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Jim Sterling Video - Valve Endorses AIDS Simulator
- Thread starter Chairmanchuck (另一个我)
- Start date
"Selling right now, on Steam"
"Screens on the video shows it's not on sale".
Worst thing is that kind of trash only comes to light because people like Jim Sterling actively seek them and make videos about them.
Thank you Mister Sterling for taking this trash out of the can to give it exposure !
"Screens on the video shows it's not on sale".
Worst thing is that kind of trash only comes to light because people like Jim Sterling actively seek them and make videos about them.
Thank you Mister Sterling for taking this trash out of the can to give it exposure !
Ha, think many of us thought of Sterling upon hearing Valve's stance
Is...is this a parody of Angry Joe thread posts D:
Is...is this a parody of Angry Joe thread posts D:
I mean regardless of the popularity of the person making the content, I think it's more important to talk about the topics he brings up in this thread, which is Valve not having any sort of quality control on their platform which is causing a variety of issues.
Personally my biggest gripe is that the Steam Platform created (if not created, really helped curate) the "buy before complete" business model and once many "game studios" saw how that worked many others decided to emulate for a quick cash grab.
That being said, if a customer is willing to buy an unfinished product the problem goes both ways.
It's kind of baffling that Valve could've chose to approached this literally any way and they chose the incorrect way. Right after their contraversey of letting a school shooting simulator on their store.
Wow, I had to search the Steam store for AIDS Simulator. The description is horrific. Valve will regret this decision.
There's a big leap from "you can sell whatever you want as long as it's not illegal, we don't care" to "VALVE ENDORSES BROKEN GAMES", but of course Sterling is more than willing to take that leap.
Sure, it's definitely AIDS Simulator who stole the spotlight of smaller indies
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Yes, yes I guess I'm wrong!!
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Why don't they sell more on curated PC storefronts? Surely if curation was the key GOG would be the foremost store for indie games.
(I'm going to laugh if somebody suggests that the average PC gamer is oblivious to GOG's existence in the year 2018)
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They are not hidden under garbage. They are hidden besides other great games.
Indie devs have literally said before that due to the deluge of shit that clogs up the New section on Steam it's impossible for legitimate indie games to stand out
Really sick of Valve and how they operate, I for one have been trying to buy as much as I can from places like GOG...does anyone know if Valve gets a cut of the purchase if I buy from places like Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming (assuming I'm buying a game that redeems on Steam)???
What buries good indie games is better indie games. If you believe assets flip are overshadowing actual good games, you're definitely wrong.
What's burrying indies are basically bigger indies because guess what, bigger indies now come with AA or even sometimes AAA production values in a price point close to the smaller releases. We arrived in a time where there's so so many good releases everyday that being a cute platformer or a pixel metroidvania wont cut it anymore to sell a lot. Except on far less crowded places.
Then why do the better ones stand out in the New and Popular section ?
Which indie dev actually said what you're claiming ?
They dont. Devs get to produce steam keys for no fee, which is the reason why other stores can exist. That's how bad Valve operate in in the industry.
It takes significantly more work to find something good people have never heard of and extoll its virtues than to find some lazy meme crap and point and laugh.
Indie devs have literally said that their biggest impediment to success is the deluge of quality titles that they are directly in competition with.
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Pretty much this. I mean, Amazon sells Mein Kampf, so are we supposed to assume that the company personally endorses Nazism?
I will never understand why Jim views Steam as a publisher instead of a bookstore.
Seriously. The situation is almost fucking comedic.
"Guys, people seem upset that we let a school shooting game go up for sale, what should we do?"
"Everything is permitted."
But it is not a pile of garbage. Great indies are buried because of several factors:
a) PC platform has permanent backwards compatibility, which means that yo uare compiting against the best games of 20 years in your field. So you need to bring something special.
b) Since the early 2010s, more developers have become indies and have started to launch their games, with an increase of their quality. "Another pixel 2D platformer" is not going to sell just by itself (unless it has interestic dynamics).
c) Lots of indies do not have the ability to promote their games / still believe they dont need to promote their games, but as (b) shows, that means that noone knows they have launched (happens lots of times that you jsut know they launched after a few months, and that is for someone who follows the media).
TLDR: We have more than 40 "significant" releases in steam per month (and that is games that ahve been talked about and that can be seen in the PC Gaming notable releases for X month) which means that it is impossible to follow all of them. Competing against tons of classics and great games is hard to. Indies need to self-promote better now.
Selling does not necessarily mean endorsing. You can have the opinion as a storefront that these games are atrocious but still sell it because you are a storefront for selling games, be it whatever definition of a game you take. It still doesn't mean Valve should keep it up and should actively be removing these kinds of titles but the use of language is not correct.
What is clear is that a) this game actually isn't for sale and b) Valve needs to fix their storefront to be more stringent on quality checks.
What is clear is that a) this game actually isn't for sale and b) Valve needs to fix their storefront to be more stringent on quality checks.
PC gaming doesn't need curation. The open nature of the platform is It's biggest strengh. As long as the games aren't broken or illegal, I'm fine with asset flips, hentai VNs and poor taste titles such as Aids Simulator or Bum Simulator. But I do believe we need better tools to filter out games and genres we don't appreciate, and that's where Valve should be (and is) working right now.
If you believe indie games get overshadowed by too much garbage in the Steam Store you reached the point where you watched too many Jim Sterling videos.
Jim Sterling should highlight the good stuff on Steam. But going by the reactions in threads about the topic his audience don't want to know.
Jim Sterling should highlight the good stuff on Steam. But going by the reactions in threads about the topic his audience don't want to know.
Every new great indy game in buried under my wishlist of 200 games and the games I bought but have yet to play.
The guy is getting free clicks with rehashed videos. He knows exactly what he's doing, and it's clear he loves the fact that these games keep being made.
The best way to make shitty games disappear is to ignore them. Which Steam lets you do easily.
Sure, I wanted to buy Runner3 but had to swim through an ocean of bad games instead... Actually, those bad games don't even appear in my store. It's not a case of signal-to-noise, the noise is definitely not there unless you want it to. And I don't.
yeah i agree. i dont think there's any kind of passive endorsement by valve for something like this game.
otoh by their very nebulous statement re they'll take stuff down that trolls, i feel like a game which outright proudly states it's an asset flip is basically trolling, so should readily be able to be taken down.
the real question is will they ever bother to do this unless a certain title starts getting mainstream media attention.
i have very little faith in valve these days.
This is my take away from it as well and it was briefly brought up in the video.
As someone who enjoys Valve's games, really like the platform and the sales I have to admit that it is increasingly disappointing to see this issue continue to plague them for so long. This hasn't cropped up out of no where and it is something that has been called out again and again. I guess now I just wonder at what point will Valve actually do something. To me, Steam is as bad as any App store when it comes general browsing of items. Sifting through pages of low effort games isn't fun and if anything when I finally find something that looks mildly interesting I'm already wary of giving the game a chance.
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No one actually thinks that that Aids Simulator is one of the "trolling games" that Valve mentioned in the blogpost?
What this means is that since stores have the responsibility to control what they're, like literally every storefront physically or digitally, they actually don't care until it either effects their bottom line or they really land in hot water like with Facebook. Tech companies are objectively terrible when it comes to social issues.
Thanks for the reply! At least I can buy from Humble Bundle with a clear conscience then ;)
My take on it is that only the absolute top tier indies find their way through the noise. When I have criticism of the Steam Store, I will always hear the same "you have to search for the garbage" line. However, the legacy of Steam is that it used to be a place where you could go "off-road" from the store and still find quality games. Quality control doesn't matter for the top, it matters for the middle and bottom of the store. That is exactly the part of the store where gems ARE getting lost in the mix with the junk. If the sub-AA tier indie had visibility once you went off the front page, then none of us would spend any time on this issue.
I wish that the two sides of this debate would just agree to disagree because we've been fighting this forever. It is the same shrill battle I guess that is going to be fought until the end of time. One side, going "I'm not feeling this" and the other side going "WHERE?! WHERE IS IT BAD?! SHOW ME THE SCREENSHOTS!" until the sun burns out. I remember on the old forum posting screenshots of my steam searches and "Recommended" games because I felt I needed to "prove" what i was talking about. Of course, it was handwaved and ignored.
In this ongoing series which Jim Sterling continues to do regarding Valve and Steam, he's repeatedly pointed out that the indie developers have a problem with this. Case in point, here's one from his video back in November.
And here's another one in the same video:
To be clear, this problem with Steam's curation is something that Indie Developers have repeatedly taken issue with time and time again. I do not know where this narrative that indie developers don't care about this problem came from because they do, a lot.
It's not only the top tier. The top tier is the only one to reach beyond 100k. It's just that now the midtier is too crowded. It's easier to exist as a pixelart metroidvania when there where 2 games on the store that were like this.
It's far more difficult now when, for the same price, you have metroidvanias with handdrawn visuals, symphonic soundtracks, or with amazing gameplay twists. It's far more difficult when there's 100 more games like you for the same price.
These games dont stand out anymore. Not only they fight for your money compared to far better games but also for your time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2caCVUWy0c&feature=youtu.be&t=227&ab_channel=JimSterling a really great point by Jim, there is in fact now money to be made in these trash games "because that hill is something a bunch of morons decided to die on", like by making videos of them, oh wait...
It's a bit of both. Steam is flooded with amazing games. But usability is hindered by bloat and DLC packs and stuff filling up the "New" lists in addition to the extremely poor quality games. Steam has a discoverability problem.
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In this ongoing series which Jim Sterling continues to do regarding Valve and Steam, he's repeatedly pointed out that the indie developers have a problem with this. Case in point, here's one from his video back in November.
And here's another one in the same video:
To be clear, this problem with Steam's curation is something that Indie Developers have repeatedly taken issue with time and time again. I do not know where this narrative that indie developers don't care about this problem came from because they do, a lot.
The thing is how true that actually is.
I mean I can make a game, it wont sell and then complain it didnt sell because of the "trash" games.
Lets say I make a new puzzle plattformer on Steam, do you think it wont sell because of Aids Simulator or because of the 1000 other puzzle plattformers that are already on Steam?
Was about to say that. Jim kind of ignored that bit from thr blog post
That's a totally different discussion, and a very valid one. Discoverability tools should indeed be improved. What I disagree with is removing those things from the store, when simply hiding them is enough.
In this ongoing series which Jim Sterling continues to do regarding Valve and Steam, he's repeatedly pointed out that the indie developers have a problem with this. Case in point, here's one from his video back in November.
And here's another one in the same video:
To be clear, this problem with Steam's curation is something that Indie Developers have repeatedly taken issue with time and time again. I do not know where this narrative that indie developers don't care about this problem came from because they do, a lot.
It's nice to see these two pictures because they exactly prove my point. I know what FDG is refering too and here's why they've been struggling:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/446810/Blossom_Tales_The_Sleeping_King/
I'm sorry but in 2017-2018, your cute top down view average looking pixelart Zelda clone wont cut it. Especially for that price or without marketing. Because Hyper Light Drifter came by and stole your lunch for the same price range. Because, with all due respect to the creators involved, there's dozens of other title like yours on the market already.
Moonlighter released on Steam abd already outsold it by a good margin (between 50k-100k sales) because guess what ?
It had a unique twist and better production values.
In fact, I'll tell something that may sound harsh but which is also true: If Valve had to put some form of curation on their store, it is titles like Blossom Tales that would be kept out of the door.
As for Imageeform, I have no doubt they enjoyed a better success on Switch. They've been marketting hand to hand with Nintendo and even had some sort of exclusivity involved iirc.