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J-Snake
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« Reply #120 on: February 18, 2017, 06:33:01 PM »

because the reviews aren't universally negative, that's how -- it has mixed reviews, many positive, many negative. that shows some percent of people enjoyed it.
That only shows that you shouldn't trust them, it is a perfect example for just that. Just take a look at the positive reviews and get flooded with sarcasm and trading cards mentions. Btw. I can already see by the trailer that its developer is mechanically incompetent, it displays noobish collision bugs. And getting mechanics right is fundamentally important for a platformer.
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« Reply #121 on: February 18, 2017, 06:36:41 PM »

Steam reviews are garbage but they usually tell you whether a game has serious technical issues, is an abandoned early access title and STUFF LIKE THAT. that's pretty much their only real purpose.
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #122 on: February 18, 2017, 06:43:25 PM »

if noobish collision bugs weren't allowed than 99% of the platformers the angry videogame nerd reviews would never have been officially licensed by nintendo for release
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J-Snake
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« Reply #123 on: February 18, 2017, 06:56:35 PM »

You sure are making a big stretch here.

Btw. these are the positive Klabi reviews in a nutshell:

- "my cancer got cancer and died"

- "Gave it the "Why is this on steam?" award. 10/10"

- "cards"
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« Reply #124 on: February 18, 2017, 07:43:54 PM »

because the reviews aren't universally negative, that's how -- it has mixed reviews, many positive, many negative. that shows some percent of people enjoyed it. if even 10% of people enjoy a game of those who buy it, it's worth being on steam.
actually, the games that generally get voted in with the greenlight voting groups tend to also spam up the  store vote for the first few days by giving keys to the group for review, the whole thing is basically set up to get through greenlight and scam as many people as possible for the first few days while it still shows positive or neutral on the front page of new releases.  That's probably why there's some positive reviews, they tend to start with a few.  Unfortunately the refund system is pretty hidden still and most people don't know about it, so generally at least a few $100 worth stays sold and unrefunded.  The accounts that are in these greenlight voting groups also if you look tend to release a few games a month to a few games a WEEK, taking advantage of people not really knowing how useless the voting system really is (your generic game purchaser on steam won't be too aware of this). Honestly I don't even think the way steam is going is going to help as much as they think, the greenlight volume on steam really isn't THAT huge, and hell, the groups doing this aren't exactly hiding, you can click on groups on the side of half the game submissions and easily find that they're greenlight spamming groups. If steam cracked down on these groups and removed greenlight access from all the accounts in them that would solve 90% of the problem at once.  There's a few russian ones I've seen too that actually boast about guaranteeing greenlight if you publish through them,

Valve actually addressed this problem in 2015, with devs essentially trading keys and cross voting in groups, they just didn't do anything to stop it.
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« Reply #125 on: February 18, 2017, 08:15:34 PM »

key reviews don't actually count toward the average; i was counting the average, which was only people who bought it on steam. even among people who bought it there are a bunch of positive reviews, and some are genuine -- though sure, some are satire. but i'm not sure if that matters anyway -- if you sarcastically like something, you still like it. think of the people who buy and enjoy movies like troll 2 or manos hand of fate. if you "ironically" like something because it's so bad it's good, you still do in fact like it.
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b∀ kkusa
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« Reply #126 on: February 19, 2017, 12:30:35 AM »

they key review not counting toward the average is relatively new , it started around september 2016.
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« Reply #127 on: February 19, 2017, 12:33:05 AM »

if only valve decided to create a system that removes voting and key-spam-boosters.
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« Reply #128 on: February 19, 2017, 12:39:26 AM »

think of the people who buy and enjoy movies like troll 2 or manos hand of fate. if you "ironically" like something because it's so bad it's good, you still do in fact like it.
I doubt that people who genuinely enjoys the "so bad it's good genre " intentionely voted for klabi to be on the steam store.
Those games are just sold for pennies (during sales) , and customer is getting back his money by selling the cards. (lowest card cost is usually around 10 cent, you get at least 3 cards per game)
That's just a rigged system. you buy a 10cent game, you get 1 more game to your game list (number of games badge), eligibility for booster packs, cards.

Unless you're naive, i don't understand how you're giving the benefit of doubt to games like those.
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #129 on: February 19, 2017, 05:33:22 AM »

i'm anything if not naive; i've been making indie games for nearly 25 years, and reviewing them for nearly 15. i've reviewed probably hundreds of games worse than anything that's on greenlight now, in my years running the 'ohrrpgce' engine magazine. i feel like a lot of you don't realize just how bad a bad game can get. klabi isn't particularly bad, it's just normal bad. i've seen much worse bad than that. at least klabi runs, doesn't crash on start or crash in the first level, doesn't delete files on your hard drive, at least it has music and sound effects (many of the indie games i've reviewed didn't even bother with those). i'd definitely enjoy that game over many other games.

there are certainly people who buy it for the cards, but again, a sarcastic positive review is still a positive review. they aren't just pretending to like it for the sake of review, they enjoyed it in a so bad it's good sense. i feel like a lot of the people criticizing klabi are just jealous of its success, but it succeeded by fulfilling a small niche of game (meme/joke games, games that are so bad they're good) well. instead of criticizing klabi and talking about how it doesn't actually deserve the money it gets, you should be focusing on improving your own games so that they could enjoy similar success to klabi's.

and by improving, i don't mean simply making a game "good" from a pure theoretical or gameplay perspective, the way j-snake often thinks of it. i mean making a game "appealing" to an audience. enticing. a game that they look at and want to buy. that is more important than how structurally or mechanically good a game is. it's sometimes known as youtube appeal -- a game that is interesting enough to stream or to put in a youtube video, a game that's as fun to watch as it is to play. many games are fun to play, but not fun to watch (such as trap them). and a game needs to be both fun to play *and* fun to watch to be successful. klabi just shows the extreme of a game that's fun to watch but not fun to play, and which still succeeds despite that handicap.

example, people like to make videos of this game:



you can find dozens of those. how many fan videos like that can you find for trap them? or even for my own game, immortal defense? not too many.
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« Reply #130 on: February 19, 2017, 08:53:24 AM »

i'm talking from a player/customer point of view, not a developer point of view. I understand where you come from.
You're just being a lot more tolerant towards indie games because you know how hard it is to make a complete competent game, and from your experience you've played a lot of games that are worse than this one.
But that doesn't justify a product of this quality to be present in a big store like steam.

Your argument is basically saying, "this is ok because i've seen worse". when it shouldn't be ok.
but again, a sarcastic positive review is still a positive review. they aren't just pretending to like it for the sake of review, they enjoyed it in a so bad it's good sense.

0,1 hour of gameplay which is a requirement to post a review for a game. So people are enjoying running a game for 10 min for the sole purpose to make a meme sarcastic joke?
you're justifying this because some people are enjoying paying 10 cent to make a sarcastic positive review?

The videos you're talking about aren't "fan" videos, it's just controversial because a game that ugly is on steam.
Youtubers would do anything to get more views... that's naivete if you think they are fan videos.
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quantumpotato
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« Reply #131 on: February 19, 2017, 10:03:49 AM »

I clicked ahead randomly in the video and,

Quote
"This is 16cents on Steam. How does anyone feel, morally ok, charging for this?"
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« Reply #132 on: February 20, 2017, 04:05:58 AM »

Propably for the first time ever I side with J-Snake: time is an issue. It's not like "nothing is lost on a bad game" - yes, you can refund it, you can give it a bad vote, but you'll never get your time back. I have a fulltime job and a child now, I get one hour of computer time per day, if all planets align nicely. I want them to stop wasting my time..

And if that means that some enthusiastic My First Unity Game developer got the cut, too, so be it.

The comparision to GooglePlay or the AppStore comes to mind - I never ever actually used the shop, except to download a game somebody else told me about. There's only so much that Discoverability can actually do when the material it draws from is so overwhelmingly excrementary.
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« Reply #133 on: February 20, 2017, 09:19:24 AM »

Another point worth bringing up:

Just because you give someone the ability to choose ("they can decide for themselves whether a game is crap or not") doesn't mean that you are building healthy trust with the customer. When Steam starts wasting people's time with "garbage" they have no interest in, you not only risk them becoming leery of Steam itself but the developers on it. Rotten fruit or not, what you allow yourself to serve to the customer says a lot about what you think is valuable or good for them. By Steam taking a "no-holds-barred" approach, they're essentially saying ANY game is good enough for Steam, so long as the developer pays a fee (which has little to no bearing on game quality at all.) This hurts the developer too, as their potential consumer base has become jaded to anything that isn't mainstream.

Again, the only reason Steam gets away with it is their monopoly. People put up with all the garbage laying around because they don't have any other option for getting the good stuff, but that doesn't necessarily stop them from being suspicious about their storefront's (and, unfortunately, their providers') standards.

This issue goes far beyond whether or not people can make intelligent decisions about their game purchases. It also has to do with the trust between customer and provider.
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« Reply #134 on: March 11, 2017, 12:07:04 AM »

It's better than it used to be
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=765&browsesort=trend&section=items&actualsort=mostrecent&p=1

I see only three crafting survival horror action assetflip games on the first page. That's only 10% :D

Of course, it's still filled with other kinds of crap and "i don't know what I'm doing" games. I even saw one that just plain stole a song from Beastie Boys for the trailer.

But honestly, is it such a big problem? Yes, it's a boiling pot for kids who rush head-on into game publishing with just a few weeks of work, but that's how you start doing it. Have you never been 15 years old?
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #135 on: March 11, 2017, 04:35:31 AM »

It's better than it used to be
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=765&browsesort=trend&section=items&actualsort=mostrecent&p=1

I see only three crafting survival horror action assetflip games on the first page. That's only 10% :D

Of course, it's still filled with other kinds of crap and "i don't know what I'm doing" games. I even saw one that just plain stole a song from Beastie Boys for the trailer.

But honestly, is it such a big problem? Yes, it's a boiling pot for kids who rush head-on into game publishing with just a few weeks of work, but that's how you start doing it. Have you never been 15 years old?

you're talking about a different thing here. you're linking to the greenlight page, not the steam releases page. generally the games on greenlight are *supposed* to look more amateur than the games on steam, because a lot of them never get finished or released or don't pass the voting process. this thread was about the games for sale themselves on steam are bad, not whether the games on greenlight are bad. you should be linking to or looking at the actual new releases list:

http://store.steampowered.com/explore/new/

of course you could say that once steam direct is in place, there'd be no voting barrier and most of those games would be for sale. that actually isn't the case. did you know that only 1/3 of the games that got greenlit were ever actually released on steam? it turns out actually finishing a game is a lot harder than presenting one for votes. that alone is a filter: bad game developers tend not to even be able to finish a game (if i had to guess, i'd say most people in this thread have started, but not finished, a game -- that's fairly typical on indie game forums). even the worst bad game, if it's finished, is usually better than an unfinished game.
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« Reply #136 on: March 11, 2017, 09:06:19 AM »

About all of this, have we started to see some numbers on the effects of Steam's discovery update? It was supposed to help discovery of games on the platform, its been out for a couple months now. Discovery is the real underlying problem behind a lot of the issues people are talking about here I think. I heard some enthusiastic comments early back in January, but we probably have more numbers to look at by now. Anyone here with a some games out noticed an uptick in the last few months?
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #137 on: March 11, 2017, 09:11:37 AM »

steam did actually release an analysis of it, but privately, for steam developers only. so i can't really talk about it, might be against the TOS to do so. if you are a steam developer though, look at the steam development forums, and there's an announcement there about it and a stickied thread.

as for how it affected my own game, can't say i noticed any difference. my own game isn't a huge seller, so it seems silly to base it on any one individual game though.

edit: you do seem to have a game that was greenlit. so you should be able to see it there.
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« Reply #138 on: March 11, 2017, 09:35:19 AM »

Quote
What's On Steam
Keep up with every game launched.

Every single Steam launch in bite-sized capsules. Updated every 10m.
A Dejobaan experiment—not affiliated with Steam.

http://www.whatsonsteam.com/index.htm
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« Reply #139 on: May 03, 2017, 05:27:25 AM »

I heard in the Rifter's thread:
Looks like a bunch of games also got greenlit recently, so the greenlight "system" has changed a bit.
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