Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
First off, I’m not trying to attack anyone here.
If I mention names, I’m not angrily singling anyone out, they're perhaps just the most
relevant to or prevalent in this particular situation.
I’m going to criticise some of Jim Sterling’s ideas, for example, but he’s not guilty
of everything I talk about here.
I also think that dude seems cool and I could see him being very fun to hang out with, so
on the off-chance you’re watching this Jim, I assure you it isn’t personal.
Cool?
Cool.
So yeah, Steam has been kind of broken for a while.
As many before me have pointed out, the mere presence of a game on Steam used to be a marker
of quality.
In the past, it led me to trawl the platform constantly to see what new games had been
released.
Cut to a few years later, a tradition of hyper-reduced sales prices leading to a library full of
games I will likely never play and an opening of the floodgates to any shmuck with an executable
to throw up on the store and, well, yeah.
Not so interested in that anymore.
For some people, however, it’s far more than just a lack of interest.
People are legitimately angry about the state of the platform, with some people more or
less dedicating their careers to trying to get things fixed.
Notable problems include the ways in which Valve has let curation slip; that they’ve
foisted responsibility for managing it onto consumers and algorithms.
This leads to games that used to get visibility from their presence on Steam now being completely
buried.
There’s also systems like Greenlight which have been gamed by rogue developers to get
their games on the service illegitimately, as well as the ever-irritating asset flip
(where store-bought assets and Unity tutorials are uploaded to the platform without any creative
input to try and make a quick buck).
Each has become more prevalent over the years, as well as gradually lowering Steam in the
eyes of its customer base.
As a result, a lot of things have been shouted very loudly again and again that Steam needs
to stop letting bad games onto their service and start giving us good games, damnit!
And at least on the surface, anyway, it seems that the years of shouting have worked.
Steam has already announced that they’re ditching Greenlight in favour of Direct - a
system which introduces a paywall in an attempt to stop devs abusing the platform.
In a somewhat more surprising move, however, Valve recently flew consumer advocate YouTubers
Jim Sterling and John Bane (otherwise known as TotalBiscuit) over to their offices to
consult on plans to improve the service.
The result?
Well, unfortunately, a lot of it boils down to a more concentrated focus on what they’ve
already been doing: doubling down on algorithms and crowdsourcing curation (hey, wanna do
some free PR work for these devs?
You can call yourself an Explorer if ya want, buddy!), and I guess sating the weird desire
of your TotalBiscuits to have everything perfectly categorised.
A good few minutes of TB’s video is spent lamenting the ever-so-urgent problem of Steam
that they didn’t recognise your specific distinction between the terms Rogue-like and
Roguelite.
This platform is really going places!
As you can probably tell, I don’t think any of this is very convincing.
In fact, I don’t get the feeling Jim and John are particularly convinced either.
Maybe of the fact that that Valve is aware of its image problem?
Who knows.
It doesn’t mean they’re going to enact any kind of meaningful fixes however.
Even flying the guys out there is more of a symbolic gesture than anything else.
More importantly, I don’t think it’s possible for anything to come out of those meetings
to actually solve the issue.
That’s because the issue itself is far bigger than just fixing Steam's front page.
And that's just it - these people, these consumer advocates, were brought out to fix Valve’s
image problem.
A problem Valve caused for themselves through their desire to control as much of the PC
market as possible with little regard for how they were going to manage that eventuality.
The problem is that we’re viewing this in terms as black-and-white as “once we fix
Steam, we fix the PC gaming landscape!”
It ignores the more uncomfortable reality; that Steam is kind of a monopoly, and these
acts of contrition afforded to very specific (if vocal) YouTube communities all amount
to how they can maintain that absolute control.
But why is that bad, you ask?
All my games are in one place, so obviously I want that platform to thrive for the sake
of convenience.
I don’t want a million Uplays and Origins clogging up my desktop, confusing my flow
of gaming.
I get that, I do.
It’s the age we live in, where we’re constantly seeking out new ways to condense as far as
possible the ways we consume media.
The problem is that it gives Valve no real reason to improve.
Game devs are making far less sales, customer satisfaction is through the floor, but Gabe
Newell’s net worth is the highest it's ever been.
Even if individual games are selling less, Valve is making just as much across a larger
number of titles.
And now there’s going to be a ubiquitous paywall I guess, locking out even genuine
devs who might not have the money.
It just doesn’t work, because there’s no competition.
The solution is not to congratulate Steam on the appearance of contrition, of their
supposed catering to the specific whims of the audiences of two specific YouTubers.
The solution is to perhaps forego some of that unity of experience, for the sake of
supporting other platforms offering different services.
Whilst Uplay and Origin offer little in the way of unique selling points other than “you
get to launch this launcher from Steam, which is itself a launcher”, there are other similar,
but bespoke platforms that are worth examining.
For example, instead of trying to find that tiny indie diamond in the gargantuan pile
of shoddy mobile ports that is Steam, why not look for that experience on somewhere
like itch.io?
It’s a service curated by actual human beings which offers smaller developers the means
to distribute their unique, fun and experimental experiences that they might not be able to
distribute on Steam.
It’s so different from Steam that its founder Leaf Corcoran has in the past altered things
on the backend to accommodate the quirks of specific games, for instance.
This is a platform that really cares about a specific kind of experience.
With Steam’s upcoming paywall, you’ll probably see a lot more devs gravitating to
this service, with the human curation and a genuine wish to support genuine devs stopping
your Digital Homicides in their tracks.
You can support the work of these devs by supporting the platform that cares about them.
It's the same with GOG.
You go there for old games, many of which fall into that somewhat ephemeral “middle
tier” of development that can’t really exist now because anything other than AAA
mega corp or scrappy garage programmer just isn’t sustainable on a platform like Steam.
It's also totally DRM free, whereas Steam itself is DRM, giving you more choice in how
you play and control your purchases.
I’d say having multiple libraries is a small price to pay for each one having its own purpose,
giving devs a choice of the platforms that suit their interests, each service being able
to foreground the best of its specialty as a result, leading to a better landscape for
the consumer.
It’s supply and demand – you support these carefully curated experiences on each platform,
and that curation suddenly becomes a lot easier and more effective.
More choice is better for everyone, and Valve controlling nearly 100% of all PC gaming purchases
does not allow for that.
Ultimately it's you who has to realise that though, and perhaps consider sacrificing some
convenience in favour of supporting a competitive marketplace.
But hey, I guess John giving Valve a good talkin’ to about algorithms will have to
suffice for now.
Which brings me onto my larger problem with so-called “pro-consumer” punditry on the
industry, and this is far from just John and Jim.
There’s nuance to every situation in the games industry that I feel is often lacking
in the way these people represent it.
Everything is always the fault of big bad publishers and lazy devs trying to make bad,
incomplete experiences to irritate the poor, innocent consumer who can seemingly do no
wrong, but also just can’t stop buying those dang bad games.
Essentially, the customer isn’t always right, and these commentators rarely if ever point
that out.
It’s how you get to situations like the Mass Effect Andromeda thing where people are
shouting about lazy devs, when in order to get to their position, you have to be anything
but.
No one considers the fact that, well, games are hard to make especially within a large
company, so you talk to other devs and they'll tell you it's a miracle anything gets shipped.
No one considers that the devs perhaps didn’t want to put the game out in that state.
No one considers the fact that it was the end of the tax year, so EA weren’t going
to push that back, instead forcing already pressured devs to work harder and release
something that they perhaps wanted to work further on.
But nope, a continuous, reductive commentary on “lazy devs” (which is itself real lazy)
and intentionally bad games leads to people getting harassed by those who have no idea
how complex this process can be (or who was even involved).
These people are now going to be the Explorers, choosing which games get surfaced and which
get buried.
All for the sake of fixing Valve’s image problem.
Sounds great, right?
Ya just gotta have the good games be on Steam’s front page and the bad games be catapulted
into the sun!
What I’m saying is that being pro-consumer means so much more than breaking things down
into “good games” and “bad games” (something you see a lot of especially in
John's video).
This is a problem for a number of reasons; not least of which because it doesn’t allow
for games in the middle ground.
The camp games; the ones that lack some technical finesse, but perhaps have heart.
What’s that?
You want a kinda bad game to laugh at and have fun with?
Well no, you don’t get to do that, because Jim and John's fans-turned-Explorers have
decided that that joke’s over now and those games are all BAD.
It’s downright suppressive.
Even if it’s not that with these YouTubers, things often come down to “this PC port
has a bad frame rate and these controls are bad and that’s why this business hates the
consumer!”
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been guilty of reductive statements myself in the past – I’ve
just never claimed to be some pro-consumer advocate.
But assure yourself of this: the idea that devs are lazy and want to hurt the consumer
is not only reductive; it distracts from real, tangible problems about the way the game industry
works.
An example of this for me was back in November last year when Ubisoft executives were accused
of and fined for insider trading.
Allegedly these higher-ups (including the CEO of Ubisoft Montreal) sold stocks back
in October 2013 right before substantial delays were announced for both Watch Dogs and The
Crew – delays which, according to PC Gamer, saw shares drop by around 25%.
In December 2016, the people involved were fined a combined total of 1.27 million Euros
(although they asserted their innocence and plans to appeal).
Now, not only is insider trading super, SUPER illegal, but in games, this is the kind of
business practice that has knock-on effects on company standing, project timelines, budgets,
pressure on development teams, etc.
Things that lead to less than ideal products.
And yet, nothing.
I found out about it from a news article buried on Gamespot, and no one was mentioning it.
That seemed wild to me.
I guess it got a postscript in a Jimquisition episode in January (Nintendo’s Virtual Console
Is Trash) as if this was just a simple foible of the company when potentially it was something
much, MUCH more serious.
But no, because it didn’t directly translate to “this company hates the consumer because
DLC or bad frame rates”, you didn’t see it covered.
I mean, without wishing to get too conspiratorial, I’m willing to bet the executives at Ubisoft
were glad that people were continuing to comment on things as symptomatic of the larger problem
as frame rates and pre-order DLC and the like, precisely because it distracted from that
larger problem; that there’s a distinction between the so-called “shady business practices”
that amount to “bad games” and the actual shady business practices of which the things
people complain about are a result.
I mean, I could talk about the failings of this kind of punditry all day, but at some
point, the onus is kind of on the consumer to make better choices.
We live in a capitalist society – big businesses do not have your best interests at heart,
and just because you loudly demand that "catering to gamers" makes business sense, doesn't make
it so.
In fact, often the opposite is true; you can talk about F’ing Konami and how they’re
going to die without Kojima and how they don’t care about the gamers all you want, but their
profits are actually up year on year.
This kind of thing should be a given; it’s the surface level.
Challenge yourself to go deeper into the underlying problems when discussing this stuff.
It’s probably why a lot of this consumer advocacy stuff falls flat with me.
It’s both pointing out the blindingly obvious whilst failing to get to the heart of the
issue.
Valve attempting to control 100% of the PC gaming market is bad for developers and consumers
alike, and no amount of YouTubers flown out to talk about dumb algorithms and further
crowdsourcing curation is going to change that.
The reality is that the solution to the problem of Steam comes down to you, the consumer,
giving up some of the convenience of having one library of games in one place, in service
of seeking out and supporting different platforms offering more specialised experiences.
In return, this is where you will see Steam, and the PC gaming market in general, really
start to improve.
So I hope you enjoyed my take on the whole Valve situation.
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Thank you so much to all the patrons on screen for their continued support.
I’d also like to give special thanks to Biggy, Mark B. Writing, Peter, Nico Bleackley,
Artjom Vitsjuk, Justins Holderness Christian Konemann, Thomas Coker, Nicolas Ross and Charlie
Yang.
And with that, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.