Editorial: It's time to close the gates

It’s time to close the gates

          A few weeks ago, the official PlayStation YouTube account uploaded a trailer for a game called “Life of Black Tiger”, which was set to release on the PS Store for a suggested price of $10. The trailer quickly grew in notoriety, garnering over 32,000 dislikes and thousands of comments bashing it. Why? Well, if you haven’t seen it yet, I think this image explains it pretty well.

          Yup. They want $10 for this awful looking game. And trust me, in motion it looks even worse. Was this an attempt by Sony to troll on the eve of the Nintendo Switch conference? Or perhaps they were hacked? Regardless, the trailer is still up and the game is available now on the PS4 Marketplace. Even stranger, this isn’t the first time Sony’s done this. There was a trailer for a game called Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine uploaded a few days before the Black Tiger trailer, and it looks even worse!

          It doesn’t take a genius to tell that Life of Black Tiger and Skylight Freerange 2 are crap. You can figure that out from the first few seconds of trailer, and the games themselves seems to reflect that. But we’re not here to talk about the games. Today, I want to talk about the implications that this garbage has on the current state of digital marketplaces as a whole, specifically the one that seemed to start all this nonsense: Steam.

          We’ve spoken at length before about Valve’s lack of quality control on Steam and how the entire purpose of Steam Greenlight has been destroyed thanks to the overflow of garbage that makes its way onto the storefront. The thing is, I wrote my original article on it back in September, and since then it’s only gotten worse. Nearly 40% of all the games on Steam were released in 2016.

          Let me repeat that. Nearly 40% of all the games on Steam were released last year.

          That’s almost half of all the products on a storefront that’s existed since 2003! And Valve continues to just sit back and let it happen, only intervening when you have a case like Digital Homicide where a legitimately unhinged developer attempts to sue anyone who looks at them the wrong way. I think Valve knows they rule the roost when it comes to PC gaming storefronts, as the only real alternatives to Steam are currently Battle.net and Origin, who sell only Blizzard and EA games respectively, and the Windows 10 store, which is a complete and utter joke. With an empire like that and thousands of users checking in daily for their gaming fix, why should they care if a few hundred garbage games make it onto the storefront?

          The answer is easy. It’s because no professional store allows crap to be sold on their shelves. If you want a good reputation, you won’t sell something that is below your standards. For example, most professional storefronts don’t sell games rated AO by the ESRB, so as to not offend anyone shopping there.

          Steam has no such filters. At this point, literally any joker with the money to buy a Steam Greenlight license and a few hours to spare is granted shelf space. We’ve seen games released on Steam with missing executable files, games built from nothing but pre-made Unity assets, games stolen from somewhere else, and games filled with nothing but memes and potty humour. And if the recent activity of the PlayStation YouTube account is any indication, Sony is starting down the same path, allowing literally anyone to put a game on their marketplace and even giving them a spotlight for doing so, regardless of the actual quality of the game itself.

          So how do we solve this problem? Easy. Steam and Sony need to put on their big boy pants and hire a quality assurance team.

          I’m not sure if this is still a thing, but back in the day Nintendo used to have something called the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality. To ensure that no broken or flat-out terrible games would be sold on their systems, Nintendo would have their quality assurance team check out the game beforehand to ensure it was up to their standards. Then, if you went to the store and saw the Nintendo stamp of approval on a game, you knew that they’d given it the thumbs-up.

          Steam has nothing of the sort, and at this point they desperately need it. There was a time when Steam was so restrictive that basically nothing could make it on, but nowadays it’s the polar opposite. Steam and Sony need to close the gates, hire a quality assurance team to ensure that the Life of Black Tigers of the world don’t make it to the storefront, and then maybe, just maybe, they can redeem themselves a bit.

Song of the Week

          I’ve spoken before about how I thought that Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor had the best game soundtrack of 2016, the best of which being the festival music. Well, here it is in all it's weird, alien glory!