Why won’t Steam filter new games?

Over 4000 games were released on Steam this year alone. Some of those games, to put it mildly, are of dubious quality and got bad reviews. So gamers started asking: “Why won’t Valve filter new games like it did before Greenlight”?

I don’t work at Valve, so everything below is just my personal opinion. But I believe, Valve is currently in the position where it would not be possible to implement any kind of a review process.

Ye olde game store

Let’s start with how the things worked in the ancient times. And by “ancient times” I actually mean the ’90s.

By that time the gaming industry was already that — an actual industry, not a loosely-tied bunch of enthusiasts making games out of their bedrooms and basements.

Developing a game was reasonably hard, yet still within reach of any group of motivated enough individuals. So, not as prohibitively expensive as in the 2000s. And we used to have a lot of those small-budget games in the ’90s. But of course, not 4000 per year by any stretch.

Why? Because you still needed a publisher.

Publishers get a bad rep now with all the indie stuff, but back then they were indispensable. You couldn’t deal with tens of thousands of gaming stores in the US alone, let alone other countries and their complicated taxation systems.

Publishers also worked as filters. If you couldn’t convince EA or GOD or THQ to publish your game, maybe it wasn’t that good? Of course, as the market and budgets grew, smaller and riskier publishers went bankrupt or got bought out. Survivors became bigger and needed even bigger games to justify the cost of running a publishing business.

Y2K problem

The original mechanism of getting your game out through a publisher got broken in the early 2000s. Publishers became gatekeepers instead of filters.
Even if you were making an AAA game with substantial financial backing, you still had problems finding a publisher. For smaller developers it became literally impossible to get published. So, they either went local (as some German and most of the Russian devs) or closed the doors and dispersed to more successful companies.

PC games suffered the most. Space is sparse in retail stores. Three major platform holders paid for space for their products (sometimes through marketing, sometimes directly), yet no one paid on behalf of the PC games. So, save for evergreen Blizzard titles, PC games were out of the stores, out of sight for most gamers.

This is where Steam comes in. You might take it as overreacting, but I truly believe that Steam was one of the main reasons the core games stayed on the platform. By making PC titles readily and easily available (even easier than pirating!), Steam captured and cultivated a huge audience of dedicated gamers.

But the gatekeeping problem remained and became worse as development tools got more available. As Unity, Unreal Engine and other tools went semi-free and accessible, the number of good titles skyrocketed. And Valve, as the gatekeeper, was the biggest hurdle in the way of those new indies.

Green(light) pastures

You have to give it to Valve — they understood it even before everyone else did and acted to solve the problem by removing themselves from the equation. It’s a bold (and difficult) thing to do, and I honestly don’t believe that any other platform-holder would have the guts to go this way.

You see, having one company to effectively censor the core games market would be unhealthy even if they’re the good guys. The ’90s structure of multiple publishers worked precisely because you had different companies competing for both gamers and developers, betting their money on the future success of games they signed up.

Valve has no financial stake in publishing games and has no competition, so they did the most generous and honest thing possible in this situation — delegating the responsibility to choose the games for the platform to gamers themselves.

It turns out, gamers are bad at filtering games because they have no financial stake in them. Of course, sometimes they back a bad Kickstarter project too, but overall Kickstarter shovelware production rate is much lower than that of Greenlight.

Why won’t Valve just close the gates?

Because it wouldn’t solve the problem we had before Greenlight — one company being a gatekeeper for the games 150M people play. Valve understands well that them keeping a tight grip on all the games will not benefit the market.

This is also an immense amount of work — can you imagine how many people it would require to actually review 15 games per day while giving each a fair treatment and a chance to appeal? Do you want a single company to do this? In any other market, this would have been called monopoly or censorship.

Can we solve this problem?

Yes, we can. Of course, we can. I mean, we can get a man to the Moon, surely we can help gamers find a game they’d like to play.

There are many ways to solve it. It seems that Valve is trying at least two approaches.

First, they’re replacing publishers from the ’90s with the influencers or so-called curators. This approach is based on the idea that those curators, having a stake in their audience, would only recommend good games, acting as a filter. It’s not perfect since curators are not invested in the games themselves, but it’s better than nothing.

Second, Valve is trying to bring a social graph into play like Facebook did for their news feed. You know well how it worked out for Facebook, but maybe Valve will have a better chance?

And, of course, there is a resurgence of small publishers, just like in the ’90s. They work as curators fostering their audience, but they’re also financially invested in the games they publish. So far, this system worked out well for Paradox, tinyBuild, Devolver and some others.

Maybe Valve won’t be the one to fix the problem after all. Maybe the market will balance itself as it did before that.

But until that, enjoy the current situation, it probably won’t last.

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By the way, around a year ago I have changed Steam Spy’s front page to display “trending games” based on a number of factors. I was told it does a pretty good job of filtering out bad games. Try it.