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| Source: https://www.gog.com/about_gog |
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| Source: https://www.humblebundle.com/about |
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| Source: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store |
This is unsurprising, for two reasons. The first is that, while Valve Corporation's Steam can claim to have the most games, its competitors cannot, so the concept of curation is a wonderful way to present a smaller selection as a good thing for consumers. The second reason is that Steam has been criticized lately for its lack of curation. Valve's hands-off approach has allowed some controversial games onto its storefront, from school shooting simulators to visual novels prominently featuring rape. Of course any games which are controversial enough to attract media attention are promptly removed, but at that point the damage to the store's reputation is already done. Controversial games aside, there's also a general consensus that Steam's catalog includes a huge number of very low-quality games. It's true. It does. There are literally tens of thousands of games on Steam, so of course they're not all very good.
The quality of any given game, of course, is entirely subjective, but few people who have looked past the list of best-sellers would disagree that the Steam store contains a ton of shovelware. And, frankly, how could it not? It's the natural consequence of the store's "anything goes" policy, because Sturgeon's law has no exception for video games.
But does it matter?
Whenever I read complaints about how Steam isn't curated, or has no quality control in terms of the games it sells, I get the distinct impression that the complainers just have a bone to pick with Valve, or with PC as a game platform in general. Subjectively, one might think less of Valve for allowing cheap garbage on its store — and for the sake of argument we will assume that everyone agrees on the definition of "cheap garbage" — but, objectively, I don't think the platform's lack of curation is likely to have any negative effect on the average Steam user's experience. A store which sells only the greatest products, hand-picked just for you, sounds great if you're planning to buy every product in the store's catalog, or choose randomly from it. But nobody does that.
There could be a million cheap garbage games on Steam and you still wouldn't be forced to buy them. Under normal circumstances, you wouldn't even know they exist if you don't go looking for them. If a game is so bad (or, to be generous, so niche) that a manually curated store would be likely to reject it, then that game is too obscure to be found on the front page of the Steam store. Such a game is certainly not popular enough to be found in a list of top sellers or anything else which you'll find on Steam without doing a fairly narrow search. In a way, Steam is curated, in that the games most prominently featured on its main page are there because they're notable. The shovelware simply isn't on the surface. You have to dig for it, at least a bit.
Meanwhile, all the terrible games in the world don't negate the good ones, nor does an abundance of awful games make the good ones any harder to find when you can sort by popularity or review score. Of course, now I'm making an assumption about the popularity of "good" games, but I don't mean to imply that only the most wildly popular games in the top ten best sellers are any good. I'm only assuming that any game with an ounce of quality will have higher review scores, for example, than the shovelware about which Steam's critics so love to complain. Despite the nearly non-existent barrier to entry, not every game is equally visible. Moreover, the Steam store isn't just an unsorted list of games, so the idea that the good games are buried under piles of junk simply isn't true.
Statistically speaking, I'm sure there are a few hidden gems which might be deserving of praise but haven't gotten enough recognition to stand out from the rest of the practically endless catalog. So many games are released on Steam every month that, if nobody has ever heard of you and your game drops tomorrow, it might not get any attention at all. Unfortunately, it happens to be the case that quietly releasing your game on Steam simply cannot be your entire marketing strategy if you want your game to succeed. But if you're that inept at promoting your product, your game probably has no hope of being picked up by a hand-curated store with higher standards, so the fact that Steam is open to every other untalented hack of a developer isn't your problem. Marketing ineptitude aside, what constitutes a "hidden gem" is incredibly subjective, so if Steam were hand-curated, there's no guarantee that any hypothetical hidden gem would make the cut.
On that note, although the concept of curation is nice in general, I don't necessarily want a store doing that curation for me at all. I don't need someone to tell me what's good. I'd rather continue to ignore thousands of horrible games, playing only the ones I want, than even once find myself willing but unable to play a game because some company decided that it wasn't good enough to be featured on their store.
No matter how bad you think a game is, someone out there probably likes it. Maybe no one thinks that obscure, low-budget, independently developed game is the best game, aside from the developer's mother, but it probably kept someone entertained, at least for a short time — proportionally, no doubt, to the low price at which such games are typically sold. Small indie games are okay sometimes, if the price is right. Not every game needs to cost $60 and take 60 hours to finish. Sometimes, honestly, I'd rather spend $60 on 60 games that last one hour each.
I've impulsively purchased my fair share of stupidly cheap bundles of games from sites like Fanatical (formerly Bundle Stars), Humble Bundle, etc., and this results in a lot of really bad games in my Steam library, so I'm acutely aware of how many bad games there are out there. However, through these bundles, I've also found some fun games which I never would have played otherwise. It's important to emphasize that these games were fun enough to justify having spent chump change on the bundles from which they came, and I'm not saying I would ever pay $60 for any of them, but that doesn't matter because that's not the space they occupy in the PC game market.
Would I delete some games from Steam if I had a magical delete button? I admit, it would be hard to resist. But the games I would be most tempted to destroy are, I happen to know, very popular among other types of people. I don't understand why people like anime dating simulators, but they probably don't understand why I liked Neon Chrome and Lovely Planet. So if I woke up one day and found that my Steam account had been blessed with that magic delete button, I'd like to think I would refrain from forcibly "curating" the store to suit my own taste.
After all, those anime dating simulators aren't really hurting anyone.
