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Valve Decides To Get Out Of The Curation Business When It Comes To 'Offensive' Games

Valve Decides To Get Out Of The Curation Business When It Comes To 'Offensive' Games

5 years ago
Anonymous $qrGo_Xv_Cm

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180607/09483839986/valve-decides-to-get-out-curation-business-when-it-comes-to-offensive-games.shtml

As we've said in the past, Valve has always had a tricky line to walk with it's Steam platform, having to straddle the needs of both the gamers that use the service and the game developers that make it worthwhile. Frankly, it's walked this line fairly well for the most part. The platform, which was always popular, has exploded as the place to release a new game title online. As we noted way back in ye olde 2016, this popularity has also presented a problem for Steam: saturation. There are now simply so many games available on the platform that blindly wading into it and expecting to find new content you didn't know you wanted is a dicey proposition at best. More content is an undeniably good thing, but it would be silly to suggest that the deluge of new games released in the past few years hasn't also had a deleterious effect on the usability of the platform.

Our solution? It won't surprise you. We advocated that Steam empower the gamers that use it to act as curators. If done properly, this would allow an ecosystem of trusted advisers among gamers that share interests to tell them which titles they should be looking at. To that end, Steam subsequently employed a curators program within the platform that attempted to build exactly this ecosystem. To date, it's been mediocre at best.