Steam Next Fest is being flooded with thousands of low-effort games, while developers are becoming reluctant to share their work for fear of seeing it quickly cloned.
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
What you’re asking for is not trivial. Just for the backlog, assuming a single scant hour per game, is 70 new full-time positions before getting into the organizational and administrative overhead. That’s the absolute bare minimum to load up and investigate a game and categorize it and it only works for things that are clearly defined from the very beginning. Realistically there’s no way they can sift through all the assets and code in that time for, as an example, signs of AI use even if they had full access to the developer’s work files. What you’re asking for is more like a full week audit on average.
I’m pretty sure they can afford it. But I’d be happy for the tag system to continue being meaningless if they would just hoist genre out into a separate system curated only by Valve.
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
Valve should have staff manually play through 144k games to make sure all the tags are accurate?
Yes, they can afford to ensure the quality of their systems.
What you’re asking for is not trivial. Just for the backlog, assuming a single scant hour per game, is 70 new full-time positions before getting into the organizational and administrative overhead. That’s the absolute bare minimum to load up and investigate a game and categorize it and it only works for things that are clearly defined from the very beginning. Realistically there’s no way they can sift through all the assets and code in that time for, as an example, signs of AI use even if they had full access to the developer’s work files. What you’re asking for is more like a full week audit on average.
I’m pretty sure they can afford it. But I’d be happy for the tag system to continue being meaningless if they would just hoist genre out into a separate system curated only by Valve.