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Steam's killer feature (pawb.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've tried to love Itch, EGS and GOG, but the thing that keeps me coming back to Steam is the ability to say "No, I'm not going to play that, stop showing it". The other stores shove unwanted ads in my face every time I visit, and it's always for the same old games I have no interest in. Steam helps me on my quest to find the diamonds in the rough, and every time I check the front page I usually see 5+ games that I'd consider playing.

Anyone else feel game shops should do more to help us find the right games? What's your strategy for finding good games with so much trash out there?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's really the thing with Steam in general, from a consumer perspective it's a very good and honest service, it actually adds to the experience of playing games instead of being an annoyance.

A lot of other stores feel like only shells made around popular titles to promote more stuff and lock people into using them. More launchers won't solve the monopoly of Steam, you'll just end up with as many as there are streaming services.

That's not the case for GOG and Itch, but there you don't get the same level of experience.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd argue that there is nothing to "solve" I mean steam doesn't even have a monopoly, nothing stops people from going to EGS, origin etc. other than their own shortcomings.

But even if we assume Steam has a monopoly, it is not abusive. They are looking out for developers and players alike and they provide a lot of services. I probably wouldn't have discovered half the indie games in my library if steam wasn't good at promoting these smaller games.

I am not saying Steam is the saviour of the gaming industry or anything like that, they are a company after all. But the "monopoly" exists without the utilization of bad practices like exclusivity deals unlike other players in the market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There is some anti-competitive abuse: Steam will delist games if it finds them being sold with a lower price on another platform. This prevents other platforms from competing for customers by taking lower fees. They can only compete for developers and hope developers will drive customers, which hasn't happened so far.

That doesn't affect me much though. I mostly just want better competition so that more money goes to the gamedevs. Steam makes an insane profit. Steam's profit from me alone is more than the undiscounted launch price of ~~30~~ 22 AAA games... Have they employed hundreds of people for thousands of hours to make something to entertain me? No, they just operate the store. Hardly seems worth being almost 1/3rd of every pricetag.

EDIT: Ok, curiousity got the better of me, I checked my purchase history and did the math, Steam has earned roughly US$1367 from me. Hard to be exact as it's split over 3 currencies, but that's roughly 22 * $60. I've updated the number above.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Steam delisting games due to them being sold at lower prices elsewhere isn't something that's entirely unprecedented, but it's the first time I've seen it done on the retail side. A lot of wholesale distributors and manufacturers don't like it if you try to sell their products below a certain percentage of MSRP, since it results in one seller taking business away from the distributors'/manufacturers' other retail clients and drives everyone's overall income down. But when used that way it encourages competition, rather than discouraging it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes. Some sort of foad button is what every service should have so you can filter out the things you will never want to see any trace of.

Also, similarly an "I've seen this and will never look at it again, good or not" option.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"foad button" 😆 I like it. That acronym is past due for a comeback

Perhaps this is an area where we need adblockers to innovate. Let people ban URLs or metadata (e.g. game shop pages, publishers, titles, entire domains), and the blocker will filter out any page element that contains a link to the URL, anywhere on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Something like greasemonkey or a special extension could do it, maybe. But it would probably need to be pretty service specific and possibly updated when things change.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Preferably one that actually works as well. YouTube has a "I've seen this and will never look at it again" option but it's effectively non-functional, as the site's algorithm constantly overrides it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a great feature to have, and honestly I actually haven't had to use it much either. I've found that Steam does a good job curating things properly based on my library, and the way Steam advertises its listings is mostly unintrusive.

Honestly, I think Steam's "suggestions" system is the only form of advertisement that's actually gotten me to buy something. I wouldn't have known about RPG Maker VX Ace without out otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which "suggestions"? I find each showcase on the website has its own quirks:

"Featured & Recommended" at the top of the store page gives me great recommendations, but rarely updates, always looping through the same ~20 games unless I ignore/wishlist all of them to force it to refresh
"Recommended based on the games you play" and the genre-specific sections never seem to update for me. They're all full of stale "maybe I'll look closer if I'm in the mood for that genre (which never happens)" games
"Discovery queue" is always fresh but starts to devolve to only porn and low-effort shovelware unless I proactively ignore them
"More like this" on a game page seems only show more popular games that I already know about

To get to 50k ignores, I made a script to ignore whole pages of search results, and used it with combinations of tags I had absolutely no interest in (e.g. "multiplayer + sports", "sexual content + match 3 puzzle", "zombies", etc.). This made the Discovery Queue MUCH more relevant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

All of them, really. I don't really go through the queue that much but I've never been bothered by what shows up in the "Featured", "Recommended based on the games you play" or "more like this" sections. It does tend to be more of the just popular or big-name stuff but it generally does a good job of at least picking things related to what's already in my library.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Perhaps my problem is with ~1500 games, I have so many of each tag in my library that Steam can't figure out my niches. Or maybe the hundreds of crap games I got from old bundles have convinced them I love shovelware 🙃

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that might have a part in that. I've only got a few hundred games, many of them very niche like bullethells and AG racers.