You know the cliché. Steam sale rolls around, everyone jokes about locking their credit cards up. Except I haven’t felt like that about a Steam sale for a very long time. And I think this stems from a broader and well-documented problem that Steam has today: the fact it has too much choice.
Having too much choice is pretty much the very definition of a “first world problem”, but at times like this it really does highlight how it’s something of an issue. What’s doubly sad is that this problem has come about at least partly as a result of attempting to sort out a completely different problem.
Years ago, Steam was still the leading PC digital storefront, but its catalogue was much smaller. This is because it was primarily the domain of big publishers. I don’t know the ins and outs of what it took to get a game on Steam back in those days, but I know that it was out of the question for a lot of smaller developers. The few “indie” titles that did make it onto the platform tended to be celebrated, because they were often doing something very different from the highly commercial publishers. It’s from those early indie titles that we got the first steps in the direction of the “art game” movement that is thriving today.
The Steam sale during those days was an exciting time, because more often than not it was an opportunity to pick up something you’d been thinking about for a long time at a knock-down price. And because the catalogue was still at a manageable size, it was easy to discover (or rediscover) games that you might want to grab. A simple browse of the homepage would almost always result in you picking up a virtual armful of games, then checking them all out for considerably less than the price of a single undiscounted new release.
Today, though? The front page is full of an overwhelming amount of choice, and clicking through to the various curated sections doesn’t help, because those are also full of an overwhelming amount of choice.
This is the result of Steam’s increasing permissiveness of small-scale and independent developers. It’s theoretically a good thing that now pretty much anyone can get their game on Steam rather than having to sell their work independently — which means getting eyes on their own independent website — but it also means that Steam’s catalogue is no longer at a manageable size, and hasn’t been for quite some time.
I say “theoretically” a good thing, because the problem with this is self-evident: if you flood the market with that much stuff, it becomes difficult to find anything but the most high-profile titles. And that’s got to be almost as bad for indies as not being able to publish on Steam at all.
And, as much as I was in favour of Steam allowing adults-only titles on the platform after many years of rather opaque policies in that regard — policies that developers, publishers and localisers still fall foul of at times, for reasons that often remain unexplained — it’s been disappointing to see the absolute torrent of low-effort porn games flooding the market. And with the advent of AI-generated art that will actually draw dicks and fannies, that’s only going to get worse.
It’s one of those situations where, like the obsession with following the trends I talked about yesterday, it’s difficult if not impossible to put the plug back in now the flood has happened. Steam now can’t just suddenly turn around and say “actually, we fucked up and inadvertently filled our entire store with garbage, please get out”. I mean, they can, but I feel like there would be significant challenges (and likely lawsuits) thrown their way if they were to do so.
This is one of the reasons I spend a lot more time browsing and using GOG.com these days. GOG.com arguably still has a bit of a curation problem, particularly since it stopped being about just “Good Old Games” (which is where it got its name from) but it’s nowhere near as bad as Steam is. In a GOG sale, I can usually find a few things that I’m interested in playing without too much difficulty, whereas when a Steam sale rolls around, I tend not to bother even looking unless there’s something specific I had in mind.
Just another example of the gradual enshittification of everything, I guess, and a reminder that the human race should probably never, ever have nice things.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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