In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky).
But there is still a ton to admire in both organizations.
The floodgates need to close, now. As someone who has voted on hundreds of Greenlight titles, Greenlight is an abject failure IMO. It's flooded with garbage, the first few waves of approvals gave us some great titles that otherwise would have never seen the platform, but now it's a nightmare. There are no more approval lists. What's worse, it's the only way onto Steam. Your indie gem is just as likely to be lost in the shovelware noise as the latest idle game ported from mobile.
Anyone with $100 can post games there. Anyone with more than $100 can purchase a service which votes their pre-purchased unchanged asset pack "game" through Greenlight. It's ridiculous.
Tags and abandoned curator lists are not a solution to hundreds of shovelware titles clogging up the new releases section IMO.
Unfortunately, nothing will change until something comes along to replace the current system entirely. Valve will act when they are forced to act, not before.
Why? The internet itself is an open, uncurated platform.
The basic ability to publish things and finding good content are two separate problems. Don't try to solve one by restricting the other.
my point is that you should maintain openness while making it easier to discover good content.
Well, figure that one out and I'm sure you'll make a lot of money. Until that happens though, I'll take a semi-closed Steam ecosystem instead of the alternative.
Don't restrict other people for your own benefit. Instead a solution that lets them do their thing while you get the content you want is much more equitable.
I have paid for, and not returned, numerous bizarre or niche indie games that are slayed in their reviews; whereas I've returned more than a few Overwhelmingly Positives heaping shovelfulls of mainstream schlock.
It's part of growing your userbase; you lose its initial narrow focus of taste.
Steam is also constantly promoting new games to you and making suggestions based on what you currently play. There is also the social aspect in that you can see who is playing what, leading to new discoveries.
I will admit that at least having the verifiable length of time a reviewer played a game helps, but I don't find the reviews themselves to be all that worthwhile for most games.
If it was worth 1500 hours of the reviewer's time then it's probably worth 10-50 of a potential buyer's.
Inversely, I don't need to play a bad game for 1500 hours to decide that it's bad. I played 60 minutes of No Man's Sky and you'd have to pay me to play a single one more. Does that mean I should be discredited from voicing my opinion?
The return system and the achievement system should probably be integrated. Likely there should be some sort of achievement related to 'escaping the tutorial'. They might even call it "Almost bought the farm" or something.
Playing to that point should give a player a good idea what kind of game it is, and what sort of plot (if any) is happening in the game.
From /that/ point they should have maybe 30-60 min of 'game runtime' to return the game or not.
Functionally this would be an in-product demo.
Steam could easily implement this, letting you try purchased games for up to two hours.
It's be trivial for them to implement some anti-abuse system (like "must have purchased N games before using demos, etc).
The exception would be with highly competitive multiplayer games, and even then you can quickly get a very good idea.
Steam isn't bad at discovery, but because they're not creating much original content and their UI is janky, they're also not that good at it.
Source: created comprehensive database of education technology products [1], and while we made best attempt at discovery, we learned pretty quickly it was secondary in importance to having comprehensive info.
As someone who pays for AdWords, I have no problem getting someone on the phone to help when I need it.
If you've paid Google enough money. I have to keep paying $6AUD/month unless I want to lose $300+ of Android apps forever (Google Apps for Work). No chance of transferring them to another account (I'd pay $100+ for this)
6 years * 12 months/year * $3/month = 216 USD = 289 AUD.
They have a gem game called Counterstrike Global Offensive which is their 2nd biggest game after dota2(which is free), and up to a half a year ago that I was playing, we all thought (me and reddit) that they had 0 devs working on it.
Bugs were all over the place, noone was taking action into fixing them, releases were every once in a blue moon including just new skins that were content created by players etc.
Now of course the game has evolved and there are some new developers trying to do something with it but its funny to think that a game of that calibre that returns prolly billions in revenue has pathetic support.
The only gaming company I've seen keeping up with what they make is Blizzard.
This makes me think that it's rather particular to the product. YouTube was acquired and now has a significant focus towards consumer sales via movies and Red, perhaps these two factors have lead to a significantly different culture surrounding support?
This strikes me as something you can afford because you are in a factual monopoly ("You are not OK with our service ? Find an alternative... whooops :)"), rather than just having a lot of money.
Steam benefits from the fact that even people not completely happy with it (personally I have no complaints, but I use it exclusively as a store/launcher) are already invested in the platform, and do not want the hassle of dealing with two or more similar services, so they are wary of any alternative that might surface (see Windows store or proprietary stores like Origin).
If you have first-pick of incoming talent, it makes sense that you can get away with giving those employees an extremely high degree of autonomy.
These companies were successful because of what they were, and they continue to be successful because of what they are.
It is a virtuous circle living on money, people, management and many more characteristics that go together.
Google didn't suddenly transformed to being Google overnight the day they reached the first $1B.
Trying to imitate success seems to turn into a cargo cult. For whatever reason people seem to shutoff their brains when talking about this.
It's similar to questions of programming language, infrastructure options, etc. They are important supportive aspects to the core business but mostly the core of the business could still operate even if those supportive aspect were mediocre/non-optimal - just not as effectively. On a longer time scale that stuff starts to matter in a highly-competitive market.
Most startups and small businesses don't really have those issues, or at least they aren't critical at that stage of the company when the core business hasn't been figured out. So emulating them at a high cost is a bad idea.
The context of everything is important. Sadly most advice dolled out in business books is extracted and formalized without considering the context of where it worked and why.
Do you know of any examples offhand? Definitely agree that it's a virtuous cycle of talent -> revenue - > perks -> talent
>Trying to imitate success seems to turn into a cargo cult.
Love the apt description of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Free_spending
Offhand examples are the list of failed companies on that page.
It's not the genetics that matter, it's the years of training leading up to the current workout routine, not to mention the pro athlete's knowledge and understanding of his/her own body, as well as the dedicated free time to put into a workout that needs that kind of attention in order to succeed.
When you have all day, and you like working out, you can do things that don't normally make sense and still see results.
When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.