#criseg

[blazehedgehog]

How do you feel about the song "Country Roads"?

Growing up, John Denver was the target of a lot of kids cartoons as the “uncool music.” That’s one of those things where once you get past a certain age, you learn none of that matters. People who are obsessed with only listening to “cool” music are the dopes.

Listening to it now, it makes me nostalgic for going back to Colorado, even if the song is explicitly about West Virginia. But still, it’s an alright song.

[blazehedgehog]

Are you having problems with Tumblr's new "Safe mode" feature? Because it has made the site unusable for me. Even innocent blogs throw me in a "redirect loop" error, so I'm asking to see if it is just me or just a general bug.

I know I’m Mr. “be nice to people” etc. etc. etc. but I’ve always been strictly a safe mode = off person. Never had it turned on in Google, immediately disabled it on Twitter and Tumblr, etc.

Letting computer algorithms tell me what they think I’ll like is a bad idea. I’ll brave the unsafe depths of whatever’s out there if it means I get to decide what I actually like or not.

[blazehedgehog]

What do you think about Steam Direct and/or it's admission fee?

I’m glad Steam is trying to stop the torrent of raw sewage spilling out on to Steam. Jim Sterling’s discovery that 40% of Steam’s entire catalog of games were released in 2016 is mind-boggling.

Valve seemingly took “work smarter, not work harder” to heart, but in reality it just makes them look lazy. Instead of solving the problem first and then building tools to help accomplish that task more quickly, they did it the other way around: they built a bunch of tools that they hoped would make the problem solve itself. Instead of knowing how to fix it, they theorized how to fix it, and used everyone as beta testers. That’s bad, and has had bad consequences.

Steam Greenlight was a mess. Speaking as somebody who made it through Greenlight, I can say with certainty that I don’t think my game deserved to make it through Greenlight. When you register, they talk about the tens of thousands of votes you need, you’re shown a percentage to the top 100 most popular games on Greenlight, all of this information to suggest where the line is drawn for games approved for sale or not.

None of it matters.

I think OverBite peaked at 71% of the way to the top 100 games. By the time it was “greenlit,” it had slipped back down to like, 43%. Less than 2000 people actually viewed my submission page. Only half of them actually voted on the game. Of the people that did vote on OverBite, nearly half THEM said “No.”

But it was still good enough to be greenlit. No surprise, then, that a lot of total garbage managed to get through Greenlight and approved for sale. Greenlight was a sloppy solution because the other option involved Valve doing more work for themselves.

Steam Direct sounds like Valve will be a little more hands on with what gets approved or disapproved, which is great. But I also think that it probably won’t stem the tide as much as I (and others) are hoping – we’re moving towards an era where everybody can do everything and Valve specifically wants to encourage that. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure, so the idea is to let all the trash in and even if it only sells one copy, that’s still money for Valve. In Valve’s eyes, the solution is to then build a curation pipeline so the trash can get to a person that might appreciate it.

We might see a slight reduction on the amount of crap going up on Steam, but really I think Valve’s involvement in this is going to be checking for Digital-Homicide-style shenanigans (where they were submitting six variants of the same template game with different graphics packs overlaid).

Then again, Valve tossed out that submission price – the “it will cost between $100 and $5000 to submit to Steam Direct.” Higher prices obviously mean a more exclusive service, because tiny no-name developers throwing crap at the walls won’t be able to afford it. There is an opportunity here to, again, clean up Steam. But how clean should it be? What’s worth cleaning up? Some have mentioned we wouldn’t have gotten games like Undertale or Stardew Valley if the Greenlight submission fee was too high.

It’s a tough decision to make, because you have to be deliberately exclusionary and that rightfully starts to spook a lot of people.

If it was me, I’d do one of two things.

Make it so that every submission to Steam Direct costs $100. With Greenlight, you paid $100 one time and could submit an unlimited amount of games after that. Instead, I’d make it so that every single game submission cost $100 by itself. Increasing the financial investment deters people from flooding the system with garbage, but $100 still keeps the same doors open for the games I just mentioned (Stardew Valley and Undertale).

If Steam Direct is going to function like Greenlight where it’s a one time fee to submit unlimited games, raise that to $250 or maybe even $300. Basically, you don’t want this to be something somebody can do as an impulse, but still not so expensive that you shut out smaller developers. Having the submission fee be the same as buying a game console makes sense to me.

I know for some developers out there, the idea of being suddenly shut out from Steam for the first time in two years is scary to them, but I feel like this is something that needs to start happening. User curation isn’t working and as a society we’re reaching total media overload because it’s so easy to access literally millions of hours of entertainment each and every day. There needs to be a better way to cull everything below a certain point, as sad as that sounds. It’s too overwhelming not to.