Steam Next Fest is being flooded with thousands of low-effort games, while developers are becoming reluctant to share their work for fear of seeing it quickly cloned.
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
What you’re asking for is not trivial. Just for the backlog, assuming a single scant hour per game, is 70 new full-time positions before getting into the organizational and administrative overhead. That’s the absolute bare minimum to load up and investigate a game and categorize it and it only works for things that are clearly defined from the very beginning. Realistically there’s no way they can sift through all the assets and code in that time for, as an example, signs of AI use even if they had full access to the developer’s work files. What you’re asking for is more like a full week audit on average.
I’m pretty sure they can afford it. But I’d be happy for the tag system to continue being meaningless if they would just hoist genre out into a separate system curated only by Valve.
Walmart sells a ton of shit I think is stupid. Sometimes I see it in the store. It really doesn’t bother me, I go to the aisle for what I want, consider the options, pick one and buy it.
I’m staunchly against smoking. Cigarettes are sold in many stores, but the packs all have warning labels on them making it very easy for me to make sure I never accidentally buy cigarettes. So far, it’s been pretty easy to avoid.
I don’t need to talk to the clerk when I walk in and ask them to hide all the products I hate, as long as everything is labeled and I can buy what I intend to buy, it’s really not a problem. It’s a store.
That’s not the issue here. They are free to have whatever games they want in the store, I don’t care.
The issue is: if you have a recommendation system in place (like the Discovery Queue, which I use and have found great games on), you’d better let me customize it so I don’t recommended yet another hentai puzzle instead of a nice boomer shooter. Just this. I just want some control on what I’m being recommended.
No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.
You can. Add tags/genres to your ignored list, and you won’t see any games marked with them.
Been blocking EA games for years.
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
Valve should have staff manually play through 144k games to make sure all the tags are accurate?
Yes, they can afford to ensure the quality of their systems.
What you’re asking for is not trivial. Just for the backlog, assuming a single scant hour per game, is 70 new full-time positions before getting into the organizational and administrative overhead. That’s the absolute bare minimum to load up and investigate a game and categorize it and it only works for things that are clearly defined from the very beginning. Realistically there’s no way they can sift through all the assets and code in that time for, as an example, signs of AI use even if they had full access to the developer’s work files. What you’re asking for is more like a full week audit on average.
I’m pretty sure they can afford it. But I’d be happy for the tag system to continue being meaningless if they would just hoist genre out into a separate system curated only by Valve.
As far as I can tell, you can only add about 10 tags to the ignore list. That’s way too few for me.
Walmart sells a ton of shit I think is stupid. Sometimes I see it in the store. It really doesn’t bother me, I go to the aisle for what I want, consider the options, pick one and buy it.
I’m staunchly against smoking. Cigarettes are sold in many stores, but the packs all have warning labels on them making it very easy for me to make sure I never accidentally buy cigarettes. So far, it’s been pretty easy to avoid.
I don’t need to talk to the clerk when I walk in and ask them to hide all the products I hate, as long as everything is labeled and I can buy what I intend to buy, it’s really not a problem. It’s a store.
That’s not the issue here. They are free to have whatever games they want in the store, I don’t care.
The issue is: if you have a recommendation system in place (like the Discovery Queue, which I use and have found great games on), you’d better let me customize it so I don’t recommended yet another hentai puzzle instead of a nice boomer shooter. Just this. I just want some control on what I’m being recommended.
Account settings > Store preferences > uncheck “Adult Only Sexual Content”
Thanks, but it only solves part of the issue.
That wouldn’t solve the issue of you’re fine with hentai games, just not the puzzle ones.
That hurts Valve’s bottom line.
Never going to happen
It’s not unheard of Valve going things that hurt its’ bottom line.
Family sharing, for instance. I can use the same instance of The Talos Principle 2 that my kid uses instead having two copies.
That kind of touch makes me a happy customer, with way too many games on my “one day I’ll play this” list.