The sad state of Steam 2: A new kind of lies



  • Remember this thread?

    https://what.thedailywtf.com/t/the-sad-state-of-steam-not-software-bugs-for-once/50584

    A new contender arrives:

    "New kind of adventure".

    New kind of adventure is a 3D adventure game with RPG elements.

    3D is correct. Every other word is a lie.

    Mary hides in a wardrobe after her parents had a fight. She falls asleep. When Mary awakes, she discovers that she is in a beautiful, magical world with giant strawberries and magical druids!

    I'm guessing the Unity game asset store had a promo day where you could download as many strawberries as you wanted for free.

    Use Mary's new found powers and Aquarius' magical abilities to solve puzzles and complete quests.

    Mary's power is... uh. You can't control her at all?

    Aquarius' magical abilities consist of playing a flute at some flowers.

    There are no puzzles.

    There are no quests.

    There are only giant dialog boxes saying, "that area is not available in the alpha".

    Collect Artefacts to unlock new magical powers and abilities.

    There's no inventory system or, as far as I can tell, even any way of picking things up.

    A huge vibrant world, with colourful wildlife and environments.

    Read "vibrant" as "eye-searing".

    Gather items and resources to trade with Druids.

    See above. There's no gathering. There's no nothing.

    Original folk jam soundtrack.

    It's like 4 looping notes.

    What this game doesn't have:

    • A title screen
    • A menu (you have to quit using Alt-F4, I am not making that up)
    • A purpose
    • Anything at all worthwhile

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6WmtqNu9rw

    Again: Valve, you BADLY need to at some point have a human being look at game listings BEFORE you offer them for sale. Because any reputation you once had for store quality is quickly sinking to the bottom of the barrel.

    This is fucking ridiculous.

    Tompi Jones deafened me with high-pitched electronic squeals, but at least it was a game!



  • The original folk jam soundtrack was what really sold me.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat said:

    You can't control her at all?

    The preview video shows her being controlled. One of the comments says

    You can switch between the characters, but you only learn this by hit and miss. There are no instructions.

    But not even that guy felt like sharing the hidden wisdom of how, exactly, you change characters.

    As another pointed out:

    Bought it for cards, made a profit, still feel ripped off.



  • Added a YouTube embed to the OP; give it about half an hour to finish uploading and processing.

    EDIT: also I should add I did this as a bonus video as one of the videos scheduled for a week after next ended up only being 3 minutes long. (Which is about 2 minutes more game play than that awful game had.)

    Turned out to be a whopper.



  • There is something disturbcoursingly familiar about that "Early Access Game" concept...

    I suppose it like some sort of gambleinvestment. You pay LOCALIZED_CURRENCY_VALUE, get a chance to "contribute" and if you are lucky the Developer delivers and you get a "good" game cheaply. Of course, after six months or so, the whole project might collapse into a black hole and you have only lost LOCALIZED_CURRENCY_VALUE.

    Prof fit!



  • Keep in mind that every time a new developer wants to release something like this on Steam, they have to pay $100 to Child's Play charity and then get enough people to upvote their Greenlight page for Valve to contact them.

    Also, I've never seen anything like the games you find on Steam. Maybe the algorithm decided you like shitty half-made indie games for some reason?



  • @ben_lubar said:

    Keep in mind that every time a new developer wants to release something like this on Steam, they have to pay $100 to Child's Play charity and then get enough people to upvote their Greenlight page for Valve to contact them.

    That's Greenlight, not Early Access.

    Unless Valve's somehow glommed the two programs together now.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    It seems to be that you have to be on Greenlight to get Early Access access, unless you're an exception. They're vague about the whole thing.



  • Hm. Well Ben L's right, that it was a Greenlight game:

    Thus proving Valve wrong to think that there's any kind of value whatsoever in letting the public vote on games they want to see.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    This pretty much exactly highlights the problems with Greenlight and Early Access: this guy literally made just enough assets to make a pretty trailer, wrote some lovely marketing copy, and sits back and reaps in the cash from early access purchases. He probably never intends to finish it.

    The current price is 99 cents, and 602 people wrote reviews. Several indicated buying it on sale, so I doubt many paid the full dollar. Still, more people likely bought it than reviewed, so he probably made at least a tidy $500 profit for an hour's worth of work.



  • If you click the "Back to Basics Gaming" profile, he's also running a bundle site that's somehow even MORE pathetically cheap than BundleStars:

    http://www.superduperbundle.com/?p=bundle&b=12

    Also look at this list of all the titles "published" by Back to Basics Gaming.

    Jesus.

    This is just like when I was a kid and you'd walk into Toys R Us and they'd have huge bins full of C-64 games with labels like, "take 10, $2". Game Industry Crash 2.0.

    Sigma 7 was pretty good though. I got it from a bin like that.



  • Wait, you can put a game on Early Access without it being approved in the normal way? I thought that Early Access was something on top of either being greenlit or being an AAA game developer.



  • @ben_lubar said:

    Wait, you can put a game on Early Access without it being approved in the normal way?

    When I think Early Access, I think DayZ or H1Z1 or those not-quite-AAA titles that skipped Greenlight entirely.

    I guess the confusion is the two things are not mutually-exclusive, and I had just kind of assumed they were. You can Greenlight into Early Access, or get a genuine publisher and go directly there.

    Whatever, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Point is, this is garbage and everybody at Valve should feel bad.



  • I remember seeing an improv comedy thing where they acted out a movie trailer and then acted out the entire movie, and the latter was about 3-4 seconds longer than the former.





  • No, this was long before that video was uploaded, and also far more terrible.

    That sketch also had about G64 times more effort put into it than the game this thread is about.



  • I will never not link Mitchell and Webb.



  • Yes, but the thing I remembered wasn't that.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    Yes, but the thing I remembered wasn't that.

    Are you sure "remembered" is the right word? Because it doesn't seem quite like le mot juste.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @blakeyrat said:

    Okay, little girl, you are coming with me. Come on, little girl, fuck you

    :giggity:

    @Yamikuronue said:

    But not even that guy felt like sharing the hidden wisdom of how, exactly, you change characters.

    This will probably be implemented with Unity 5. I know that Unity 4 did not feature a switch character button. What oversight on Unitys end!

    @loose said:

    Of course, after six months or so, the whole project might collapse into a black hole and you have only lost

    It kinda depends on what games you buy on Alpha. There are some titles that were in Early Access where you could be sure they would come out (Trine 3 recently went out of EA). If you invest in BEAUTIFUL TITLES like these, you are bound be get burned!

    Filed Under: Once again, good topic!





  • Relatedly - Diadra Empty, a game originally released in 2013 (Link to obligatory old blakeyvideo), seems to be plagued by shitty publisher/localizer syndrome now that it got released on Steam (after going through Greenlight). Stuff got shipped kind of broken (like achievements and save file management) and got broken even more when the first things were patched.

    *sigh*.


  • area_pol

    I do not see the problem. Steam provides a free market, everyone can sell anything they want - and pay Steam for the infrastructure, seems a fair business.
    Of course, some people try sell worthless products of terrible quality. However, noone if forced to buy them.

    The consumer has a range of means to judge the game's value before buying it:

    • See how the game works in reviews, let's plays or opinions in the internet. (And if there are none, this probably means the game is bad)
    • Check the "steam reviews" - there are less trustworthy, but if you have about half negative, you know something is wrong. (true for this one)
    • Beware of Early Access - unless you know from other sources that the game is good, early access usually is a sign of poor quality - even the developer thinks they need the "it's early access" excuse to explain the flaws of their product.
    For example, "New Kind of Adventure" satisfies all those disqualifying criteria. And if you buy something broken regardless, you can probably get a refund.

    This system may also teach people not to trust product descriptions and advertisements. In every industry, advertisements lie to maximize sales and scams are abundant. It's better if someone gets scammed on a 1$ bad game and learns to check the products, than if they get scammed on false medicines, unsafe equipment or fraudulent financial product.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Again: Valve, you BADLY need to at some point have a human being look at game listings BEFORE you offer them for sale.

    But hiring people is expensive. And they need the extra millions to invest them in not actually making any new games.

    I know! They should just ask for volunteers to do it. It's the Valve Way™.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Valve Way™.

    I can see that might cause patent issues with the Discourse Way™



  • All I see are recommended reviews.



  • @Adynathos said:

    I do not see the problem. Steam provides a free market, everyone can sell anything they want - and pay Steam for the infrastructure, seems a fair business.

    Right; but Steam used to be where the good games lived, while all the shitty games were deep in the Desura ghetto. (When I reviewed Diadra Empty, it was on Desura. It's actually not a bad game. One of the worst games I've played, ASA: A Space Adventure, is a Desura game.)

    That's really the disappointment. Valve opened up the floodgates, and now Steam is full of all these little floating turds. And there are zero game stores left where a human being makes a call on whether a game is deserving of being listed or not.

    Case in point: http://store.steampowered.com/app/329980/ (Although to be fair to Frenchie there, he says he ditched that buggy broken shitty game engine and switched to another one, so maybe the thing actually works now. I still doubt it.)


  • FoxDev

    hmm....

    /me wonders if she could get a game on steam that literally pops up a windows message box that says "Fuck you for giving me money!" where clicking "Ok" has the "game" close gracefully and clicking "Cancel" attempts to cause your computer to crash

    /me further wonders what kind of reviews the "game" would get.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @cartman82 said:

    All I see are recommended reviews.

    I really wonder whether the game really can only be improved. Experience suggests that relying on such a thing would be unwise…


  • area_pol

    @blakeyrat said:

    Right; but Steam used to be where the good games lived

    Yes, this feature is indeed gone. However they could bring back the quality control without removing the free market: label the verified games with "Checked by Steam Staff" and let customers filter by this if they wish.
    Maybe they try to go in that direction by adding the curator system.

    @blakeyrat said:

    And there are zero game stores left where a human being makes a call on whether a game is deserving of being listed or not.

    I heard gog.com has quality control. It is the same company that makes the Witcher games, so they should be competent.



  • @Adynathos said:

    label the verified games with "Checked by Steam Staff" and let customers filter by this if they wish.

    That would require the existence of "Steam staff". Anybody who's tried to contact Valve knows there are no humans employed there.



  • I'm sure they're all just working hard on HL2 episode 3.


  • area_pol

    Maybe the Portal series was a virtual trip to Valve's office?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    That would require the existence of "Steam staff". Anybody who's tried to contact Valve knows there are no humans employed there.

    Hey, Valve employs people!

    ...that doesn't mean any of them are working on Steam, though.

    (Side note: I have conversations with Valve employees fairly often. Usually because I'm submitting bug reports directly to Eric Smith or John Schoenick for Team Fortress 2 bugs)



  • @powerlord said:

    Hey, Valve employees people!

    📎 It looks like you're trying to speak English! Let me help!

    @powerlord said:

    Hey, Valve employs people!

    @powerlord said:
    Hey, Valve employees are people!



  • I'm on the edge of my seat to find out which one he meant!!!



  • I meant the former. Whoops.

    But yeah, I'm apparently the only person who is testing out Valve's Map Workshop system for TF2 as I keep finding bugs in it.

    Oh, and this patch note:

    Community request: Updated the FindMap and CanProvideLevel API for server-side mods. These functions now always expose the full workshop names for maps when known, even if not the map is not yet installed.

    I made that request.


  • kills Dumbledore

    On a vaguely related note, has anybody else's Steam been really shit on Windows 10? It looks like they've tried to make the text a readable size by scaling up all the elements, so you get big, blurry text mashed up with images because the layout hasn't changed and there's now no room for both.

    No pictures because I'm at work. Might get round to posting some this evening


  • FoxDev

    Can't say I've noticed that myself; are you sure you haven't just activated Big Picture mode by mistake?


  • kills Dumbledore

    Still the window mode, it just looks terrible. It might also be something to do with my rather low resolution monitor



  • It's fine, the text is way too small as usual and there's no way to change the font size, as usual.

    Steam is still ass about drawing text, but it's no more or less ass than it was in Windows 8. Or Windows 7. Or Vista. Or XP. Unless you go back to about 2007 or so which is the last time you could change font size.



  • You do know steam supports themes?http://www.metroforsteam.com



  • Yes.

    And yet those themes can't change the font size without breaking the layouts. Especially on the IM windows.

    Try it.



  • well, i tried it with double font size 16 -> 32, and it doesn't seem that bad apart from needing little more spacing (which is probably in another layout file)?



  • It's possible they've fixed it in the last year, I suppose.

    Steam used to just have a goddamned option to set the font size. And it renders using Chromium, which has a goddamned option to set the font size-- but doesn't expose that option to the user!



  • The steam software is utter shit. If it wasn't for summer sales, I would prefer boxed copies. In relation to your original complaint though, Valve thinks they've absolved themselves of sin by offering the new refund policy. Also, the fact that people keep buying this shit "For the Lulz" (see Air control http://www.pcgamer.com/air-control-may-be-the-worst-game-on-steam/) means that this is a valid tactic to make a quick buck. It's no different than scam kickstarters.

    A fool and his money will soon be parted

    Caveat Emptor [sic]

    Sic Semper Tyranus!

    ...Wait...



  • Air Control the WORST game?!?!??!

    Air Control is one of the BEST games on Steam. If you think otherwise, you must be a humorless idiot.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_37IFze11s

    Jesus Christ, if you can play like just 2 minutes of Air Control without falling out of your seat laughing, you need to just seppuku right now. It's goddamned hilarious.

    How the fuck did that guy from PCGamer miss the joke?!

    That is amazing.



  • @Adynathos said:

    The consumer has a range of means to judge the game's value before buying it:
    See how the game works in reviews, let's plays or opinions in the internet. (And if there are none, this probably means the game is bad)
    Check the "steam reviews" - there are less trustworthy, but if you have about half negative, you know something is wrong. (true for this one)
    Beware of Early Access - unless you know from other sources that the game is good, early access usually is a sign of poor quality - even the developer thinks they need the "it's early access" excuse to explain the flaws of their product.

    All of those require at least a few idiots early adopters

    Thanks blakey.



  • Blakey has always been there for us. What a guy!

    @blakeyrat said:

    joke

    ehh, I'm not too much of a fan of this type of "humor". But it spawned a massive amount of copycats trying to be "bad enough" to be good, and instead just being dumb



  • I'm not an early adopter, I pick up the games in "12 games for $3!" bundle deals, games usually only end up there after all other revenue streams are closed-off.


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