This is such a hot garbage take, specifically the bit about social progress being slow & radical “things” having “very few benefits”.

Also, OH MY GOD at that take at radical history.

are you really this ignorant?

Greedfall is not making a purposeful commentary about the difficult nature of social change in the face of concentrated power structures. It’s not. I can’t stress that enough. It simply isn’t. It. Is. Not. Doing. That.

How are people supposed to tell you about games they don’t know about?

Gotta love these Steambois who come into every article that is critical of Steam to shitpost. Anything to get some more juicy steam wallet funds from Valve. 

A publisher that I’m paying 30% of my sales to is supposed to advertise my game. That’s how third party publishing works. If it’s failing to advertise, why am I giving them 30% of my sales?

let me guess your background: iT’s AbOuT eThIcS iN gAmEs JoUrNaLiSm

He does. It just looks like this: Talk about what people are saying, explain a case as to why people are saying it, somebody passive-aggressively whimpers in the comments asking why he’s so upset (because he did his job and today that involved saying something the whimper-er didn’t like).

There is a caveat - if Valve could actually figure out which games I actually want and would buy and show them to me, then everyone wins.

Except for the last steam sale, which encouraged a ton of people to literally remove games from their wishlist.

Wishlisting a game opts you in to further marketing of the game, so you see when it goes on sale, big updates are released, or the devs hold events. It sounds like that is one of the most effective avenues for reaching gamers that indies have.

This is true only if game A is not a high profile title. Based on this article, it usually is. So Steam’s “Discovery Mode,” which is supposed to illuminate games you’ve likely never heard of, seems rather broken right now.

Steam is that safety blanket, or favorite piece of clothing. The one you’ve ‘always’ had. The most comfortable one. The one with all the memories. And a pox upon anyone who points out that it has holes, or smells funny, or is faded even if they’re right.

Is it like...’The New Thing’ on the internet sphere to turn articles that report on the existence of stuff into “This person is so outraged their hair is on fire!!”

Someone will write an article that’s straight forward and tame, and within an hour some chud on Youtube will have a video up “Kotaku writer crying for…

Anecdotes are not data.

It seems to help to have high wishlist numbers when launch time comes.

I don’t think they are blaming the algorithm for people removing games from wishlist. It’s more like people are removing games from wishlists faster than new people are adding games to their wishlist

showing me several games I already know very well about instead of new unknowns, in something called the “Discovery Update”, sounds like a severe failure of the stated intention

If you read the piece, you’ll see developers are pointing out that the wishlists/view ratio was halved, which suggests Steam also started showing the games to the wrong people. Maybe it’s an accident, but this seems like a straight screw up.

For all of the hang wringing and crying about why Valve and Steam are the One True Platform, they seem like they are doing alot to hurt indie developers.