Editorial: Memelight

Memelight

          It’s easy to give Valve a lot of grief these days. Not only have they all but abandoned game development (included the much anticipated Half-Life 3), while the Steam platform is still an excellent place to play PC games, Valve’s hands off approach to quality control is continuing to cause issues on the service.

          Some really weird stuff has gotten onto the storefront, from games based around memes, to games with less gameplay than cutscenes, to games that shamelessly flaunt around stolen assets, to games that are nothing but a stolen asset pack.

Now, normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. However, Steam’s main page and Steam Greenlight’s homepage operate on very “first come first serve” basis. Unless they’re a triple-A release, games have an extremely short time in the spotlight on the New Releases page.

Imagine you’re a struggling indie dev who’s just finished their first game. You’ve uploaded it to Greenlight, and your fingers are crossed that people will vote for it.

Unfortunately, your game got the unfortunate luck of being uploaded on the same day one of Greenlight’s resident sleazebags decided to dump 20 different asset-flips onto Greenlight at once. Like magic, your game has vanished from the store page, and now resides in the bowels of Greenlight.

It’s no surprise that people like Jim Sterling are trying to shine a spotlight on these poor unfortunate games. Because of how fast you have to be to catch something on the homepage, it’s easy for people to overlook your game in the flood of sheer garbage. I’ve even seen people give up on Greenlight entirely because of this, which is a shame, because there can be some really great stuff on there.

          This all came to a head last week, as longtime Greenlight presence Digital Homicide finally blew its load after asking Valve to give them the personal information of 100 users who dared to give their games bad reviews. If you’re unfamiliar with DigiHom, they’re two brothers notorious for attacking Steam with dozens of asset flips at a time, hiding behind fake company names so people won’t know it’s them, and their seemingly endless feud with previously mentioned critic and YouTuber Jim Sterling.

          Valve ultimately decided to give Digital Homicide the boot once and for all, but this shows me, clear as day, exactly what’s wrong with Steam. The fact that these brothers got as far as they did before Valve finally decided to manually remove them is frightening. They aren’t the only ones causing trouble on the site, either. There’s also Cobra Studios, BMC Studios, one very angry man who keeps reuploading the same game on Greenlight over and over again, hundreds of asset flippers, and even more that I’m sure are lurking on the site somewhere.

          And this is where Valve needs to step in. These people are trying to sell garbage that takes about an hour to make, and in doing so they’re shoving actual games with time and care put into them out of the spotlight, just so they can make an extra few bucks of some user that only buys their games for the Steam trading cards. I don’t know if this means that Steam needs its own policing service on Greenlight, but it would certainly help. While Digital Homicide is the most infamous of Greenlight developers, there are many just as bad as they are. Valve needs to cut the crap and start getting rid of these asset-flippers, because god knows there’s some poor indie game trapped down there that deserves to see the light of day.

The NX Roundup

          Welcome to the first ever NX Roundup, where we take a look at all this week’s news about the most frustrating console of all time! This is probably going to become a regular thing for the blog, as I feel it necessary to preserve all this nonsense so we can learn from it.

          While the system itself is still hidden away, according to The Pokémon Company representative Tsunekazu Ishihara, the rumours about it being a hybrid of a console and a handheld are true. He also clarified that there will be Pokémon games on NX, surprising no one.

          We also got some enigmatic statements from Ubisoft. Because if I’ve learned anything from my time covering the game industry, you can trust Ubisoft.

          But I digress. Ubisoft had a lot of nice things to say about the NX, including that it’s something new, but it’s still extremely “Nintendo”. I assume that means that if you say the words “Metroid fan game” around it, the NX will tear your lungs out.

          Ubisoft also said that Nintendo has “learned from the Wii U”, but whether that means that they learned from their mistakes or something entirely different is up to you.

          We’re no closer to learning what the NX is, so I assume that this feature will be continuing for a while. See you next week!

Song of the Week

          Reconstructing More Science from Portal 2. Given that Valve is the topic this week, I figured now would be a good time to feature a song from my favourite game of all time.