clyde

Fake Games

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The problem is not that the games exist. The problem is that they distract from other games that are good and deserve attention. Nobody besides someone who obstinately wants to rail against "haters" want this shit.

 

And it's definitely Valve's job to curate their fucking store with at least a modicum of quality control.

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If the games had viruses then I would agree that there is a problem. 

Valve's job (as I see it) is to:

-keep viruses or phishing methods or whatever off the store

 -to ensure that I can get refunds for games that are falsely advertised or don't run

-keep harassment masked as free-speech games off the store

-ensure that I can still download the game once the developer goes belly up.

 

Not to enforce quality-standards of others on me.

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That's a nice dream, but unfortunately reality doesn't accommodate.

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I guess I'm a little confused about how these games distract from other games. I had never heard of any of these games until I saw people talking about them in this context, so it's hard to imagine how they were a distraction.

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31 minutes ago, clyde said:

If the games had viruses then I would agree that there is a problem. 

Valve's job (as I see it) is to:

-keep viruses or phishing methods or whatever off the store

 -to ensure that I can get refunds for games that are falsely advertised or don't run

-keep harassment masked as free-speech games off the store

-ensure that I can still download the game once the developer goes belly up.

 

Not to enforce quality-standards of others on me.

 

Why not? It's Valve's storefront, they can do whatever they want with it, within reason. Letting it degenerate into a libertarian wasteland of stolen and copied work intended to swindle low-information customers is not in their best interest... which is really what's most puzzling about Valve's actual response for me: they're reacting passively to a genuine threat to the integrity of their storefront as a place that people go to buy games instead of rolling the die and pirating them. Still, the reason that these games are showing up on Steam and not other "outsider" platforms like itch.io where a punk aesthetic is more commonplace is because Steam is geared towards impulse buying and mass consumption in a way that itch.io isn't, particularly in the way that "early access" works, and the makers of these "fake games" are taking advantage of that.

 

I know it's a bad analogy, but it feels like some people here are arguing against the rights (and, furthermore, the social necessity) of businesses to curate the products they sell. A grocery store has a responsibility as a commercial institution to do more than make sure it's not selling poison instead of food and provide a locale for people to purchase this non-poison food. Who benefits from Valve not taking a more active hand in monitoring the quality of the games in Steam? The dozens of people writing negative reviews for Action Alien and Galactic Hitman, expressing confusion over the game they bought and frustration that they can't get their money back? "Caveat emptor because I don't want my freedom of choice restricted" seems like an unusual opinion to be voiced on these forums, but I'm sure it's out of an interest in the most good for the most people.

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1 hour ago, Gormongous said:

 Who benefits from Valve not taking a more active hand in monitoring the quality of the games in Steam? The dozens of people writing negative reviews for Action Alien and Galactic Hitman, expressing confusion over the game they bought and frustration that they can't get their money back?

But I thought you can get your money back? Without refunds I'd see the point, but now that Steam has refunds I don't see what the big deal is. It's not like poisoned food or whatever, where the damage is done once you eat it. If the game is a fake game, you can just return it!

 

Anyways, I suspect the reason you don't see these games on itch.io is that there's less money to be made on itch.io. It's not like Steam is more "geared towards mass consumption" than itch.io is - it's just that Steam has more customers. There's nothing about Steam's design that makes it more focused on mass consumption. itch.io is trying to sell me on other games just as much as Steam is. Ditto for impulse buying. How is itch.io any more resistant to impulse buying than Steam? I'm pretty sure it's easier to impulse buy on itch.io.

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I think they have a right to not include all games submitted, I just don't think they have the responsibility to exclude games that gamers consider fake games.

 

I still don't understand where these low-information consumers are being served these fake games as suggestions to buy. 

 

I don't see these dozens of complaints of games being non-refundable, possibly because I'm browsing by phone. 

 

I also don't consider use of assets from Unity's asset store a reason to dismiss the worth of a game. 

 

As far as why be concerned, Steam as a platform has an impact on what is considered legitmate and/or saleable. I can understand someone thinking that this does not necessitate that they have the responsibility to represent games outside of the status-quo, but Steam's influence is significant enough that the gamer-police can use its policies to damage the medium and the ability of small developers to reach their audience.

I can easily think of a few games that this crew would get removed from consideration on the store that have historical been influential and successful financial or culturally.

And again, the complaint that these fake games are creating so much noise and cheating customers continue to be unbased.

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On 4/8/2017 at 0:20 PM, Beasteh said:

I find myself wondering how Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo ensure basic minimum standards, then I remember Life of Black Tiger is on PS4. So there's really no escape.

 

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo don't have this problem because they effectively have a top down approach to allowing games onto their marketplace.  Just as an example, here are the two processes we went through in getting our game on PS4 and Steam

 

PS4:

- Get registered as a developer with sony

- Get Devkits from sony to develop on their platform

- Get license from Unity to be able to deploy and publish games on a PS4

- Submit game for a cert process

- Release game

- Any patches need to go through another cert process, which includes the game being perfectly functional with any combination of patches installed.

 

Steam:

- Get registered as a developer with steam

- Get approval to be on the marketplace

- Release game

- Patches are released at the developer's discretion

 

Valve does take a lot of flak for attempting to democratize that system, but there is value in that expansion.  This process does ensure quality, but it's often the reason things come late or even not at all to the consoles such as the case with Diablo's seasons feature or that situation with Phil Fish.  While there are a lot of games that make their way onto the marketplace that shouldn't, it also creates a space for games like Stardew Valley, Undertale, and others to get out to the public, or any other games by creators that aren't equipped for a full cert process.  Hell even getting access to a devkit, or perhaps even approval to develop on the platform can be a bit of a hassle and to some extent the amount of paperwork involved can discourage people from the entire process.  What valve hasn't, or at least hasn't been willing to do in my view is take these so called fake games off their marketplace once they're discovered, or put any kind of restrictions on pricing for games that don't meet some kind of standard.

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I can't buy Air Control or find a way to buy Galactic Hitman (maybe because I'm on my phone?) So it seems that Valve is removing games that the Youtubers freak out about having access to on the Steam store in some cases.

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I don't know why Air Control vanished but I think Galactic Hitman is gone because the company freaked out at negative reviews and sued Valve to get the list of the names of 100 people who wrote bad reviews so that they could sue those people. Valve was just like "uh, yeah, fuck off" and delisted all their games from Steam.

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44 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I don't know why Air Control vanished but I think Galactic Hitman is gone because the company freaked out at negative reviews and sued Valve to get the list of the names of 100 people who wrote bad reviews so that they could sue those people. Valve was just like "uh, yeah, fuck off" and delisted all their games from Steam.

 

Awkward.

 

Hmmm. It looks like there is some nuance to these events.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2016/09/21/yuma-digital-homicide-video-games-sue-users/90742572/

 

http://kotaku.com/game-developer-sues-100-anonymous-steam-users-for-18-m-1786721306

 

It looks like another case of consumer-vigilantes. Now I'm wondering if we are debating ethics in games-storefronts while someone is the victim of online harassment.

 

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So I've now beaten Galactic Hitman and another game by Digital Homicide called Devil's Share.

Both games are rather short and also extremely punishing in how fast and inevitable damage is (until you realize that crouching makes you impossible to hit). I stopped playing Galactic Hitman after the first two levels. The levels are very similar to each other. Then I played some Devil's Share. Devil's Share is actually kinda awesome. I'm happy that I bought it and played it. I will admit that it would be confusing if I didn't come into this game expecting something normal, but that could be said about other games I've learned to appreciate. I don't really want to spoil Devil's Share for y'all; working through your expectations for how a game that looks like it should play is the fun and interesting part.

If I just happened across either of these games on Steam somehow (which again, is impossible now) I would be really confused. I don't think that is reason to campaign against the developer though or for the store to remove the games (I understand that there was more complexity to this case, but I'm just saying based on the quality of the games themselves). Mildly interesting note: the trading cards are still earnable, but not buyable or saleable.

 

Looking forward to trying Pixel Day Gun-Z tommorow or maybe a little bit tonight.

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I played some Pixel Day Gun-Z which is not nearly as interesting as the previous two games.

I watched some more Jim Inquistion videos about the beef with Digital Homicide and Unit-Z "asset-flips". I think that those are two different situations that shouldn't be conflated. In one case Sterling claims that the developer started harassing him with frivolous lawsuit threats. He also goes into detail about stuff like creating a honey-pot for people who were critical of the game so that they could be pre-emptively banned before writing bad reviews (I think?). On the flip side of that it looks like there was a pretty significant campaign of writing comments in every possible crevice of the developer's store-fronts to talk shit. I wasn't there, I don't know what's really going on, it seems like more of an issue involving terms of use for developers and consumers on the social portions of the Steam store.

With games like Pixel Day Gun-Z (which is still on Steam but took some effort to have it appear on a list of games) the issue seems to be that folks are buying a game-pack called Unit-Z and an bundle of 3d models off of the Unity Asset store, putting them together in the fastest way and then getting the game through Greenlight somehow. I also saw it mentioned that some games are being submitted to Greenlight by people that actually did not make the game. I don't know how they got it, but I guess someone could take a game off of itch.io and put it on Steam Greenlight claiming that it is theirs? The reason I mention these two types of circumstances together is because in both cases the problem seems to be that Greenlight is somehow being gamed. I'm kinda curious about how that is done. Are they using botnets or just giving away free keys for upvotes?

I'm not bothered by Pixel Day Gun-Z being on the store. I think it is astoundingly uninteresting and if I had a store this would not be in it, but I don't know. I am concerned that every game that uses a store-bought asset is going to get attacked by these purists and maybe the advantage of having games like Pixel Day Gun-Z on the store is that it establishes one side of the spectrum of expectations. I'd love to see an examination of the game that expresses appreciation for it, I can't do it.

Devil's Share is pretty cool though, and Galactic Hitman is not a fun game, but I still see those wet liver-faced aliens with tentacle mustaches shooting at me when I close my eyes and I can remember the exact intonation of "Target Down". So those are good examples of what concerns me about these efforts to get games removed from Steam. I think they are kinda neat (even though my appreciation for them is based on something other than fun-factor) and I expect that they would be lumped in during the purge. I think it's also worth mentioning that Galactic Hitman and Devil's Share may not have come into being if not for the motive to put them on Steam, I'm not sure about that but it is worth considering. I'm curious about how this Explorer's program will go now that I've investigated the situation a little bit. I might record a Let's Play of Devil's Share. I'm a bit nervous about doing so, but we will see.

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8 minutes ago, clyde said:

With games like Pixel Day Gun-Z (which is still on Steam but took some effort to have it appear on a list of games) the issue seems to be that folks are buying a game-pack called Unit-Z and an bundle of 3d models off of the Unity Asset store, putting them together in the fastest way and then getting the game through Greenlight somehow. I also saw it mentioned that some games are being submitted to Greenlight by people that actually did not make the game. I don't know how they got it, but I guess someone could take a game off of itch.io and put it on Steam Greenlight claiming that it is theirs? The reason I mention these two types of circumstances together is because in both cases the problem seems to be that Greenlight is somehow being gamed. I'm kinda curious about how that is done. Are they using botnets or just giving away free keys for upvotes?

 

I'm not bothered by Pixel Day Gun-Z being on the store. I think it is astoundingly uninteresting and if I had a store this would not be in it, but I don't know. I am concerned that every game that uses a store-bought asset is going to get attacked by these purists and maybe the advantage of having games like Pixel Day Gun-Z on the store is that it establishes one side of the spectrum of expectations. I'd love to see an examination of the game that expresses appreciation for it, I can't do it.

 

I don't think it's just the presence of store-bought assets that make a game a target of the "purge," as you call it. I think it's a combination of store-bought assets, asset swaps of existing games including Unity demos, and games "stolen" from other lower-profile storefronts; higher-end pricing that leverages Greenlight, Early Access, and reviews-for-keys campaigns to push the game onto the front page long enough to capture a few hundred or thousand sales; and hostile, cryptic, or even absent communications between developers and community. It's the combination of these (with blatantly swapped assets and "stolen" games foremost among them) that makes for a "fake" game (not that that term isn't awful and a really tone-deaf choice by Valve). My main concern is that, like pornography, scammy games intended to skim a few thousand bucks from unsuspecting customers for a week or two of work mostly need to pass a smell test that benefits the most from a real person whose job is to do the judging, not an algorithm synthesizing the part-time work of a bunch of self-appointed gaming experts or whatever the Explorers program is intended to comprise in its ideal form. As this thread has shown, people's tastes and standards vary so wildly that such a synthesis will probably be worthless, at best, or highly partial and unfair, at worst.

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I don't see how a real person whose job it is to do the judging could be anything other than worthless at best or highly partial and unfair at worst, at least compared to the other options. What sort of real person do you have in mind who is immune to partiality?

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21 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I don't see how a real person whose job it is to do the judging could be anything other than worthless at best or highly partial and unfair at worst, at least compared to the other options. What sort of real person do you have in mind who is immune to partiality?

 

I'm not saying that they'd be immune to partiality. That's flatly ridiculous, no one's immune to partiality. I'm saying that, as a single person with a single job, they'd have to have a consistent approach that would be accessible to evaluation, modification, and critique. Surely that's better than the aggregate of the opinions of GamerGaters, "walking simulator" fans, peeps who only play Call of Duty sequels, and so on, right? The assumption (shared with so much of Silicon Valley) that aggregation removes biases rather than amplifying them is the big issue that I have with Valve's efforts to automate the processes of its storefront.

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I haven't followed this issue closely, but isn't part of the problem that they use these fake games to generate Steam trading cards and use them for some weird market exploitation?

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21 hours ago, Gormongous said:

libertarian wasteland

 

basically

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5 minutes ago, Twig said:

 

basically

 

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

 

This is a joke

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I have no particular points to add, just that I agree with others here that removing these games is a fruitless endeavour that could lead to harming genuine participants for no real gain. The biggest possible gain seems to be the possibility of Steam regaining a bit of their reputation, but I'm not really interested in that (I'd rather games decentralise from that single platform).

 

The last measure I heard about Valve suggesting was to charge much more for game applications onto Steam, so I don't agree that they're generally trending towards improving things for developers.

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20 minutes ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

I have no particular points to add, just that I agree with others here that removing these games is a fruitless endeavour that could lead to harming genuine participants for no real gain. The biggest possible gain seems to be the possibility of Steam regaining a bit of their reputation, but I'm not really interested in that (I'd rather games decentralise from that single platform).

 

The last measure I heard about Valve suggesting was to charge much more for game applications onto Steam, so I don't agree that they're generally trending towards improving things for developers.

 

How do you feel about the efforts of Amazon to remove knockoffs and counterfeit products from its storefront? It's gotten to the point where cheap fakes have undercut actual artists and manufacturers so much that many of them are struggling to stay in business. Does Amazon have a responsibility that Valve does not and, if so, what is it (or is it up to the buyer to protect themselves from being swindled, as I did when I had to buy the box set for Star Trek: Deep Space 9 three times from Amazon before I finally got one that wasn't a Chinese bootleg that had been repackaged)?

 

I also am really wondering if other people here have specific examples in mind of games that would be mistaken for "fake games" without good reason, have no other venue for distribution, and yet have a substantial artistic or entertainment value that the community would be missing out on. I love you, clyde, but the fact that you managed to have a couple hours of fun with a game that clearly looks like it was hoping to be mistaken for Serious Sam 3 isn't particularly compelling as an argument to keep these floodgates open. I had a lot of fun playing with sticks and branches in my backyard as a kid, but that doesn't mean that I'd be open to a company charging people money for sticks they'd found.

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Of course they will have other venues for distribution, but some examples of games that have artistic value that I imagine would be targeted for removal:
-Depression Quest

-Magic Wand

-50 Short Games

-any Twine game

-games made with RPG Maker

-Visual novels

-any game that uses a publicly available 3d model or environment from the Unity asset store. With the exception of the Digital Homicide games, I'm not aware of any that are up for sale, but I'm sure there are some.

-Dominique Pamplemousse

-Mountain

 

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Is there some shortcoming to Steam's refund system? I've heard it functions quite well from the consumer side. (admittedly if you buy a thing and forget for 2 weeks, then yes you'd be stuck with it)

 

I think Valve has a responsibility to deal with literal knockoffs when the artist or company who owns the original addresses them, or with actively malicious games (eg. phishing or virus carrying games). I don't think the general audience has the wherewithal to decide that. We're dealing with a group of people who think it would take a week for multiplayer to be patched into No Man's Sky, a "fundamentally broken and misleading game". I don't have any reason to think Valve would police who makes these decisions intelligently, given that they generally outsource that policing already.

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11 minutes ago, clyde said:

Of course they will have other venues for distribution, but some examples of games that have artistic value that I imagine would be targeted for removal:
-Depression Quest

-Magic Wand

-50 Short Games

-any Twine game

-games made with RPG Maker

-Visual novels

-any game that uses a publicly available 3d model or environment from the Unity asset store. With the exception of the Digital Homicide games, I'm not aware of any that are up for sale, but I'm sure there are some.

-Dominique Pamplemousse

-Mountain

 

...No.

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