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DIGITAL HOMICIDE vs STEAM: IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME - by Mr Biffo

22/9/2016

20 Comments

 
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You might've read the series of pieces I wrote earlier in the year about the developer Digital Homicide. Founded by brothers Robert and James Romine, the company is in the process of suing YouTuber and journalist Jim Sterling for "assault, libel, and slander", over what they allege was his vindictive coverage of the company's objectively terrible games.

As I wrote about the situation over several articles, I came to realise what my own vested interest was (links below). Digital Homicide's personal hurt was pretty evident, but this latest development suggests they've learned nothing in the ensuing months. Whatever is really driving them, it's ugly and unnecessary - albeit only as ugly and unnecessary as what drives certain customers to revel in trying to take them down.

Now, Digital Homicide is suing 100 users of Steam for "personal injury" regarding the behaviour of those who have sought - often through aggressive means - to draw attention to the apparent shovelware nature of DH's games.

In response to the lawsuit, Valve has removed all of Digital Homicide's games from the platform, Valve's Doug Lombardi stating: "Valve has stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers".

Now. Here's my gut reaction: Digital Homicide need to shut up and stop acting like lunatics. I mean, there's getting hurt, and then there's reacting to that hurt with grossly disproportionate behaviour. And yet, the root cause of all of this can be firmly planted at the feet of Valve itself - and the company's hands-off, quantity over quality approach to what it hosts on Steam.
WHAT'S DA PROBLEM?
The games industry has a problem, and that problem was highlighted during Apple's recent conference, when the company proudly proclaimed that there are now over half a million games on the App Store. However you look at it... that is not a good thing for anyone. Except maybe Apple, who take a percentage of everything sold on their store.

It doesn't benefit the developers, it doesn't benefit the industry, and it doesn't benefit the customer. How many great games are on the App Store that are buried beneath hundreds of thousands of Flappy Bird clones? The only games I ever see at the top of the App Store charts are either big licenses, or Clash of Clans and Pokemon Go.

The situation isn't much better on Steam - and though there's a certain democratic process as to which games rise to the top, it's wrapped up in an off-putting and toxic community.  

There's a revolting us-versus-them culture which has grown up between industry professionals and customers - that sense of entitlement which can see journalists and developers abused for every little slight. Yet somehow there's never anything levelled at the Apples and Valves - the ones who are benefitting from a strategy of "Ain't our problem, bruv".

There's no question that anybody can make a game these days. The question is really whether they should. And not only whether they should, but whether they should then be given a platform on which to distribute that game, regardless of the content and quality. There's virtually no quality control, no human hand guiding a selection process of what ends up on Steam, and consequently the average punter is kept away, reluctant to scale a mountain of turds to find the gold nuggets buried within.

Steam and the App Store are the biggest distribution platforms the games industry has, and they're both an utter mess, both unwelcoming to the casual user, and thoroughly bewildering unless you're already immersed in gamer culture.

Frankly, I barely look at either anymore. Something like 60,000 new apps are added to the App Store every month. How can anybody realistically think that's a positive? 
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BUSK ON
The App Store and Steam are the gaming equivalent of busking; basically, anyone can rock up, and it doesn't matter whether they know how to play guitar or not. They can put their hat down on the ground, and pluck the strings in the hope someone might lob a few pence into it.

Except it's worse than that: because there are 500,000 buskers all playing at once in Wembley Stadium, and while some are better than others, there's no chance of picking any individual performer out amid the din. And to make matters worse, Aerosmith are on stage, and they've got a really big sound system. 

Apply that specifically to Steam and Digital Homicide, and the analogy gets more confusing, and encompasses something about a particularly vocal and aggressive busker spitting in the face of the audience members who are gathered in the few available seats, and the audience members spitting back. Or something like that. I dunno. Do I look like I'm King of the Analogies?

THE FACT IS WHAT?
The fact is this: if I'm finding Steam and the App Store too confusing and off-putting and unpleasant and unprofessional and anarchic to go on there... you can bet that other people are too. Valve has a responsibility to both creators and customers, as the owners of the distribution platform, not to just sit back, and passively rake in the money while allowing a culture of anything-goes.

Similarly, I remain bewildered by the amount of clones, and rip-offs, and barely-finished games which end up on the App Store. It seems like a weird strategy for a company such as Apple - which is usually so controlled and polished and on-message. But then, when you consider how driven Apple is by its bottom-line, it becomes slightly less weird.

Sadly, it's not always a matter of the cream rising to the top, when rising to the top requires rising up though an ocean of games which should never have been given a commercial release.

Within such an environment it's inevitable that people are going to get pissed off, that tempers will become frayed. Everyone is fighting to be heard - whether it's fighting to get their own game noticed, or fighting to get games noticed above the dross. It's the law of the frontier, and people are taking justice into their own hands.

It was only a matter of time until someone got lynched.
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
JIM STERLING'S BEING SUED FOR $10 MILLION AND IT'S ALL MY FAULT - BY MR BIFFO
JIM STERLING: THE BEST MODERN GAMES JOURNALISM HAS TO OFFER? OR A VULGAR,
PATRONISING EMBARRASSMENT? - BY MR BIFFO

JIM STERLING VS DIGITAL HOMICIDE... WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON? - BY MR BIFFO
JIM STERLING: A CODA
​
20 Comments
RichardM
22/9/2016 10:45:44 am

Thing that has always confused me about the App Store: 'AAA' titles generally only have a few reviews (Angry Birds has 66, for example). But they're always at the top of the charts? I know not everyone who downloads a game reviews it, and that 'top grossing' is the only clear criteria on any of those lists, but it's just not clear what - if any - role the user review system has. The curated lists of apps are even worse. I genuinely can't believe that those are based on any opinion other than who paid the most to get on them.

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Phil
22/9/2016 04:33:18 pm

I think App Store reviews are only displayed by default for the latest version. Top games might update quite often (if a new version of iOS comes out especially and iOS 10 was last week) so you'll only be seeing the reviews from the last few days

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Voodoo76
22/9/2016 12:22:50 pm

I absolutely love games. I'm 40 and grew up playing all the consoles. I have a ps4 and an iphone but I have absolutely no interest in playing games on my phone. The few I initially did try were crap, with dodgy controls and playability. I'd rather spend a few quid on something decent than playing free shitty games with no soul.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
22/9/2016 03:00:23 pm

If you're not interested in simple match-three puzzlers or free-runners, then point-and-click adventures (proper ones, not hidden object stuff) and JRPGs with menu-based battle systems (not action-RPGs) are amongst the better mobile options for "core" gamers.

I'm currently enjoying Chrono Trigger and Day of the Tentacle, for example.

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Penyrolewen
22/9/2016 09:11:53 pm

I think you need to look at them as a different type of gaming. No, they're not as good as a ps4 but you don't have you're ps4 when you're waiting to see the doctor, or for the bus, or your mate- whatever. There are some great mobile games out there. I'm no seasoned mobile gamer myself but I have played some of the obvious ones, I'm sure others can name many, many more. Monument Valley is lovely, possibly the 'nicest' game I've ever played. Crossy Road is genius, not my personal favourite but still genius. FTL is absorbing retro fun. The Box is a good puzzler. I wouldn't play any of them on consoles/pc but they're good for a spare few minutes. Tell us about more, please, digizens.

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Penyrolewen
22/9/2016 09:13:59 pm

EDIT: 'your ps4'. Blooming typos/autocorrect. Sorry to all that gave a pang of nausea to.

Voodoo76
23/9/2016 12:48:18 pm

No i'm not convinced, i'd rather take my daughters 3ds if i had the urge to play on the move, which I don't as I'm 40, far too busy working and I have no mates!! Phone's should be for talking and messaging.

Bloated on Games
22/9/2016 01:13:49 pm

An excellent op-ed.

Adding on top of that, there's also a backlog of enormously cheap previous gen games. I walked into CEX and bought Borderlands for £2. Then I spent about £100 buying 50 or so triple-A games, because PS3 and X360 are dirt cheap now. Yet I never have time to play them. I'm not sure I even will.

As such, I don't even bother looking on Steam.

It's weird. When I was in my teens, I could afford maybe 4 games a year, and regularly cannibalised my collection, trading in the old to get more new. I felt like I could never get enough.

Now I'd rather just watch Netflix. :(

This makes me sad, Mr Biffo. How do I get unsad?

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CdrJameson
22/9/2016 03:23:00 pm

I recently received a massive tax bill and now have precisely no money for the next six months.

It is at this point that a previously untouched Steam backlog starts to look like it was a sound investment.

So to get unsad, get a massive tax bill. Er.

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Antony Adler
22/9/2016 04:13:56 pm

@Bloated on Games -a sad story, I feel the same way ! When i was a kid, I'd play the s**t out of games I didn't even like that much (Blades of Steel on the Gameboy got way too much playtime!!) . There's something about rarity that adds to perceived value. Now we're just awash with choice, but very very little that's truly fun / innovative etc. Sticking on a movie does feel a lot simpler nowadays !

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Spiney O'Sullivan
22/9/2016 06:53:56 pm

Is the answer gin?

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Panda
22/9/2016 02:07:03 pm

This problem for me isn't just limited to phones and Steam either. I think there are way too many games released for the triple-A console market. I get that it's all about risk aversion now and just about every big publisher feels that unless they can get as much out as possible, the risks they're taking won't be mitigated enough. You can't put all your chips behind anything nowadays, even if it seems like a sure thing.

But I think they still need to find a way of making sure they're not drowning us all in redundant pish, otherwise things will stagnate and studios won't be allowed to try and put anything deemed "unsafe" out there.

When you look at an industry where the biggest innovations of the past decade have been mere business models that constitute new and original ways of taking our money off of us, you begin to suspect that this became a problem a long time ago.

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Retro Resolution link
22/9/2016 03:46:06 pm

This situation feels disturbingly reminiscent of the uncontrolled glut of titles swamping the Atari VCS which preceded, and most likely provoked, the video game crash in the early 1980s.

I spent a good half hour earlier simply trying to find a sliding puzzle game on the Play Store - even with a very specific, incredibly simple game as a target, wading through poorly coded, possibly malware-riddled, permission-whoring apps was a ridiculous chore.

The reviews all too often appear suspiciously manipulated, leaving raw download numbers, luck, and a hunch as deciding factors in selecting anything.

And add all that to the inherent instability of applications on Android's hopelessly fragmented platform (hardware, o/s revisions, and vendor-specific bloatware)...

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J Griffin link
22/9/2016 06:42:11 pm

Speaking as a small android game dev, I think the major problem is visibility.

I know there's good stuff out there, but getting noticed is ridiculously difficult. There's next to no decent sources for finding games that aren't from major publishers or very well established indies. App review sites are largely a cesspit, and the promoted titles on storefronts go to the big players almost exclusively. If you're very lucky you'll be the one in hundreds of thousands that somehow ends up becoming a cult hit, but even that seems rarer these days.

There have been attempts at game sites that offer better coverage of the App stores, but they've mostly stirred up very little interest and tend to fold when they're just not getting the numbers they need for a readership. All indications point to the vast majority of phone gamers just not really giving enough of a shit to support any kind of content curation or recommendation above what the storefronts give them. So as a dev your options are basically either pray Pocketgamer covers you or a popular YouTuber covers your game and that's about it. The in-store review system is basically useless as anyone using it properly is going to be buried under folks paying for user reviews by the bucketload and even if it wasn't, it's largely just used by normal users as an indicator or whether that game's been broken by a recent system update or not.

TL;DR - It's a shit business.

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Retro Resolution link
24/9/2016 12:57:40 pm

As a fellow developer (albeit not in the games industry) I feel your pain, and agree with your TL, DR - this applies to dev in general. It seems that the industry stopped respecting the ever-increasing skill set required to produce quality code a long time ago.

...Full circle back to the days of Atari, telling the (lone) developers of million-selling titles that they were of no more value to the company than the staff packing cartridges into boxes in the warehouse.

Antony Adler
22/9/2016 04:15:28 pm

Great article, Mr Biffo, and good discussion going on below !

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FatDave
22/9/2016 05:58:45 pm

Curators are good for sifting through the stinking mess looking for nuggets of gold

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Chris Wyatt
22/9/2016 06:31:03 pm

The busker analogy rings true with me. It reminds me of why I stopped going to open mic nights: they're awash with people that can alternate between 3 chords and sing really dull folk songs, yet Joe public seems to appreciate this crap?

Yes, it's great that newbies can get their first taste of performing in front of a crowd, but there are too many people who think they're musicians, when it's clear that they're just pretentious attention seekers who are not interested in perfecting their craft, or probably just do it because they think it's cool, or something. I just don't feel that most people do it for the love of music, and they probably started doing it to try and fit in with a certain crowd. It's that sense of a lack of individuality.

I would say the lack of quality control is not the fault of developers, and the sheer number is not a problem, but you do need people to curate it in order to skim the cream from the liquid crap.

Great article as always.

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superfog
22/9/2016 08:59:40 pm

quote-me-do: The question is really whether they should

Why shouldn't they?

Where's the cussin' snakes?

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Bloated on Games
23/9/2016 08:40:49 am

I was thinking about this, and sometimes people say "oh first world problems" when one raises the topic...

But our entire developed society has grown in this direction, of excess choice, excess waste, whether it's the thousands of games unplayed in App stores, or the tons upon tons of perfectly good food we throw away.

Despite pursuing the belief of "more will make it better", are we living more satisfied lives? Do we feel content? Looking at the arguments online, it would seem no. People are more irritable and angry than ever before...

Then again, we didn't have the internet during the 1970s, when all the strikes were on. Maybe people would complain just as much.

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