"There is no platform that matches Steam's excellent discovery system" according to Heroes of Might and Magic publisher, the real problem is "some games should not be made"

The CEO's take here is actually pretty on-point. The article title over-simplifies, a bit.

The problem he points out is that a "failed" game that doesn't sell well, or even sells moderately, is still a valuable game, and experience for the developer(s), but it also often means financial ruin for the studio. In his opinion, it's that such studios aren't recognizing when they're releasing into an over-crowded genre, and need to adjust their budget expectations down.

Cause yeah, people SHOULD be able to make shit little games, without having to re-tool their entire career if it doesn't do terribly well.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Not censorship, but not massively overindexing like that.

The on route to getting recommended this stuff is way too open without a way to tell it stop.

When I go in my top recommendation is “Fetish Locator S&M Studio”, and these are all in my top recommendations at the top of the store:

Meanwhile my library looks like this:

I will say recommendations based on games I play is pretty good, but I’ve also dismissed “5 hearts one roof” and similar a ton of times.

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

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 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.

I don't see a problem at all, you just have an option to swap "OR" with "AND" as the search operand

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.

Genuinely can't tell if spam or non sequitur.