clyde

Fake Games

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56 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

It feels like a lot of people against more aggressive curation in this thread, whether automated curation by an algorithm or curation by a dedicated staff, seem to be fine with letting Steam become an unnavigable ocean of titles to the average customer, rather than permit the chance of any bias entering the storefront's presentation. That feels like a very privileged position to me.

 

That seems like kind of an unnecessarily harsh characterization of the arguments others are making here. Personally, I think some good points are being raised by clyde and others and it's been a really interesting conversation to read.

 

Ultimately though, I think I do tend to agree with your point of view. At the end of the day, when you consider what Valve is (a storefront), I think it is perfectly reasonable and within their rights to take some steps to ensure that there is some minimum standard of quality present in all of the products they sell. This is literally what every store that sells anything does. It will never be perfect and there will always be bias and some really good or interesting things may not make it onto the store. But in aggregate, I think Steam and customers will be better off with some type of more aggressive curation that prevents tons of shit permeating the store. I think it is slightly unreasonable to expect that they should sell anything and everything people submit, especially with the seemingly exponential increase of the amount of new games released on Steam each year. They are a store, not a junkyard, and the problem is only going to get worse as more and more games flood an already saturated market.

 

On Jim Sterling, that's cool to hear that he isn't a shithead. He sounds like a decent guy. But I don't think I can ever bring myself to watch his stuff because his brand is so goddamn off-putting. I do wonder though if he has found such great success due to or in spite of his style.

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53 minutes ago, clyde said:

I assume that this isn't an attempt to represent my position, but I'm still curious which priviledges you are referring to. 

 

As a non-inclusive list, the privilege of having the ability, the resources, and the connections to be able to research the game you want to play elsewhere before having to go to Steam to buy it; the privilege of not needing to worry about being substantively inconvenienced by the time you waste finding a game or the time or money you waste playing it; the privilege of championing artistic expression over the concerns and needs of the people consuming it and paying for it. Maybe "entitlement" is a better word that "privilege," because it's less systematic in origin than the privilege of race, socioeconomic status, gender, or orientation, but I do think that it's an exercise of privilege to say that semi-broken "amateur" games deserve the same visibility and billing as professional games with ongoing support on a commercial storefront run by a private business with millions of customers, because you're willing to do the rest of the legwork yourself.

 

11 minutes ago, Zeusthecat said:

On Jim Sterling, that's cool to hear that he isn't a shithead. He sounds like a decent guy. But I don't think I can ever bring myself to watch his stuff because his brand is so goddamn off-putting. I do wonder though if he has found such great success due to or in spite of his style.

 

I'm trying unsuccessfully to find a four-page interview that Sterling did with TheMarySue or something about his growth from consumer-rights shithead to outspoken feminist and social justice advocate, and his own feelings about coming out as bi in the age of GamerGate, but Google is repeatedly failing me. He comes across so much better in writing, too, but YouTube is the way of the future.

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33 minutes ago, Zeusthecat said:

 

Ultimately though, I think I do tend to agree with your point of view. At the end of the day, when you consider what Valve is (a storefront), I think it is perfectly reasonable and within their rights to take some steps to ensure that there is some minimum standard of quality present in all of the products they sell. This is literally what every store that sells anything does. It will never be perfect and there will always be bias and some really good or interesting things may not make it onto the store. But in aggregate, I think Steam and customers will be better off with some type of more aggressive curation that prevents tons of shit permeating the store. I think it is slightly unreasonable to expect that they should sell anything and everything people submit, especially with the seemingly exponential increase of the amount of new games released on Steam each year. They are a store, not a junkyard, and the problem is only going to get worse as more and more games flood an already saturated market.

 

 

Do you think older games should be removed from the store? Pretty much all stores remove stock when it expires or becomes out-dated. I would think that some of the older games on Steam aren't even compatible with Windows 10. In your view, would this be a good way to remove some of the cruft in Steam?

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Yeah, I was going to say that I remembered being cool with a lot of Sterling's writing long before I ever saw his weird star wars villain routine.

 

Personally, I'm all for aggressive curation. And hey, if there's a false positive and something is rejected that maybe shouldn't be, perhaps there could be a process to appeal that decision and make a case for your game.

 

I've seen a lot of games that are clearly intended to trick people into thinking they were buying something else, and that's not cool. There were tons of fake Minecrafts on iOS and android that would use a screenshot of the real Minecraft, for instance. Some "developers" sell emulators packaged with a rom that they have no rights to. The most egregious examples get taken down pretty quickly, but the perpetrators still presumably run off with the money like a bunch of Kangaroo Jacks.

 

The more grey area is stuff that's just bad. It's hard to draw that line. Sometimes people try their best and end up with something kind of low rent, while others put in no effort, and know they can get a few sales based on screenshots and stuff.

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11 minutes ago, Salacious Snake said:

The more grey area is stuff that's just bad. It's hard to draw that line. Sometimes people try their best and end up with something kind of low rent, while others put in no effort, and know they can get a few sales based on screenshots and stuff.

 

One of the unfortunately more effective ways to handle that is to let the algorithm flag everything sketchy and then to have either a developer- or staff-initiated review for false positives. The vast majority of people who make asset-swapped scams or repackaged ROMs don't even try to get their claim reviewed: they were just looking for a quick buck and entering a lengthy arbitration with the digital storefront isn't worth their time. Of course, that depends on Valve actually hiring someone to handle the reviews and not just dumping it on their unspecialized and overextended customer support staff, which I seriously doubt that they'll do. Valve seems to prefer mediocre automation to human-based specialization in almost all circumstances.

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53 minutes ago, clyde said:

 

Do you think older games should be removed from the store? Pretty much all stores remove stock when it expires or becomes out-dated. I would think that some of the older games on Steam aren't even compatible with Windows 10. In your view, would this be a good way to remove some of the cruft in Steam?

 

I think it all depends on demand and whether or not those games still function. If an older game continues to sell copies at a reasonably healthy pace, and can run on a modern operating system, then no, I don't think they should or would be removed with more aggressive curation. But if nobody is buying them and/or they don't run on modern operating systems then yeah, I think it would be reasonable for them to be removed from the store.

 

It's maybe not a perfect comparison since a traditional store has more finite shelf space than the practically infinite shelf space on Steam, but I think it is a reasonable model for Steam to strive for (and Valve's cost to host these games is not zero). In theory, I like the idea of having an infinitely expandable storefront where everyone can find exactly what they want and anyone can put a game up with as little or as much effort as they feel like putting in, but in practice, none of these changes to Steam have been able to mitigate the disadvantages of such a bloated storefront. I don't envy Valve. This is a tough problem to solve.

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Maybe Valve should concentrate of fixing their categories rather than removing games from sale (or not putting them up at all).  here is the second page when I browse "Racing"

 



Capture.thumb.jpg.d81154074878928f12289a02c109c980.jpg

 

 

Based off of some of the positions stated in this thread, an uneducated consumer might buy Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 or Mad Max or Arma III DLC thinking that it is a racing game.  This failure to properly categorize is also burying games and losing revenue for hard-working game-makers. Why isn't this the priority solution when it is something that more people would be happy with?

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27 minutes ago, clyde said:

Maybe Valve should concentrate of fixing their categories rather than removing games from sale (or not putting them up at all).  here is the second page when I browse "Racing"

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 


Capture.thumb.jpg.d81154074878928f12289a02c109c980.jpg

 
 

 

 

 

Based off of some of the positions stated in this thread, an uneducated consumer might buy Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 or Mad Max or Arma III DLC thinking that it is a racing game.  This failure to properly categorize is also burying games and losing revenue for hard-working game-makers. Why isn't this the priority solution when it is something that more people would be happy with?

 

That would be fucking great. You're now arguing against your own previous position, because tags are Valve's solution to grouping categories the same way that most of their solutions are implemented in the storefront: let customers do it. Tags are assigned by people who care enough to go on to store pages of games and manually write a tag on a game. If Valve actually did curation, you'd probably see a wider variety of tags, and ones that more accurately represent the games upon which they're placed.

 

But I'll ask, what's wrong with the screenshot of what shows up in the racing category? You can damn well race in all of those titles if you want to.

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10 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

But I'll ask, what's wrong with the screenshot of what shows up in the racing category? You can damn well race in all of those titles if you want to.

 

 

 

You can by foot in COD multiplayer too. I don't think that people are looking for Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 when they are searching for racing games. I assume they are looking for something like Project Cars or Assetto Corsa, not GTA5.

 

p.s. I'm continually surprised by what y'all seem to think my position has been in this thread. Not sure what is causing the confusion. I guess it's not a big deal. It's weird though.

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27 minutes ago, clyde said:

You can by foot in COD multiplayer too. I don't think that people are looking for Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 when they are searching for racing games. I assume they are looking for something like Project Cars or Assetto Corsa, not GTA5.

 

p.s. I'm continually surprised by what y'all seem to think my position has been in this thread. Not sure what is causing the confusion. I guess it's not a big deal. It's weird though.

 

Your position, from where I'm sitting, appears to be that as long as products released on steam are not literal IP theft, and if you can recover your money through Steam's refund system, it doesn't matter how much of a scam or how broken they are, they can and should be allowed to exist on the platform and curation towards the ends of curtailing releases of this type cause active harm to both developers and consumers.

 

I don't think that people are looking for scams that can use the masquerade of Early Access to hide forever in barely disguised unplayable ignominy when they are searching for indie games. I assume they're looking for original, completed works. 

 

 

 

I can see something academically noble in your active search for titles people have labeled "fake games", to see if there's any value in them. Let's be real though, If Steam as a united storefront didn't exist and these were being sold on someone's website, you the consumer would not buy them because the fear that they'd be stealing your credit card would be way too omnipresent. As it is they're just stealing your money if you can't refund it quickly enough.

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I'm glad I asked; I was legit confused about how you were relating the thing about tags and categories to my disapproval of removing games from the store because of most users quality standards.

 

Here  is one of the things that is having an impact on my views: I also have an imaginary consumer in mind as I'm thinking through this situation; it is basically me when I first started buying games on PC rather than on a console. The appeal of Steam were explicitly these things:

-I don't have to worry about viruses if I download games from this store.

-I don't have to worry about credit-card theft if I buy from this store.

-I will be able to re-download the game after the publisher has gone out of business.

 

During my first couple of years buying games on PC, I was also unaware of how wide of an array PC-gaming was. This was around 2008. At the time visual-novels and early-access were not on the store. Short, interesting games like Gravity Bone were not on the store. Wasn't 30 Flights of Loving was controversial when it was put on the Steam store?

The climate has changed a lot since then largely due to Itch.io and Gamejolt, but I think that it is an entitled (as defined previously by Gormongous) assumption that folks that scared about downloading PC games will know about or trust stores like Itch.io. On an early episode of the Giant Beast Cast, Vinny Caravella expressed very clearly that he was not willing to download from (I'm pretty sure it was) Itch.io because he was afraid he would get viruses. There is an industry professional who is unwilling to download a PC game from something smaller than Steam, Origin, Uplay or Battlenet. Y'all don't seem to think that these frightened PC players would enjoy smaller games that a lot of folks wouldn't consider worth a buck, but I certainly would have if I had known they existed.

 

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Y'all don't seem to think that these frightened PC players would enjoy smaller games that a lot of folks wouldn't consider worth a buck, but I certainly would have if I had known they existed.

 

Nope, nobody said that.

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32 minutes ago, clyde said:

Y'all don't seem to think that these frightened PC players would enjoy smaller games that a lot of folks wouldn't consider worth a buck, but I certainly would have if I had known they existed.

 

No dude it's that the $1.00 category of gaming on Steam is so full of stuff that is literally a scam due to lack of curation that there's no worldly reason to take the chance that anything there is real, barring word of mouth approval from credible sources.

 

The reason I said you're going against your previous position is for the important issue (stealing people's money) you don't want curation, but for the relatively unimportant issue (determining game genre) you want much better curation.

 

By the end of 2008 there were 400 games on Steam. Total. There were over 400 Steam releases just in March this year. There are six games in April released under $1. 21 released under $5. Seven of them have any user reviews of any kind whatsoever. The one with the most reviews is one that's come out of free "early access" to paid "early access" that people are reviewing just to link to the places where the assets were stolen from.

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I conceptualize the problem with the Steam store like this: are basic requests made to non-specialist customers more or less likely to go awry? If I tell my mom or my non-gamer friend to go to Steam and buy me the newest Call of Duty, am I liable to get what I want? In my experience, having spent last month trying to explain to a friend how to get the best version of Myst on Steam via text, the answer is no. It becomes almost impossible if you are wrong about or don't know the exact title of the game that you want. As clyde points out, the user-driven and algorithm-compiled tagging system for genres is nearly useless. Searching for any term except the exact title (and, often, even searching for the exact title) results in a confusing list of professionally developed games, amateur or indie games, asset swaps and scams, and non-game material like soundtracks and wallpaper packs. The storefront's recommendation system tends to drive you to unrelated but currently popular games. It's a mess, and that's if you aren't concerned about accidentally paying someone for a game that's not playable, that's been abandoned before being feature-complete, or that has stolen assets.

 

I laud your abundance of good faith, clyde, but from my perspective and the perspective of others, we're trying to get rid of a huge pile of shit stinking up the room and you don't want us to get rid of it because you think there might be gold somewhere in the shit, because you've found gold there sometimes in the past. There may be gold, but there's certainly shit, and I guess which is more deserving of our attention and efforts is a matter of opinion.

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3 hours ago, Badfinger said:

No dude it's that the $1.00 category of gaming on Steam is so full of stuff that is literally a scam due to lack of curation that there's no worldly reason to take the chance that anything there is real, barring word of mouth approval from credible sources.

 

The reason I said you're going against your previous position is for the important issue (stealing people's money) you don't want curation, but for the relatively unimportant issue (determining game genre) you want much better curation.

 

I'm fine with more reliable categories. Removing games from the store is what I have a problem with.

No one is stealing people's money in any of the circumstances we have discussed so far.

Also, if you take a chance with fewer games that are chosen by Valve employees or whatever and you don't like the game, what is the difference?

 

Quote

 

By the end of 2008 there were 400 games on Steam. Total. There were over 400 Steam releases just in March this year. There are six games in April released under $1. 21 released under $5. Seven of them have any user reviews of any kind whatsoever. The one with the most reviews is one that's come out of free "early access" to paid "early access" that people are reviewing just to link to the places where the assets were stolen from.

 

I want to see this. How do you do this search?

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3 hours ago, Gormongous said:

I laud your abundance of good faith, clyde, but from my perspective and the perspective of others, we're trying to get rid of a huge pile of shit stinking up the room and you don't want us to get rid of it because you think there might be gold somewhere in the shit, because you've found gold there sometimes in the past. There may be gold, but there's certainly shit, and I guess which is more deserving of our attention and efforts is a matter of opinion.

 

Better categorization or using the curation system would not only remove the stuff you consider shit from your view, it would also remove the stuff you don't want to play. So people could still find it and buy it if they want and you wouldn't notice it was there unless you went looking for it. Don't they show top-sellers by default? In combination with better categories, wouldn't this be fine for a new user to browse without concern of low-effort games?

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3 hours ago, clyde said:

 

I'm fine with more reliable categories. Removing games from the store is what I have a problem with.

No one is stealing people's money in any of the circumstances we have discussed so far.

Also, if you take a chance with fewer games that are chosen by Valve employees or whatever and you don't like the game, what is the difference?

 

 

I want to see this. How do you do this search?

 

Yes they are. They are creating a sham product and selling it for money. They are scamming people. That's theft. They are finding the soft edges of the Steam return policy and grinding pennies together to make dollars. You don't have an unlimited number of Steam refunds, which is in place to protect legitimate experiences that might fall into the realm of completable inside a refund window. as well as make sure people can't just roll some endless amount of money and try every game. I support this. I want people who make exciting and interesting short experiences to get paid for them. But it makes putting money into questionable experiences a gamble.

 

https://steamspy.com/

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Steamspy is interesting, was able to quickly find one of these scam games:

 

https://steamspy.com/app/344040

 

335,000 sales at $4, the dev team is walking away with 1 million dollars with stolen assets by a guy who is a known scammer, this is from his other game:

 

 

 

 

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34 minutes ago, YoThatLimp said:

Steamspy is interesting, was able to quickly find one of these scam games:

 

https://steamspy.com/app/344040

 

335,000 sales at $4, the dev team is walking away with 1 million dollars with stolen assets by a guy who is a known scammer, this is from his other game:

 

Wait, is this for real? How the hell did that game manage to get 335,000 in sales? Or is number of owners not necessarily indicative of number of sales? (for reference, Firewatch has just less than double this, which makes me extra suspicious)

 

Given that we regularly see much higher profile games with lower sales than this, I just can't help but be a bit skeptical about that huge number. And if it's real, holy shit.

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Yes, it's for real.

 

Although I don't know if SteamSpy recognizes keys given away? That's usually how they drum up publicity for scam games. Give out tons of keys, and then people buy it because it's getting covered (maybe not much, but even a little is gonna be a scam), etc.

 

So I guess it comes down to this: sure, consumers can get refunds. But are you okay with the devs walking away with illegitimate money? As a professional game dev myself, that's fucked up and I will not tolerate it (to the extent that I have any say in the matter, which I don't).

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I have an answer for that one, because it's the one I mentioned obliquely yesterday that has "the most reviews".

 

It's been in Early Access for 2 years now as a free download, but it was changed to either paid early access or "released" last week, which is why it shows up both with 300k downloads and was released this month for $4.

 

Parsing reviews and other stuff it seems like people downloaded this for 3 reasons - catastrophe tourist after this person's first game, internet detective to figure out just how much of a scam/stolen the game is, and idling to get steam trading cards.

 

e: I checked out the update history. It went from Beta 1.0 in July 2016 to Alpha 0.1.2 in August 2016.  So that's fun.

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Okay that makes some sense. 300k is a large number, heh.

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2 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

I have an answer for that one, because it's the one I mentioned obliquely yesterday that has "the most reviews".

 

It's been in Early Access for 2 years now as a free download, but it was changed to either paid early access or "released" last week, which is why it shows up both with 300k downloads and was released this month for $4.

 

Ah okay, so it sounds like the "Players in the last 2 weeks: 2,845 ± 1,543 (0.85%)" metric is probably the closest indicator of copies actually sold for money. Regardless of how much or how little it has actually sold, this is a pretty good example of a game that should be removed from the marketplace.

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