Curated Stores

It seems that "curated" is the current buzzword for digital game retailers which aren't Steam.

Source: https://www.gog.com/about_gog

Source: https://www.humblebundle.com/about

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.

The Benefits of Cowardice

Recently, I've been playing a lot of the Gauntlet-style PC game Hammerwatch. Like The Binding of Isaac, my other recent indie game obsession, Hammerwatch came into my game collection by way of a dirt-cheap bundle whose other games I haven't touched. My digital game collection is filled with perhaps too many of those bundle B-sides — games which I only own because buying an entire set of games happened to be the cheapest way to get a single game which I actually wanted (most often thanks to Humble Bundle, Bundle Stars, and similar sites). I tell myself I'll get around to enjoying these incidental purchases eventually, but life and video games don't often leave time for each other, so it rarely happens. Sometimes takes me quite a while even to try the games I bought on purpose. For instance, I didn't actually get around to playing Hammerwatch for several weeks after the bundle went on sale.

And now, according to Steam, I've spent over 50 hours playing it. There's the first problem with Steam: It permanently records my playtime, without any option to reset the count, and displays the information publicly unless my entire profile is made private. The only way to avoid the shame of my friends knowing exactly how much of my life has been wasted is to play a game in offline mode (or run the game outside of Steam entirely if possible). The other problem with Steam is that it taunts me with achievements. Oh, sure, I can ignore achievements in a bad game. I won't play garbage just to increase the number of unlocked achievements shown on my profile. But any good game with achievements is just begging for 100% completion, and as an occasionally obsessive completionist, I often can't resist. Any set of challenges or unlockables will do the trick, in fact, but achievements — being (like the playtime counter) public and permanent — are particularly good at keeping me playing a difficult game past the point where I might otherwise have given up.

It was exactly for this reason that I found myself playing Hammerwatch's unreasonably punishing survival level, completion of which is related to two achievements (one for medium difficulty and one for hard). After the first few attempts, I began to suspect it was virtually impossible to beat, at least on my own. Hammerwatch is a multiplayer game but, having no friends currently playing the game and having no desire to play with strangers, I had been flying solo up to this point. My brother owns Hammerwatch, so I could have enlisted his help, but he hadn't played in a while and had never accumulated as much playtime as I had. He would have been rusty, at best, and might have been little more than dead weight in a game of survival with shared lives. So I continued playing survival mode on my own, determined not to let two little achievements stand in the way of total victory.

The survival level in Hammerwatch works like this: Only one extra life is given to start. Waves of increasingly numerous and increasingly powerful enemies spawn to attack the player, while the eventual boss (the Crystal Lich) sits in the center of the map, invincible but able to shoot any player who comes too close. Vendors, reached by way of a portal in a hidden room, sell upgrades and extra lives, which can only be purchased with currency obtained by inflicting damage on a few large crystals placed around the map. Meanwhile, stalactites periodically fall to the floor in random places, doing serious damage to everything in a huge area; these can kill a player instantaneously. After about 45 minutes, the regular bad guys stop spawning and the Crystal Lich comes out to fight.

My first character of choice in the game's main campaign had been the paladin (equipped with a sword which deals damage in a wide arc, a shield which blocks most projectiles coming from ahead, and some other incredibly useful abilities). However, I had heard the ranger (equipped with a long-range bow and not much else of import) was the most viable choice for beating the Crystal Lich (whose homing projectiles travel almost as far as the ranger's arrows). Unfortunately, the ranger isn't as well suited to the pre-boss fight against huge waves of enemies. The paladin would have been better for that. I could only pick one, though, and I didn't want to play 45 minutes to get to the boss only then to find myself in a virtually unwinnable fight, so I was committed to using the boss-killing ranger throughout my solo attempt.

I died. A lot. I died dozens of times without ever getting a chance to fight the Crystal Lich. After all, the ranger (who deals damage at long range but in a narrow line as opposed to the paladin's wide arc) doesn't do well when surrounded, and getting surrounded in the survival level is all but inevitable. The one obvious benefit was the ability to farm crystals somewhat effectively without stopping. The ranger can shoot a crystal while approaching and then shoot some more while departing. Even so, I could never afford enough upgrades to stay on the winning side of the arms race for very long. Eventually, I'd always start dying faster than I could farm enough crystals to replace the lives I was losing.

Then I noticed that the hidden room with the portal to the vendors, although it's a cramped dead end, is actually very safe: Few enemies spawn in range to see the player, and stalactites don't fall there (except in the case of one scripted stalactite drop which destroys the portal at the start of the boss fight). Perhaps best of all, the nova-firing trap in an adjacent room is close enough that it will fire when the player stands in the hidden room, and this periodically damages a nearby crystal for free money (as does the occasional lucky stalactite drop). This free money isn't as much as what a player can get by actively mining the other crystals, so I had no intention of hiding in the hidden room throughout the entire pre-boss battle. Still, it was the best solution for the second half of the fight, during which any attempt at mining was likely to cost me more lives than I could buy with the money I had gained.

And by retreating to the hidden room when things got too hard, taking my free money like a welfare check while waiting for the boss to appear, I finally loved long enough to fight him. At that point, it was just a matter of fighting him from a distance while finishing off any nearby enemies left over from the pre-boss phase. I won.

Thus I was left with a somewhat viable solo strategy for the survival level in Hammerwatch, using the ranger:

1. Don't destroy the nova-firing trap in the east room.
2. Farm the crystals in the north (behind the green spike trap), west (behind the red spike trap), and center (near the Crystal Lich). Each should have enough time to recharge while you're farming the other two.
• Don't bother with the crystal in the east (behind the blue spike trap); the active nova-firing trap makes it difficult to escape the room safely.
• Eventually a crystal in the south will be made available, but that little room with two small openings is a death trap. Don't go there.
3. Buy upgrades for speed, bow damage, and bow penetration. Buy an extra life when needed, but keep in mind Step 4 below.
4. When things get too difficult (and you're dying more often than you can mine enough cash for the next extra life), go to the hidden room and stand just south of the portal, ready to shoot anything that comes after you. You are not totally safe here, so don't fall asleep.
5. As you get free money from the crystal in the east (which should be taking damage from the nova-firing trap), keep on buying upgrades and/or stock up on extra lives, at your own discretion.
6. When a stalactite starts to fall above the portal, get out of the hidden room. Avoid the boss until you've cleared the nearby remaining enemies.
7. Fight the boss from a distance, coming a bit closer to shoot him and backing up to a very safe distance when he fires back. It will take a while, but if you can avoid the stalactites and any leftover enemies on the map, you'll win.

This cheesy strategy allowed me to beat the survival level on medium difficulty. Unfortunately, it wasn't so reliable for hard difficulty. After fighting and farming as much as possible without repeatedly dying, I was able to hide in the hidden room until the boss emerged, but the necessary task of clearing out remaining enemies during the boss fight became much more difficult. My damage output just wasn't sufficient to avoid being overrun once a group of enemies caught my scent, especially since the area of effect of the ranger's attack is constrained to a thin line.

Ultimately, I ended up playing with strangers to beat survival on hard mode, but even finding a suitable game wasn't easy. At any given time, I only saw one hard survival game (or none at all), and the first few games I joined were full of novices who didn't really know what they were doing. Even when I managed to join a game with more experienced players, lack of easy communication made things very difficult. By some miracle, however, I was eventually able to join a game with a couple of players (a warlock and a ranger) who were unbelievably good. Even when we were joined by a fourth player (a paladin) with no survival level experience, we weren't dragged down. I ended up getting killed before the boss was dead, but the other ranger lured the boss into a narrow hallway in which his attacks were blocked and finished him off.

So I got lucky. My advice for Hammerwatch's survival mode without friends? Try my solo strategy. If that doesn't work, I'm all out of suggestions, because you can't really count on finding a game full of expert players who are able to coordinate a victory with complete strangers. In other words: Good luck!

But, whatever. I got mine.