The solution is simple: Steam should use AI to filter out the shovelware. /s
People of the world. Hear my wisdom as an “old”
In the before times of home computing, anyone and their mother could make and try to sell video games, floppy disks and cassettes were plentiful. The barrier to entry was essentially non-existent. You could get fully fledged games in magazines. (In fact some magazines included the actual programme for you to type out yourself)
But it turns out when publishers just shovel slop onto the market it drowns out good quality Indy stuff and even some of the high production value games. This feels quite similar to before the great video game crash.
There’s a reason Nintendo started putting their “Nintendo seal of quality” on their games. To try and reassure buyers that they didn’t just shovel slop people mailed in. At one point you even had to send them a video tape with evidence the game could even be completed. Interestingly that seal is still found on their games.
We’ve almost returned to that state of low barrier to entry. Digital distribution means there is no real difficulty in physically producing and distributing the game. AI makes it so that anyone’s half baked idea can be shoved on Steam.
Don’t get me wrong there are many excellent games that would have struggled to make a name for themselves using steams old green light system.
Indie*
The Nintendo Seal was also them raising the barrier to entry. Many people had an NES/Famicom, not a lot of people had dev kits or Family Basics+Famicom Disk Systems.
It also reminds me of the nineties a bit, which was another time of rampant shovelware because of how cheap it was to produce a CD.
There were so many crappy discount games in the mid to late nineties that Wal Mart was selling them for under $5 at one point and you could get them in cereal boxes.
There will be no slander of Chex Quest!
I got Roller Coaster Tycoon in a cereal box. That game was a masterpiece
Exactly ! Back to eighties bubble
I just looked and I don’t see the AI flag in the filters. Maybe I’m blind, but zero chance I’m going to engage with it if I can’t filter out AI.
Millions of people who don’t even feel back pain yet are about to feel real nostalgia for the first time like the rest of us gamers
I’ve found a handful of promising ones, but it’s taking ten times the usual effort to sift through the slop.
