Spalls Hurgenson <
spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote at 23:48 this Friday (GMT):
On Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:40:48 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:
https://store.steampowered.com/sub/1097554/
Looks like a "Poppy's Playtime" clone. That's one of the problems with
Indie games. There are some great ideas to be found in the genre, but
for every novel idea, there are 300 other games that just make
soulless copies of it. If you just go by the numbers of games, it
makes AAA publishing look original in comparison.
"98% of everything made is garbage" -i forget who
But that's not what I wanted to talk about ;-)
Rather, it's the reviews on that game.
Now, Steam's user reviews have always been sort of iffy, but there
seems to have been a significant downturn in their usefulness
recently. And it's fairly obvious when it happened and why.
But first some history.
About two years ago, Valve created something called 'Steam Points.'
Whenever you bought something on Steam, you'd earn a certain number of
points (In the UK you earn 112 points for every pound you spend. It's probably 100 to the dollar in the US).
At first, these points did nothing. A bit later, Valve released the
Steam Points store, where you could buy emoticons and badges for
Steam's chat app, and background pics for your profile page. These
were fairly pointless and few people bothered.
About six months ago, though, Valve made it so you could award badges --purchased with Steam points-- to other people on Steam, usually for
things like writing an interesting review or a helpful comment in a discussion group.
And --completely coincidentally, I'm sure-- that's when Steam reviews
started to become (even) less about saying anything useful about the
game (even if it all it said was nonsense like 'game sucks' or
'developer is fag') to attention-whores trying to be spicy in order to
scoop up those badges.
Now you get reviews that say stuff like 'I will eat 1 tablespoon of
ketchup for every award I get' or ASCII art of a kitty.
And, again, Steam user reviews have /always/ been of marginally
utility, but usually there were still enough legitimate comments to
make them worth reading. But ever since those badges? The
signal-to-noise ratio has dropped precipitously.
At least the templated ones where its a multiple choice give a good idea
of some aspects. I'm fine with those.
and they're good for telling if a game is controversial, then it'll
have the overwhelmingly negative tag
Valve, of course, doesn't care. To give away badges, you need to have
steam points; to get steam points, you need to give them money.
They've incentive to encourage people to give away badges easily and
freely.
Just like CS:GO and TF2 items
But one of Steam's biggest advantages over its competitors is the
utility of its community features: the reviews, discussions, workshop,
etc. Without them, Steam is just another game's launcher. And thanks
to the 'look at me! I'm doing something zany!' attitude that those
badges promote, that utility is fading precipitously.
Steam Workshop for some games (L4D2, Gmod, and Rhythm Doctor) are
awesome and a really nice feature. I really don't see a lot of non-valve
games with Workshop integration anymore.
oh and TF2 also has some nice local map integration if you want to
practice rocket jumps and stuff or can get a LAN party together. Still
kinda sucks you have to go elsewhere to get custom HUDs tho.
If this keeps up I might as well just buy from Epic.
dont
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