I occasionally see people say things like “Why did Valve do X” or “Why doesn’t Steam work like Y?” And while I think more and more of us are aware of the answers to those questions by this point, as Valve’s strategy with Steam becomes more clear over the years, it could still be worth saying out loud.
I figured I’d throw my two cents into why Steam is the way it is and why it will always work better for certain types of games than other types of games.
The thing about Steam is that Valve seems to have a fixation with trying to make it appear as an untainted meritocracy. Good games with good buzz will sell well, and those games will be shown to even more people. Everybody wins.
I have read and watched their explainers on Steam store pages, visibility, their algorithm, etc, and I don’t think they would disagree with me wording it that way. In a recent explainer that they posted for developers, they go to great lengths to emphasize that there is nobody to “bribe” at Valve in order to get special treatment or placement on Steam. In other words, there is no human curator or tastemaker who is responsible for making a game blow up or to make a handshake deal with to make a game successful. In that video, they immediately go on to say that it would be terrible and boring for anyone at Valve to be a decider of which games should get featuring. It's better that the "players decide."
I understand the appeal of this, and I think it’s a totally subjective opinion that someone can have if they want. I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t want a person “putting their thumb on the scale” and telling the world which games are great. Personally, I like human curation and editorials, but I know not everybody does.
The problem is: it creates unfair scenarios even when you pretend there’s no bias involved. So why bother pretending?
The dream of Steam is that it doesn’t need human editors, or tastemakers, or curators to bring all the best games to the forefront of the store. According to Valve, that’s not needed because the whole world will be one big democratic tastemaker, surfacing all the right games.
Here are the ways that Steam is meant to reward the games that we, the gamers, have “decided” are good:
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A lot of placement and ranking on Steam is determined by unit sales and revenue. Top-selling games must be good (because why else would they sell well?) so Steam shows those games to more and more people.
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As opposed to Google and Apple’s recent initiatives to “help the little guy out” with better revenue cuts, Steam works the opposite: The more your game sells, the less cut they’ll take. Essentially, it’s a reward for making a “really good” game.
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Steam is big on User Reviews. To be frank I think there’s some legitimate benefit to this (imagine if you could see some user reviews before taking a chance on a random Switch game?) The user rating can help inform people on the game’s store page whether the game is good, and whether they’ll like it. In addition, games with lower than a “Mixed” rating are punished in the algorithm.
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Instead of games being handpicked to be put on the front page, a majority of that real estate is algorithmic. Games that sell well, are currently discounted, or are relevant to a user’s preferred tags are given priority.
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The only yearly or monthly wrap-up posts that Valve posts are based on user votes (the Steam Awards), number of sales, or playtime. Democracy wins!
Their argument, it seems, is that this method is the best way to ensure that everyone who uses Steam is shown the games they would most like. The follow-up argument is that developers benefit too, because if users are shown games they would like, they’ll be more likely to buy them.
Obviously, there are a lot of “little guys” who get left out of this equation. Games that don’t sell well, so they aren’t surfaced to more users, so they continue to not sell well. Steam doesn’t emphasize showing lesser-known hidden gems, or helping out little devs who are having a hard time. If you have no marketing budget and your game isn’t gaining traction on social media, how are you supposed to meet those thresholds for “selling well” that will get your game more acknowledged?
This is why I like human curation, editorialization, whatever you want to call it. A human being with taste and time on their hands can help highlight lesser-known art to people who might like it. By using their nuanced understanding of art and people, they can make recommendations that a tagging system never could. They can understand that someone who really loves the vibes of Game X might enjoy Game Y, even if they have different genre tags.
For some people (and potentially Valve), this idea might set off alarms. Because human curation means human bias and, at worst, favoritism and corruption. Personally, I think that’s a pessimistic way to look at human curation. When done responsibly, with a rotating team of people with different perspectives and experiences, I think it can be extremely helpful.
Plus, here are some examples of companies that we know have human beings who curate things:
- Nintendo and Sony with their Nintendo Directs, Indie Worlds, and Sony State of Plays
- Also, Nintendo with their “Featured” tab on the eShop. Presumably Sony and Xbox also do a little bit of human curating on their stores.
- Bandcamp, which has recommendations and articles written by real human beings on the front page
- Both Apple and Google, who have dabbled with “Editor’s Choice” style recommendations for mobile games in their app stores
Did any of these cause the world to end? Are they terrible and boring? In my opinion, no.
While human curation is subject to human bias, it at least has one huge bright spot: it allows for spotlighting things that aren’t already proven successes, to give them a chance to succeed later.
(Some might argue that this isn’t appropriate for a store, and that it should be left to games press and influencers to recommend games for you. Firstly, the state of games press and influencers is already really bad. Secondly, I believe a store is completely within their rights to give recommendations with how they place their products. Don’t all book stores and libraries do this?)
For years and years, I have wanted Steam to add some sort of human editorial to the front page of Steam. A slot where a Valve employee could personally recommend a game, a monthly listicle of recommendations for a given genre, a Nintendo Direct style showcase of games they want to highlight, anything. Any kind of helping hand that can pluck a lesser-known game out of the database and give a sincere plea for other people to try it.
But I realize now that they are never going to do this.
Maybe it’s because they think it will taint the trust that people have with the platform. Maybe it’s because they’re worried about corruption and handshake deals. Maybe it’s because they’re worried it will make the company a target of harassment.
But they clearly are not interested in doing anything like this.
Again, I think this is all subjective. You might personally agree with their philosophy and think it’s for the best. I’ll admit that I do think Steam gets a lot of things right. For a store that wants to focus on the tagging and recommendation algorithms, I do think it probably has the best tagging system and recommendation systems of any of the popular digital stores. There’s a lot of information, and a lot of categorizing, which means you can find some really specific stuff if you know where to look.
I just personally lament the idea that it has to be structured like a pure meritocracy. You have to either come to the plate with the best game of the year, social media virality, or an external marketing budget if you want to do well. You won’t get help, not even a small olive branch like a Nintendo Indie World, or a bookstore putting out a table of their employees’ monthly favorite books.
There are some games where “viral financial blockbuster” is a hard ask, full stop. What happens if your game isn’t a good fit for livestreaming on Twitch? Or maybe your game doesn’t make for a good GIF or TikTok clip? Or your game isn’t “addictive”, because it’s simply a short, meaningful narrative?
What chance does a text game have to make it to the front page? Or an audio game with no visual assets at all?
That’s not really a meritocracy, if certain games are at a huge disadvantage from the start. All because of their genre, or visual design, instead of their quality.
A system like this wants to claim that there is no cheating, no bias, and no favoritism. It wants to claim that it’s only “a store” and not a platform that spotlights interesting games. But there is obviously favoritism built-in: it favors the types of games that are good at making a lot of money.
Is it wrong to wish it could be something more than that?
