There is a lot that I love about Steam. I have been using Steam for many years now and have had the opportunity to play a large variety of games on the service. However, Steam has been pretty lethargic for a while when it comes to fixing problems and while the Epic Games Store seems to have given Valve a wake-up call, there are still a myriad of issues to be fixed on the service. Amongst the many problems that Steam faces, I think the issue of curation is the most important for Valve to fix.
It wasn’t too long ago when getting your game released on Steam was a challenge rather than a given. In the past, Valve handpicked what games were released on Steam. A famous example of this was Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale who had to release a demo to get noticed by Valve and allow them to release their game on Steam.
In 2012, Valve introduced a new system called Steam Greenlight, a service which allowed game developers and publishers to submit a game to be approved by the Steam community. This was then followed by Steam Direct in 2017 which attempted to prevent shovelware from being released. In 2018, Valve announced that they would no longer curate games on Steam themselves, leaving it up to publishers and the community.
Whether or not this has proven successful depends on who you ask. While Steam has continued to grow in overall revenue, the amount of money made by the average game has continued to decrease. While there are a variety of reasons why this is the case, the issue most commonly cited is the shear number of games released on Steam on a daily basis. It is not uncommon to see 40 games released on a single day on Steam!
The store has become increasingly cluttered and Valve has been relying on tools such as Steam curators, the discovery queue, the interactive recommender etc to bring games to the forefront. However, I would question how helpful these are to the wider Steam userbase. Considering how many users there are on Steam, it interests me that the most popular Steam curator has still failed to break one million followers. This is not a fault of the curators themselves but with Valve’s promotion of them. Having spoken with other Steam users, I hear that they rarely use the discovery queue or interactive recommender because, surprise surprise, they are too cluttered with games they are not interested in.
If you think that I am simply complaining without offering solutions, here are a few. First and foremost, Valve has to start curating again themselves. It could be as simple as just checking that each game released isn’t shovelware but this must be part of the solution. Valve also has to start redesigning the storefront to better implement all of the additional tools that they have released over the years instead of being hidden behind menus.
As I said before, I love Steam and I hope to continue to see it thrive and succeed. However, that does not make me blind to the numerous issues that Steam faces and I can only hope that Valve will eventually begin curating their store again. Let me know your thoughts on Steam clutter and if you have any ideas on how Valve could potentially solve this problem.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.