the rules of the platform, and will likely not sell even if they sneak it in dishonestly, so I call that a mildly offensive red herring. You can get a refund within the first two hours of gameplay with no questions asked anyway.
I've gone back and forth, but I agree. People just need to stop assuming that a game being on Steam is an endorsement. It's just a platform. They've removed almost all barrier for entry to enable truly indie developers to have their game on the premier PC game store. I'm sure indies prefer paying $100 and doing whatever they can to gain social traction compared to begging the gatekeepers at major publishers to give them a chance, though I could be wrong.
Yeah, and there's a a lot of games on Steam that would never get approved by a publisher, especially the smallest of indie games. Besides, if you have the means to get a finished game on Steam without a publisher, you get to keep all revenue to yourself instead of losing ~50% to a publisher.
I remember when Steam curated their store and indie devs complained because Steam didn't select their games - Steam was basically a king maker. In response to those complaints, Valve introduced the Greenlight program and a bunch of asset flips and shovelware started getting the green light. So, Valve added a cost for publishing a game to slow down the volume of crap getting green lit. Since then, they have added the Discovery Queue, Steam Curators (which is useful for specific use cases, like finding couch co-op games or multiplayer games you can self-host), and Next Fest (which brought back demos) to help gamers find the games they want. So, it's not like Valve is ignoring the problem, provided that you think the problem is difficulty finding games you want to play.
Also, my remembrance is that after they opened the store up to more games, they discovered audiences for genres that they (Valve) were not aware had much of audience these days, like visual novels, hidden object games, and adventure games. So yeah, I think if the choice is between less curation with tools to find games or more curation with more indie games or entire genres potentially being overlooked, I prefer the first option.
I wouldn't be surprised if half of everything in the last 6 months were hentai virtual novels wholly written and image-generated by AI. A quick glance at F95 will certainly make one think so.
Does Steam sell porn games though? I have Cyberpunk and a couple others on Steam but I can’t say I’ve seen anything that is that kind of adult content.
Do you have mature filters on? I see at least one adult game on the front page all the time, if not a dozen despite having bought only two or three on my account (compared to the better part of 1k games on my list).
Lots of games with advertised screenshots blocked due to being mature, and lots more that don't despite being obviously pornographic.
Okay so I read it because I was curious to see what their argument is, and when I finally read it it's that "they can't play them all" ? Like a baby? What? What a useless publication that is too, now all of them are lost completely to the enshittification diarrhea epidemic