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Valve Explains How It Decides Who's a 'Straight Up Troll' Publishing Video Games On Steam (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Wednesday, Valve, the company that operates the huge online video game store Steam, shared more details about how it plans to control and moderate the ever-increasing number of games published on its platform. In the post published Wednesday, Valve shared more details about how it determines what it considers "outright trolling." "It is vague and we'll tell you why," Valve wrote. "You're a denizen of the internet so you know that trolls come in all forms. On Steam, some are simply trying to rile people up with something we call 'a game shaped object' (ie: a crudely made piece of software that technically and just barely passes our bar as a functioning video game but isn't what 99.9% of folks would say is "good.")
Valve goes on to explain that some trolls are trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items (digital items that can be traded for real money), while others are trying to generate a small amount of money through a variety of schemes that have to do with how developers use keys to unlock Steam games, while others are trying to "incite and sow discord." "Trolls are figuring out new ways to be loathsome as we write this," Valve said. "But the thing these folks have in common is that they aren't actually interested in good faith efforts to make and sell games to you or anyone. When a developer's motives aren't that, they're probably a troll." One interesting observation Valve shares in the blog post is that it rarely bans individual games from Steam, and more often bans developers and/or publishers entirely. [...] Valve said that its review process for determining that something may be a "troll game" is a "deep assessment" that involves investigating who the developer is, what they've done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more.
Valve goes on to explain that some trolls are trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items (digital items that can be traded for real money), while others are trying to generate a small amount of money through a variety of schemes that have to do with how developers use keys to unlock Steam games, while others are trying to "incite and sow discord." "Trolls are figuring out new ways to be loathsome as we write this," Valve said. "But the thing these folks have in common is that they aren't actually interested in good faith efforts to make and sell games to you or anyone. When a developer's motives aren't that, they're probably a troll." One interesting observation Valve shares in the blog post is that it rarely bans individual games from Steam, and more often bans developers and/or publishers entirely. [...] Valve said that its review process for determining that something may be a "troll game" is a "deep assessment" that involves investigating who the developer is, what they've done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more.
98% of the total garbage disappears (as well as a few percent of the good). Of course "not terribly good games" will still appear, but it gets rid of the absolute garbage.
Or if people are appalled at paying to appear on Steam, allow spending $10K for a Steam "check-mark of marketing", and allow users to filter to show only check-marked games.
because there's no accounting for taste, and if you took away garbage there'd be no Goat Simulator. As the saying goes, one man's trash is another's treasure.
Plus, a lot of good devs get their start making trash.
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So Steam started as "shove it down their throats" Counter Strike 1.6 launcher. Evolved into highly curated game store over about a decade.
Then decided to suddenly drop all curation and allow anything and everything on the platform. Got flooded with garbage. Added weird "meta gaming" shit like trading cards. Got games that literally existed just to allow people to get cards. Allowed some trading and other meta gaming of the system. Even got pressured by some SJW types to drop politically controversial games like Hatred and even had their recent porn games brouhaha.
And now, they're doing this. I guess there's just too much pressure from all directions, and they really just decided that no, we're not bending to various pressure groups, and instead just making sure that asset flips and such are not on the store. If true, good on them.