"Nearly 40 percent of all games on Steam were released this year, approximately 746 of which are Warhammer-branded."
I knew they had a problem, but had no idea it was that bad. There are several things Valve can do to improve Steam, including:-
1. Get rid of flagging reviews as "funny". All that does is encourage more childish attention seeking / one-liner fake "reviews" by those trying too hard to be a peer approval seeking comedian. People bash Metacritic for being too "trollish", but half the "reviews" on Steam are honestly no better in the pursuit of strained "humor".
2. Add a neutral review option. A lot of games aren't bad and have great potential or even be fun, but at the same time cannot be recommended due to chronic technical issues / unfixed bugs years after launch. Again, whilst Metacritic can be overly negative / harsh, Steam ends up overly "fake positive" partly due to no neutral rating option.
3. Simply flagging games as "Early Access", etc, isn't good enough when they still swamp the main site. They (along with spammed DLC and "obvious shovelware") really need to be "hard separated" from original non-junk titles, maybe even on a different sister site. Once a dev has produced at least one "serious" title, give them more lenience on the main site (but even then avoid extremes like Warhammer / DLC spam).
4. Revamp and expand the whole technical stats box on the right ideally to the extent of
PCGamingWiki. Spell out ALL DRM (inc Denuvo), 30/60 fps locks & 120/144Hz support, borderless windowed, adjustable FOV, keyboard rebinding, controller remapping, 2.35:1 ratio support, AA options, etc, should all be listed eliminating the need to dig through pages of comments sections.
5. Create a new "Changelog" page that contains
only actual game update changelogs, not "news events" like sales, twitch streams, community events, podcasts, etc. GOG has it right where you click on a library title, then "More", there is often a specific "Changelog" page. Steam's "equivalent" is either overrun with junk to the point of uselessness or sits there empty. Again, this would cut down on the need to wade through 38 pages of "discussions" to find out if a single annoying bug has been fixed, and used to be the pre-Steam standard when games came on discs (
example for Dragon Age Origins).
6. Fix the broken genre's. "Adventure" (not action-adventure) to most means "point & click", not everything from VR shooters to Japanese Anime dating sims to Match 3 puzzles. A real RPG is far more than just an open-world shooter with a skill tree tacked on. Games that are tagged "Action + FPS + RPG + Adventure" are so vague as to be utterly meaningless as far as giving an idea of gameplay. Similarly "casual simulation" is like describing someone's height as "giant dwarf".
Yikes this turned out a long post. Then again, Steam has a lot more other things to fix too (customer services, etc) plus the general feeling that if you need both curators and anti-fraud groups "policing" stuff like flagging repackaged Unity Engine stock assets or outright stolen IP as "games", then Valve's "hands off" approach is failing even harder than the opposing "over-curation" which at least guarantees quality over quantity. The last thing any of us want is a Steam that's goes "full on" into becoming the PC gaming equivalent of a mobile app store - (100,000x apps of which 95,000x are junk that exist solely for the sake of having a presence on the app store...)
