14 DAY TRIAL // Many people think that Valve is letting just anyone put just about anything on Steam these days, instead of taking their name more seriously and regulating the flow of half-baked and unfinished games that seems to have popped up on their storefront over the last year or so.
It's no secret that Valve has taken its foot off the break, approving games left and right and allowing the community to decide on its own which games should pop up on the distribution platform for all the world to enjoy or suffer from, depending on the game.
With Greenlight churning out around 75 new titles every two weeks, 2014 has seen a tremendous influx of new titles released on the popular PC games platforms, showing that the need for indie developers to market their creations is becoming increasingly crucial in their jab at fame.
The numbers show that there were more games released on Steam in the year's first 20 weeks than during the entirety of 2013, and that the trend continues to rise at a galloping pace.
Gamasutra has presented some worrying statistics, showing that, if things were kept in check during 2012 and 2013, with the number of monthly releases slowly growing from around 20-25 to close to 40 from January through April, in the same time period of 2014 the number grew from 80 to close to 200 releases.
Valve has also stated that they intend to get rid of Greenlight and transform Steam into an open platform where anyone can publish whatever they want, with Steam users acting as the curators and even gaining the ability to create their own web-based storefronts.
This, of course, has gotten many members of the community riled and clamoring that some kind of system is put in place to protect them from the flood of low-quality products.
What they fail to understand is that, although the influx of titles is affecting many developers, it's also a byproduct of the free market, especially in a domain that is so ripe for exploitation.
Digital products are a costly affair, but they're also a wonderful gift that keeps on giving, as you can endlessly sell the same thing over and over once development is complete, a detail which hasn't escaped anyone looking to make some money.
Another facet of the so-called problem is also the fact that game making tools have gotten easier and easier to utilize, and that cross-platform games are now much simpler to create using Unity or Game Maker and other such software, meaning that there has also been a massive number of casual games making their way from mobile platforms to Steam.
In addition to this, the small-game market is maturing, and as such more and more studios are taking advantage of the comparative ease of creating that kind of software, as opposed to the traditional game market, where successful games usually required a sizable up-front investment.
This, of course, means that there are a ton of flawed or outright bad products out there, similarly to how there are a ton of Chinese Ray Ban knock-offs in the world, but that doesn't mean that the sunglasses industry is going to hell.
Apple and Google have been trying to improve their storefronts for quite some time, as the flood is even bigger in the mobile realm, and as such some solutions have already been found. It's up to Valve to see how they can improve the design of their store in order to afford consumers more power over what they can find.
Imposing strict limitations for the sake of convenience means encouraging uniformity, as Procustean standards have shown themselves to deliver the same shoddy and shallow experiences time and time again, the very same things that publishers get accused of whenever someone is disappointed by another lackluster multimillion dollar project that seeks to please everyone and succeeds in doing so with no one.
I remember a time when Flashback was at the pinnacle of game development, and I also remember a time when its memory was tarnished by having its protagonist be a bull-headed moron who utters the words "awesome sauce" without having his head explode in the next scene.
Which of the experiences do you prefer, the polished, but highly regulated one, where someone deems what is or isn't likable, or the one, where everything goes, developers are free to work on something they actually want to do, and then the general public gets to decide what flies and what doesn't?
The surge of indie game development has shown that there can be genuine worth even in one man's project (Papers, Please), not just that pixelated platformers are easy to make. The side effect of everything becoming more accessible and popular is that there will be much more of it, and most of it of questionable value, as there will always be imitators trying to cash in on someone else's inspiration, as they have done since the dawn of time.
For every Led Zeppelin, there will be a hundred Miley Cyruses, but that doesn't mean that music that a group of individuals deem bad should be banned accordingly. It just means that everyone has to channel their creativity freely and that we have to get better at actively finding quality products instead on counting on them being delivered to us.
Any product's value is reflected in the attention it gets from its target audience, and games are no different. The good old days will always have a golden hue, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the future can't be even brighter. Just a little more crowded. So filters, please.