I guess I am the only one thinking there's a bit of conflict of interest in a publisher that works on the "already discovered side" talking about a supposedly effective discovery system that allow customer to discover... other entities (and thus add more competition)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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I always cringe when I see someone make art and then get mad/blame others when it isn't more successful.
I'm like, dude, do you have any idea how many people make great art and it goes unnoticed? Be glad you had the opportunity to make it in the first place.
But let's be a real. Most of these 'people' only do it for the money and then throw a tantrum when they don't get it.
One problem: so many small/solo devs are terrible at listing their game.
I'm not talking about sophisticated marketing. I'm talking about extensive tagging, a flashy description, good well-framed screenshots, and taking a few minutes to search for and gift some YouTubers in your niche. Whatever their situation, the devs can do this.
And I'm shocked by how many don't.
It's... not hard. Not compared to game dev.
I don't know a solution either, as I don't understand why basics are skipped. Maybe they're kinda in a bubble/isolated?
Perhaps Steam should be more forceful about tagging and describing games before they can be listed. I get Valve don't want to be "restrictive gatekeepers," but that is not a high barrier.
Mostly agree.
90% of the time they are asking other indie devs who are also bad at descibing their game. They have very likely never been told their Steam page looks awful or is described poorly.
The YouTuber part is difficult. If you go to contact them, many straight up say don't send me your games to check out on their contact page, and out of the ones that do accept keys, you're usually looking at a very small chance that they'll stream it.
The skills sets just don't necessarily overlap
Thing with steam is you have to build hype and wishlists long before you release. Like months and years.
Some people make the game and then start thinking about releasing it. Like you have to do that in pretty much the opposite order.
That's pretty much all the feedback indie devs that barely get any wishlists on their steam pre-release pages get on the gamedev subreddit.
A lot of, "I have no idea what the game is supposed to be from the trailer. Is their a narrative? Can't tell from the trailer. Not much going on in the screenshots. That name isn't very google-able. You barely have a description and there's no media in the description either to flash it up. Do you not have any tiktok/Instagram/YouTube presence? YouTubers/Steam curators/Twitch? Did you submit for the Steam Indie Game/Next Fest? Have you submitted to any indie publishers and received feedback? You may be better off with a publisher if you're not willing to do social media and help with trailers and screenshot selection and writing your Steam page."
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I have to agree with that statement. Any AI slop being made nowadays should not be made, and that includes even the AAA slop we see today using it.
i just though Steam could take out twitch by just having a streaming section for Steam users
twitch and kick would just be left with the cesspool irl/chat/hot tub streams
Also and I hate to say it, a lot of indie titles are shit.
Like yes I cant do it, yes its a big achievement for an amateur, massive respect for having a go but... Bruh this just isnt very good.
Not just a lot of indies, a lot of games in general. The only difference between a shitty indie game and a shitty big game is the marketing money that makes you belive the game is good even though it's shit.
The CEO's take here is actually pretty on-point. The article title over-simplifies, a bit.
The problem he points out is that a "failed" game that doesn't sell well, or even sells moderately, is still a valuable game, and experience for the developer(s), but it also often means financial ruin for the studio. In his opinion, it's that such studios aren't recognizing when they're releasing into an over-crowded genre, and need to adjust their budget expectations down.
Cause yeah, people SHOULD be able to make shit little games, without having to re-tool their entire career if it doesn't do terribly well.
Agreed.
I know it's lemmy and love to blindly praise indies... But a lot of indies just look like somone's school project or are plain ugly, people say the gameplay is fucking great but they are honestly mid at best.
Like Schedule 1, Peak or Mega Bonk, like sure the potential is there but it just feels like it was never meant to be a full game and the graphics are... Not there.
Also a lot of indies with the edgy style like a Newgrounds animation from it's early days, just plain grotesque and that is all they got going.
Not all AI output is slop and not all slop is AI output.
All AI output is slop unless you can prove it's not made on stolen content and it's not eating an insane amount of electricity and water to be made.
I agree tho, not all slop is AI, but I never said so.
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Ignorant question here, but it relates to discovery issues I have on Steam, so maybe this is the thread for it. Is there a way to filter by multiple tags? It's entirely possible I'm just dumb, but I find the tags system useless without that ability. I don't want to see every FPS on Steam, I want to see specifically Singleplayer, Story-Rich FPS games with an emphasis on Weapon Customization and Environmental Destruction (for example). I'm on mobile at the moment and that query doesn't seem possible via the app, but I've had similar issues with the desktop client as well. My experience is that I can only browse one tag, which is not especially useful most of the time.
Like I said, this seems like something that I'm just missing, and I'm willing to eat a big helping of humble pie if someone can set me straight.
I'm pretty sure I can filter by multiple tags on PC - they're just checkboxes so you can click a few at the same time. I'll update the comment in 1 hour or so to report back
The problem with that is what do you do if a game doesn't match all of the tags, do you hide it or do you show it. How many of the tags does it have to match in order to be shown?
For example Teardown is a story rich, FPS with destruction mechanics. But it don't have much in the way of weapons customisation, so do you want it, or not?
I don't think of that as a difficult problem. No, I am not interested in Teardown if I'm searching for that particular set of tags, and I don't want Steam guessing at whether to show me a game or not. That's fine on the home page, or in the discover queye, but If I search for 5 tags, and a game only has 4, the game doesn't meet my criteria and ought to be hidden. I forget what the number cited in the article is, but there is a deluge of a games added to Steam every single day. Enough that there's almost certainly a fair chunk of games which meet my hypothetical criteria exactly, so I don't want to wade through games which "might interest me". There are other section of the store dedicated to that concept, including on the pages of the 5 tag games I'm browsing for.
I don't see a problem at all, you just have an option to swap "OR" with "AND" as the search operand
This query made me think of this sketch as steams' search techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMboDekgvz0
I bought Dispatch and now 90% of my suggestions are hentai “dating” sims.
Their discovery system needs work.
I can’t even block them because there’s a never ending queue of them each time it refreshes it shows new ones.
You can in fact block those, specifically, at least by disabling AO+ rated games from showing up in your queue at all. I don't know if there are other categories or filters that can do this, but I know for sure nsfw games can be since I use it.
There are some non-porn games that get caught by that setting, unfortunately. I had to disable it back when... I want to say when the Witcher 3 was released? Not sure, but it was some huge release that got filtered.
Also blocking hides them completely, you can't even find them if you search by name. I just want to take them out of the recommendations.
Yeah I blocked those ages ago and the only game that I was actually interested in that got blocked was baldurs gate 3. Easy to hit "show games blocked by my filters" to get the one game that was the exception, which I already knew about without Steam telling me so
There is a tag for dating sim and another for visual novel that you can exclude
you can make it so individual games don't impact your recommendeds, one way is to go to the store page of the game and click ignore. another is to find the section on the store page named "recommended based on the games you play" and clicking the "explore and customize" button to the right of it.
Edit: apparently you can also find the latter menu by clicking "recommendations" in the top bar of the store and then "interactive recommender".
You don't even get to date malevola so dispatch is pretty shit as a dating sim.
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Adding an "AI art" tag to filter against would go a long way
Steam already requires AI disclosure, I wonder if that's one of the store preference options you can toggle already.
No, it's not a toggleable preference.
It's similar to the EULA and third-party account disclosures where they're mentioned on individual store pages, but you can't specifically filter them out of searches without setting them up as tags
Probably worth emailing Gabe over ig.
He's right, its brutal that a single "failed" or even a break even title can end a studio and all the talent and experience gets lost.
A bad game is often valuable dev experience, even if it doesn't feel that way when you're going through it.
and all the talent and experience gets lost.
The people are still alive, lol.
Most people leave the industry when you crunch through a game and then get laid off anyways when the studio closes.
Even so, its the team's collective experience that's important. An individual themselves might have a lot of experience shipping games, but getting laid off and joining a new team just means they'll get to watch the new management make the same mistakes they just went through.
Edit: Fixed getting laid -> getting laid off lol
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