this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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[–] LordWiggle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

On a scale from 1 to 10, how many of those games aren't absolute shit and/or money grab scams?

[–] Lootboblin@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

and my 2024 Steam year report said I played 0 games released in 2024. Not any must have titles in day one and also my RTX 2060 can’t handle these new AAA titles anymore. Starfield was the last one that was still playable. Well time to start playing all the other hundreds of older games in my library.

[–] Onyxonblack@lemm.ee 7 points 23 hours ago

So much absolute garbage.

[–] pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 84 points 2 days ago (7 children)

How many of those are $0.99 hentai titles with like an hour of gameplay, though.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 points 1 day ago

Only around 17,000 or so. The rest are minimum effort Unity asset flips.

I do appreciate that it used to be too much effort to get a game onto Steam, but this situation is hardly better.

[–] Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 23 hours ago

That's like 20 gameplay sessions for 99¢, that's only like 5¢ per.

[–] ObsidianZed@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago (2 children)

And how many are nearly entirely AI generated?

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[–] spireghost@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 day ago

Some of the most-played steam games are "Banana" and "Cats" where you literally click it every few hours and get steam item drops. Basically NFTs where people try to get rare items, but even more braindead because the developer, at any time can make more tokens.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What's wrong with an hour of entertainment for 1 Buck?

[–] pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Noting, but many are basically the same game with different drawings.

[–] birdcannon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

The Ubisoft model

[–] Pogbom@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

....I don't think they're playing it for the story

[–] rollerbang@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Dude, I legit read that as "hentai titties" 😂

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

My friend is a connoisseur, and he says both the quantity and quality has been declining this year.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago

A terrible, terrible for Steam and ~~gooners~~ gamers this year

[–] 58008@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

How could the quality be anything but sterling with 50 new games each and every day?

[–] donuts@lemmy.world 40 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Discoverability is a huge problem on Steam because there's so many games releasing, you can't really keep up.

18,000 games is almost 50 per day on average. That's 50 titles fighting for your attention and wallet every single day.

If you don't get noticed because you didn't spend half of your development budget on marketing, or your game didn't pick up well with influencers or more traditional media like reviews, you're just kinda fucked. No matter how good your game might be.

Speaking about quality, how many of those 18k titles were uninspiring, asset flipping slop?

[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 1 points 20 hours ago

Making a good game is one thing, making a huge amount of others want to play it is something else.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It doesn't help that Steam store is a nightmare to navigate.

Releasing demos is a great way to succeed. It doesn't take me more than 5 minutes to decide if it's something I want to continue playing.

Putting videos of nothing but cut-scenes is a great way to ensure I keep scrolling but every title seems to take this approach.

[–] Pogbom@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've always dreamed of a world where game demos were mandated by law. Some products can't be tested out easily, but just about any video game really can.

[–] odium@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

I use steam's two hour return window as a demo.

[–] Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

The Steam Next Fest is how I found most of the good indie games I've played. Making a good demo will put you above 99% of the cruft out there.

[–] alphabethunter@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I have picked up the same habit. I'll download and test a couple of dozen demos every next fest, and then wishlist/buy the ones that are good. I played 108 demos this year, and some of my favorite games this year were demos like this: Kill Knight, Last Plague Blight, Karate Survivor, Empty Shell...

[–] Stern@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

that and word of mouth or just cool gameplay vids. dude parrying an explosion got me to withlist va proxy

[–] overload@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I remember that clip of the dude parrying a nuke, can't remember the game but it stuck with me.

[–] Stern@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] overload@sopuli.xyz 2 points 21 hours ago
[–] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 25 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That's unironically the reason I don't even attempt to find games on Steam anymore.

[–] Zahille7@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

I'll only go looking if I see a cool game in a YouTube video or see a cool article about something coming out soon that looks interesting. Otherwise, same.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It depends, sometimes I go down the rabbit hole on their "Games Like This" suggestions on my favorite games' store pages. I actually just found a cool one that way the other day called Ad Fundum. It was a funny coincidence since it came up suggested on a completely unrelated game, but I'd been wanting a game centered around digging underground.

But yeah, with literally over 100,000+ games on Steam, it's become way too difficult to find quality stuff that isn't AAA or indie games that struck it lucky with popular streamers giving them exposure. Which sucks for indie devs that actually put out their passion projects since it makes discoverability so hard, as others have pointed out here.

[–] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I've always found the "games like this" section to be so superficial that it very rarely actually has games which I'd consider to be similar to the one I'm looking at. Just looking at the store right now, for "Aquaria" which I really enjoy, it recommends Skyrim as a similar game. Sure they both are open world adventure RPGs... but I definitely would not consider them to be similar games.

[–] napoleonsdumbcousin@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can recommend the site steampeek.hu for this. It shows much better recommendations for similar games than steam itself.

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[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Guys we have soooo much shovelware, asset flips and softcore porn that's barely a game. This is very much a good thing!!!

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