Erik Johnson says Valve will stop barring games from the Steam Store

[TableSalt]

[Ad Bot]

[cblock360]

This almost makes me want to download Origin.

[hillkill]

This almost makes me want to download Origin.

you don't have to buy or download any of it lol. quit bitching

[Kochieboy]

itt people overreacting

It's just valve confirming that they are doing forgetall for QA and they are putting research games back on the shelves. Just block all the stuff you don't want to see and move on.

[cblock360]

you don't have to buy or download any of it lol. quit bitching

It was a joke

[Shift Kitty]

I hope they still plan on removing games that are literally asset flips.

[Kochieboy]

I hope they still plan on removing games that are literally asset flips.

I'm pretty sure they mentioned that they will keep monitoring for blatant abusers.

[hillkill]

It's just valve confirming that they are doing forgetall for QA and they are putting research games back on the shelves. Just block all the stuff you don't want to see and move on.

i don't understand how the content they allow matters or not. steam is a distribution platform, and it's still going to be a distribution platform even with eroge/research games. not necessarily defending the games, but it's kind of stupid to bitch about

[Aplem]

Prepare yourselves, 5,000 "Indie Games" are gonna be hitting the Steam store.

[Kochieboy]

i don't understand how the content they allow matters or not. steam is a distribution platform, and it's still going to be a distribution platform even with eroge/research games. not necessarily defending the games, but it's kind of stupid to bitch about

A lot of people seem to have it in their head that steam is a curated distribution platform. Which it was, if you were still living in 2012-2013. You have no idea how hard it was to get a game up on steam until greenlight came around and it would kill indie devs because steam was becoming the norm for DRM on PC. Now everyone and their grandmothers can get their game up on steam and be able to sell it. Does it have to be good? Nah. Does it have to be a full game? Nah. Can it be an asset flip? Welp, that question has still been left to answer. Valve does curate games in the fashion of, "Is it controversial? If it is, then prune it." But they don't do full curation, and I believe anyone that still believes that valve is responsible for curating their storefront for just major titles should just stop living in 2012 all together. It was a tough time for devs and it was really stuffty for just about everyone, so get over it.

[EcstaticEggplant]

if you wanna make ur steam store 99% better just do this

[Rose The Floran]

[TristanLuigi]

I'm okay with this. It means the platform will be more open to everyone, even if that does mean some stuff games make it onto the store. I find that garbage games rarely end up in my recommendations or front page anyway, and you can filter by ratings or popularity. However, I do think their search engine could still use a little work, and that's even more important if they're going to be taking a hands-off approach; it seems Valve agrees:

“We’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal or straight-up trolling,” Johnson explained. “Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see.”

With that goal in mind, Valve is once again promising to improve its personalization tools that surface games that Steam thinks you will like. It has had many of these features for years now, but Johnson says that they not prominent or comprehensive enough. The Steam dev team is also going to offer you more direct control over how the store works for you.

“We are going to enable you to override our recommendation algorithms and hide games containing the topics you’re not interested in,” said Johnson. “So if you don’t want to see anime games on your Store, you’ll be able to make that choice. If you want more options to control exactly what kinds of games your kids see when they browse the Store, you’ll be able to do that.”

Also important:

In the short term, we won't be making significant changes to what's arriving on Steam until we've finished some of the tools we've described in this post. As we've hopefully managed to convey, navigating these issues is messy and complicated. Countries and societies change their laws and cultural norms over time.

And:

We'll still continue to perform technical evaluations of submissions, rejecting games that don't pass until their issues have been resolved.

[torin³]

I'm okay with this. It means the platform will be more open to everyone, even if that does mean some stuff games make it onto the store. I find that garbage games rarely end up in my recommendations or front page anyway, and you can filter by ratings or popularity. However, I do think their search engine could still use a little work, and that's even more important if they're going to be taking a hands-off approach; it seems Valve agrees:

Also important:
And:

you are a child enthusiast

[Maxwell.]

or straight up trolling.

yet we still have a bunch of stuffty joke parody games on there