TotalBiscuit

 

A few points.

Most people are not actually arguing for "museum-style" curation, they're arguing for baseline quality standards, better discoverability and the inability for publishers to mass-dump old titles onto Steam from the back catalogues and clog up the "New Releases" section that way. They're also arguing for proper labeling (Steam frequently gets the release dates wrong, even on the store page itself. The dates are always wrong on the new releases store front), lack of censorship of useful tags (Steam recently banned the Uplay tag. The only mention of Uplay DRM is a tiny section halfway down a vast page that is very hard to find. Other banned tags include "bad port" "DRM" and "mobile port") and things like more accurate and descriptive genres (indie is not a genre).

Retailers in the UK at any rate are responsible for offering refunds when products do not meet the standards set out by the Sale of Goods Act, which includes "not fit for purpose". They then take that up with the manufacturer while the customer is issued a refund for the product. Valve does not offer this, yet they stock many games that would fall under this criteria and have an obtuse and difficult refund process that more often than not yields no results. Basically you shouldn't be able to have it both ways, stock a lot of absolute tat then not offer refunds when it doesn't work. Sites like GoG both carefully curate and offer excellent refund policies, Valve is way behind in both regards.

As to why people like me who make their living critiquing these games are unhappy, it's because we have a passion for games and don't want to see good titles getting drowned in a sea of utter shite. When I reached out to indie devs asking about the importance of the frontpage, most of them said it was extremely important to drive awareness and sales, while even the more skeptical at least admitted that the frontpage resulted in a sales bump. I'd also like to point out that we cannot keep up. No seriously, I could push myself to critique 2 games a day every day 7 days a week (which would result in awful videos, even first impressions take a decent amount of time to do properly) and I'd still be way behind. Even organizations with the resources (IGN, maybe Giantbomb) don't even come close to keeping up with all the stuff that ends up on Steam. The best case scenario is we become cherry-pickers ourselves, put out videos on only the good games while condemning the rest into that promotion-less hell, which would perhaps be extremely unfair since some of the titles we missed are probably pretty good. There was not a lack of games to do videos on prior to Steam instituting Greenlight and then, perhaps far more damaging, allowing publishers free reign to self publish hundreds of old games onto the platform, sometimes 7-8 at a time. We were not starved for content, now we're drowning in it and it's causing us to miss out on good titles that deserve our attention. We can't keep up.