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.
Obviously, markets do not produce just outcomes - if the purpose of a system is what it does, markets exist to concentrate wealth and perpetuate their own existence. But generally the more the market has rewarded you personally the more motivated you are to identify with it and rationalize your path, your choices, as being smart and correct and deserving. And the market is in turn constantly sifting the creator population for those whose goals already most closely resemble what the market currently "wants" - in effect it tells anyone who doesn't have any deeper convictions what to dream, what to value and what to ignore. When people say something like "let the market decide" they are saying "the system's current tendencies, in all their arbitrarity and unfairness and path-dependence (subject to centuries of hereditary wealth, class struggle etc) should continue to reproduce as-is". From that perspective, individual opinions are random vectors of inefficiency that only benefit markets in aggregate if they "stir the pot" in ways that create ever more capital - novelty and creativity, as drives independent of that, are merely entropy.
This is obviously a very weird way to think about a creative medium, a thing humans do just because they enjoy it, like dancing or running. But it's the reasoning that has eaten everything, because capital seeks above all to reproduce and concentrate itself. And people who wind up benefitting the most from that identify with it, and call that "merit".
is that store curation (especially in the way Valve does it) also shapes the kinds of games that are being made and released.
If Valve's algorithm selects games based on average number of players, average playtime, only allows developers to use (their limited supply of) "visiblity rounds" when they push out a major update and so on, it also makes it more likely for specific types of games to find an audience on its storefront.
I wrote about this already, but not every kind of game lends itself to these criteria, so obviously developers are then pressured into creating games that could fit, which in turn leads to a kind self-reinforcing cycle that is very hard to break out of, unless you are lucky enough to find an audience via other means.
How else would you explain this wave of roguelike-type games with layer upon layer of compulsion inducing stuff woven into them?
It's not just that "the market" decides what gets sold, it also decides what gets produced and who is allowed to keep producing things and who isn't.
No algorithm is ever going to be neutral, because at some point it needs to make a value judgement and that part is being decided by whoever has build the thing in the first place.
Anyway, most of this has already been mentioned above, but from my perspective what I would like for Valve to do, is to give users more tools to tweak what kind of stuff they get to see.
Steam already tracks so much of stuff of what's going on, so why can't I just tell it to sort my front page for games with a low average playtime, no regular updates and whatever other kind of category I might be interested in. I know that there are games like this on Steam, but finding them in the store itself is next to impossible, because at every step, it puts another five roguelike deckbuilders with city management elements in your way.
