All we needed was a filter.
I don’t wanna see F2P bullshit either when I’m looking at a genre, AI use could be the same thing.
Valve’s chokehold over PC gaming continues to make me nervous, as the company seems completely uninterested in lifting a finger to actually improve Next Fest or stem the amount of garbage that fills Steam every day now.
The author is correct, there is a lot of garbage on Steam these days. I wish I could go back to the way Steam was in the 2010s, when there were only a few dozens new games each week to chose but they were mostly good. Now you have to spend too much time sorting through the crap.
I think it is not fair to put all the blame on Steam for the current situation. The Steam store is merely a reflection on how the gaming market is in 2026.
Just don’t vote for slop, if slop wins, that’s not steams fault, that’s consumers fault.
People of the world. Hear my wisdom as an “old”
In the before times of home computing, anyone and their mother could make and try to sell video games, floppy disks and cassettes were plentiful. The barrier to entry was essentially non-existent. You could get fully fledged games in magazines. (In fact some magazines included the actual programme for you to type out yourself)
But it turns out when publishers just shovel slop onto the market it drowns out good quality Indy stuff and even some of the high production value games. This feels quite similar to before the great video game crash.
There’s a reason Nintendo started putting their “Nintendo seal of quality” on their games. To try and reassure buyers that they didn’t just shovel slop people mailed in. At one point you even had to send them a video tape with evidence the game could even be completed. Interestingly that seal is still found on their games.
We’ve almost returned to that state of low barrier to entry. Digital distribution means there is no real difficulty in physically producing and distributing the game. AI makes it so that anyone’s half baked idea can be shoved on Steam.
Don’t get me wrong there are many excellent games that would have struggled to make a name for themselves using steams old green light system.
The Nintendo Seal was also them raising the barrier to entry. Many people had an NES/Famicom, not a lot of people had dev kits or Family Basics+Famicom Disk Systems.
Seeing G*mers complain about this. While circlejerking about AI vibe coded ports is a trip.
Edit: see. Look at the g*mer troglodytes replying
AI cannot create! Only steal!
So that pretty much checks true with current held values.
Only circle jerking I’m seeing is people like you complaining about AI doing things programmers couldn’t on their own months ago.i never liked LLM’s but for programing it’s all about how willing you are to clean up the code even if it is sloppy to begin with, y’all couldn’t jailbrake the play station consoles for decades without the little pc workhorse. If you care so much about this, refine it and make it not sloppy.
I’ve never even looked at a next fest . I don’t buy games at release and don’t get games via discovery. I’m often looking for a specific game when I buy one. I don’t browse.
PatientGaming is a wonderful experience. It also saves a ton of money
Indeed. I’ll never pay 60-70 for a game. That’s nutso
