Author Topic: steam quality control is great (Read 3477 times)

Rally · October 30, 2017, 01:38:07 AM

Somehow still better than For Honor

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McJob · October 30, 2017, 01:56:03 AM

Valve supposedly believes that Quality Control or Quality Assurance (separate concepts, btw) would impose a kind of bureaucracy that would take away from having an "open platform", which if you've been following SteamOS, Greenlight and Source 2, would know that in a very warped way is their goal. They only do minimal checking to ensure the contents of a developer's upload are somewhat legal (viruses and even games without executables have been distributed through Steam in the past).

I have a lot of respect for Nintendo being the first company to implement their own Quality Control scheme, called "Lot Checks". Sony and Microsoft followed with their TCRs and TRCs respectively. One of the reasons SEGA failed as a hardware publisher is because they spat in the face of Nintendo's "bullying" of developers into making sure their games met minimal standards and let the market be open (they did a lot of things differently just to get at Nintendo; one example is letting developers source their own carts/discs while Nintendo forced devs to buy direct from them with Nintendo taking a 20% cut on every cart sold).

I should say; Quality Control doesn't weed out games with stuffty graphics, boring gameplay, bad controls etc. It just so happens that the kind of people who pump out that purile stuff also happen to fail on other basic requirements at the same time. Lot Checks/TRCs/TCRs focus on objective technical qualities such as "all loadscreens must complete in under 60 seconds", "the game must never directly forget with the hardware and instead use our API calls to be safe" or "the game must never record and upload microphone recordings".

Shift Kitty · October 30, 2017, 02:20:43 AM

Valve does 'some' level of quality control, accordingly. But it doesn't involve completely rejecting a product from their platform. Rather, the game has a significantly less chance of being 'suggested' to people.
Which seems to not be wrong. When scrolling down the store or going through my queue, all these shovelware and asset flip games haven't been popping up there. But I used to be someone who preferred browsing "new releases". That section of the store is completely ruined. With the inability to filter out tags, nor apply our own tags (yet they're still called user tags for some reason), there's just waves and waves of visual novels, asset flip FPS games, early access bullstuff, and RPG maker games. On top of that, there's only a way to filter out non-VR games, but no way to filter out VR-only games.

TristanLuigi · October 30, 2017, 02:46:34 AM

Quote from: Shift Kitty on October 30, 2017, 02:20:43 AM

Valve does 'some' level of quality control, accordingly. But it doesn't involve completely rejecting a product from their platform. Rather, the game has a significantly less chance of being 'suggested' to people.
Which seems to not be wrong. When scrolling down the store or going through my queue, all these shovelware and asset flip games haven't been popping up there. But I used to be someone who preferred browsing "new releases". That section of the store is completely ruined. With the inability to filter out tags, nor apply our own tags (yet they're still called user tags for some reason), there's just waves and waves of visual novels, asset flip FPS games, early access bullstuff, and RPG maker games. On top of that, there's only a way to filter out non-VR games, but no way to filter out VR-only games.

I've never given much thought to "soft" quality control like that. It's certainly better than nothing, but I do think there needs to be more "hard" quality control, to counter that exact issue with new releases.