This week, Steam removed a game from sale from their Greenlight service — a system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Earth: Year 2066 was quoted, by its creator, to be a “first person sci-fi apocalyptic open-world RPG game inspired by such video games as Fallout and Half-Life 2.”.
Steam’s overall quality is only as high as the lowest entry barrier they put up. Greenlight has the potential to allow truly great ideas come to fruition but stories like this, and how easily it occurred, sour what can be a great resource for young aspiring game makers. Instead, atrocities like Earth: Year 2066 can trick their way to receiving funds, and well meaning games like Towns try to run before they can walk.
Even update posts about games that have gone through to possible world wide distribution refer to them as “batches”, seemingly taking away anything special about the fact someones work is now up for sale – almost as if the head Greenlighter is bored of his job. This can only weaken the concentration of great games Steam offers, and weakens Steam itself.
Save the quarters and blast everything to oblivion at home!
Steam is changing its refund policy, but you probably won’t be affected
Should have happened a long time ago. People wanting refunds after 50 hours in game.
I'm not sure why you're getting disgrees. Whilst not all PC gamers are petty, an awful lot of them are lol
Entirely untrue. Not any more petty than console gamers. The only large difference is console gamers don't have much of a choice.
Not sure why you're getting agrees. an awful lot of console gamers are overemotional twinks ready to go to war over a plastic box, I'll take being a pc gamer then.
Speaking about overgeneralizing much.
Daily reminder that 'TheGamer' is a corporate-generated, anti-gamer, anti-consumer, clickbait web site. They are mostly A.I. generated articles that villainize gamers. They provide nothing positive and actively try to provoke and divide the community through extreme view points and politics. Do not give them any clicks.
Only scumbags? As if people don't play their games on console put in the most amount of hours and return it to GameStop and trade it in for another game. But also how many people are actually do this? And what games have been allowed to be refunded?
You can refund any game you've purchased as long as it hasn't been longer than two weeks, and you've played less than 2 hours. I wish they would change it to 3 hours because some RPG's have so much exposition that you may only get an hour total of complete gameplay. That's my only knock on it. I've refunded plenty of stuff I was just curious to try. I typically stay away from Early Access titles which are the only ones affected by this policy change.
Apparently early access doesn't count, only complete games with a play early preorder bonus.
I never liked refunding anything. Even if a film is bad, i dont want my money back. Sometimes things just aren't for me, and it's not the creator's fault necessarily.
I feel you and i have never walked out on a bad movie cause I payed my money. I also don't refund games cause I'm a gamer and I know what to buy lol. I think having a digital refund is great.
Blindfolding myself and clicking a Steam page at random would serve me better recommendations than Steam’s algorithm
Hmm, not sure I agree with that. The recommendations I get are usually pretty good, but then again I have pretty large library of games on Steam and hundreds of them in my wish list, along with lots of curators I follow for it to build recommendations off of. On occasion it will throw me a random FIFA game or something I've never bought or shown interest in, but mostly its decent IMO.
I think they have lost content control a little bit with people being able to have complete control of marketing their products on a worldwide platform.
Steam need to be quicker and more concise on making sure cheap badly made games do not make it through. I think early access it just a bad idea. Buying a game in Alpha or not even that far is just bad practice.
Beta became the new demos, now alphas and early access are the new betas.
The less complete we experience a game the more it has to make up for in the final product. Takes away some of the majesty of a new game too.
Like seeing a sketch of the Mona Lisa before it's painted.
I think Valve needs to do some quality control, cause the greenlight system is obviously not working and turning the steam platform into a mobile market place.
well Valve have always said that Greenlight will only be for a little while.
soon it will all be gone and devs can release games whenever.
only sad thing about this is that Valve really need to start with some real QA before any of that can happen.
QA is already really bad on Steam.
Let regular Joes become Greenlight ambassadors and play the early access games before they go on sale. Not everyone of course, but a select few. They can then turn around and tell Steam if the game's awful and shouldn't be allowed up.