I have to agree with that statement. Any AI slop being made nowadays should not be made, and that includes even the AAA slop we see today using it.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Also and I hate to say it, a lot of indie titles are shit.
Like yes I cant do it, yes its a big achievement for an amateur, massive respect for having a go but... Bruh this just isnt very good.
The CEO's take here is actually pretty on-point. The article title over-simplifies, a bit.
The problem he points out is that a "failed" game that doesn't sell well, or even sells moderately, is still a valuable game, and experience for the developer(s), but it also often means financial ruin for the studio. In his opinion, it's that such studios aren't recognizing when they're releasing into an over-crowded genre, and need to adjust their budget expectations down.
Cause yeah, people SHOULD be able to make shit little games, without having to re-tool their entire career if it doesn't do terribly well.
Not just a lot of indies, a lot of games in general. The only difference between a shitty indie game and a shitty big game is the marketing money that makes you belive the game is good even though it's shit.
Agreed.
I know it's lemmy and love to blindly praise indies... But a lot of indies just look like somone's school project or are plain ugly, people say the gameplay is fucking great but they are honestly mid at best.
Like Schedule 1, Peak or Mega Bonk, like sure the potential is there but it just feels like it was never meant to be a full game and the graphics are... Not there.
Also a lot of indies with the edgy style like a Newgrounds animation from it's early days, just plain grotesque and that is all they got going.
Not all AI output is slop and not all slop is AI output.
All AI output is slop unless you can prove it's not made on stolen content and it's not eating an insane amount of electricity and water to be made.
I agree tho, not all slop is AI, but I never said so.
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One problem: so many small/solo devs are terrible at listing their game.
I'm not talking about sophisticated marketing. I'm talking about extensive tagging, a flashy description, good well-framed screenshots, and taking a few minutes to search for and gift some YouTubers in your niche. Whatever their situation, the devs can do this.
And I'm shocked by how many don't.
It's... not hard. Not compared to game dev.
I don't know a solution either, as I don't understand why basics are skipped. Maybe they're kinda in a bubble/isolated?
Perhaps Steam should be more forceful about tagging and describing games before they can be listed. I get Valve don't want to be "restrictive gatekeepers," but that is not a high barrier.
That's pretty much all the feedback indie devs that barely get any wishlists on their steam pre-release pages get on the gamedev subreddit.
A lot of, "I have no idea what the game is supposed to be from the trailer. Is their a narrative? Can't tell from the trailer. Not much going on in the screenshots. That name isn't very google-able. You barely have a description and there's no media in the description either to flash it up. Do you not have any tiktok/Instagram/YouTube presence? YouTubers/Steam curators/Twitch? Did you submit for the Steam Indie Game/Next Fest? Have you submitted to any indie publishers and received feedback? You may be better off with a publisher if you're not willing to do social media and help with trailers and screenshot selection and writing your Steam page."
The skills sets just don't necessarily overlap
Thing with steam is you have to build hype and wishlists long before you release. Like months and years.
Some people make the game and then start thinking about releasing it. Like you have to do that in pretty much the opposite order.
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I bought Dispatch and now 90% of my suggestions are hentai “dating” sims.
Their discovery system needs work.
I can’t even block them because there’s a never ending queue of them each time it refreshes it shows new ones.
You can in fact block those, specifically, at least by disabling AO+ rated games from showing up in your queue at all. I don't know if there are other categories or filters that can do this, but I know for sure nsfw games can be since I use it.
There are some non-porn games that get caught by that setting, unfortunately. I had to disable it back when... I want to say when the Witcher 3 was released? Not sure, but it was some huge release that got filtered.
Yeah I blocked those ages ago and the only game that I was actually interested in that got blocked was baldurs gate 3. Easy to hit "show games blocked by my filters" to get the one game that was the exception, which I already knew about without Steam telling me so
Also blocking hides them completely, you can't even find them if you search by name. I just want to take them out of the recommendations.
you can make it so individual games don't impact your recommendeds, one way is to go to the store page of the game and click ignore. another is to find the section on the store page named "recommended based on the games you play" and clicking the "explore and customize" button to the right of it.
Edit: apparently you can also find the latter menu by clicking "recommendations" in the top bar of the store and then "interactive recommender".
There is a tag for dating sim and another for visual novel that you can exclude
That's a bit of a problem. Is that not, however, calling for censorship? On the AI front, that I understand.
Not censorship, but not massively overindexing like that.
The on route to getting recommended this stuff is way too open without a way to tell it stop.
When I go in my top recommendation is “Fetish Locator S&M Studio”, and these are all in my top recommendations at the top of the store:
Meanwhile my library looks like this:
I will say recommendations based on games I play is pretty good, but I’ve also dismissed “5 hearts one roof” and similar a ton of times.
Don't be so be ridiculous.
You don't see the link between Cities Skylines II and Fetish Locator: S&M studio?
Have you not tried the San Fernando Valley expansion pack for C:S2?
There is a link, same type of ppl would buy those games, more likely than a cod player
You can remove content/tags/genres from your discovery queue. In the settings somewhere.
I’ve removed VR so I get no results.
Edit
Yeah I think I filtered out like anime or hentai or something years ago, so I don't see that kind of game anymore.
I’ve got kids, so yeah… it’s a great feature. When I remember to keep it updated… which is currently a great reminder too!
My computer is usually locked and kids have their own, but things can happen.
You degenerate!
I guess the next step to improve recommendations is to better consider what the user doesn't play.
You don't even get to date malevola so dispatch is pretty shit as a dating sim.
A way to filter out certain categories by tags would be great, if they haven't added that already.
You can filter tags in your settings.
Hooray!
I haven't had a reason to yet, awesome that it is there if I ever do.
Adding an "AI art" tag to filter against would go a long way
Steam already requires AI disclosure, I wonder if that's one of the store preference options you can toggle already.
No, it's not a toggleable preference.
It's similar to the EULA and third-party account disclosures where they're mentioned on individual store pages, but you can't specifically filter them out of searches without setting them up as tags
Probably worth emailing Gabe over ig.
He's right, its brutal that a single "failed" or even a break even title can end a studio and all the talent and experience gets lost.
A bad game is often valuable dev experience, even if it doesn't feel that way when you're going through it.
Ignorant question here, but it relates to discovery issues I have on Steam, so maybe this is the thread for it. Is there a way to filter by multiple tags? It's entirely possible I'm just dumb, but I find the tags system useless without that ability. I don't want to see every FPS on Steam, I want to see specifically Singleplayer, Story-Rich FPS games with an emphasis on Weapon Customization and Environmental Destruction (for example). I'm on mobile at the moment and that query doesn't seem possible via the app, but I've had similar issues with the desktop client as well. My experience is that I can only browse one tag, which is not especially useful most of the time.
Like I said, this seems like something that I'm just missing, and I'm willing to eat a big helping of humble pie if someone can set me straight.
The problem with that is what do you do if a game doesn't match all of the tags, do you hide it or do you show it. How many of the tags does it have to match in order to be shown?
For example Teardown is a story rich, FPS with destruction mechanics. But it don't have much in the way of weapons customisation, so do you want it, or not?
This query made me think of this sketch as steams' search techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMboDekgvz0
I mean... I don't disagree that it's the best non-curated platform, but... that's still not good.
I don't disagree that many indies and even mid-sized studios should be more realistic about their potential, and I do agree that for a gig economy-style algorithm the crowdsourced tag system works pretty well on Steam and has more granularity than the jankier phone store app equivalent.
But it's still 100% algo sorting and it's still 100% driving ancient GaaS to the top and fossilizing it there. If you can't muster a trailer at one of Keighley's gigs or a massive influencer campaign you get exactly one shot at clearing the algorithm bars for Steam's front page and then the algo will dump you all the way down to the pits. I know for a fact that a bunch of indies and AAs are playing the exact same sort of SEO games and algo reverse-engineering you see on phone shovelware. Steam plays in that league.
I think there are pros and cons of that against a fully curated front page, and it's probably easier to at least have a chance here than back when first party certification was an actual investment, but I'm not sure I necessarily like what comes out the other end at scale.
This thread on Steam might help?
Let me know if that's what you meant.
Genuinely can't tell if spam or non sequitur.
🤦 replied to the wrong person 🤣
last i checked you only need 50 reviews (with atleast 75%+ positive) for steam's algo to aggressively start promoting your game on front-page to fans of the relevant tags. i'm honestly surprised there arent some cheap bot-farm ran by "influencers" for this exact purpose, 50 reviews really isnt that many but so few people bother to leave any that reaching that threshold is pretty crucial for serious game devs.
You need to clear the algo bars right away to make the New and Trending tab, and then you need to keep it up. If you drop off, you're out.
So dropping to Mixed or starting soft gets you written off (barring viral late pickups or otherwise getting external promo to make your game blow up elsewhere). That means you need to hypermanage your launch and SEO the crap out of it to "own a tag" or keep above water with the trending tab.
I'll say that at least that's a tool for even a single person marketing owner to micromanage a Steam launch effectively, but it's still SEO and algo gaming, which still leads to the same discoverability rat race mobile gaming has been stuck on for ages. And how survivable that process is depends a lot on what you need. I'd argue that very small devs that can make do with a few thousand copies sold may have an easier time there than slightly larger releases that need months of at least some sales to make their money back. Steam sales are either a flat line for a decade or a two week spike followed by zero engagement in your game forever.
i mean...still not sure what anyone expects steam to do here. engage with your playerbase and ask them to leave reviews or be ignored, can't expect valve to do all that. literally anything they do/don't do will piss someone off, they start actively curating shit and soon enough devs and players both will start accusing them of being paid off to promote more mainstream stuff or something
besides...this all is just kind of how the entertainment business works...it's a highly competitive field with a finite supply of attention to fight over, and as more great stuff is released your competition gets harder compete with. that goes for more than just games, music/movies/everything. even making something good and properly advertised/marketed is no guarantee anyone actually buys it, that's why publishers became a thing in the first place (that they then tend to abuse their positions is it's own problem)
I strongly disagree with that take, but also the actual alternative is not better for some of the people involved, so let that caveat be up front.
The alternative is a manually curated storefront, which is still being done in other platforms to some degree. You can absolutely sell entertainment or videogames without it being an entirely hands-off, algo-driven gig economy setup. Valve's entire business model is cutting off all internal costs and automating the thing so it prints money by itself, but that's not the only possible business model for media, as the previous century of media clearly shows.
Now, the caveat is that this doesn't particularly help the small fry, which may be just gatekept out of the entire loop instead of being simply crushed by the soulless machine of making dream paste out of independent media. Whether that's better or not I'm genuinely not sure.
Nostalgia tells me that the old industrial model where you only got to play in the pool if you could afford to do it right was more consistenly professional and less sloppy. Also that fewer things fell through the cracks, so if you wanted to make shovelware you at least had to put some work in to get it published, which was somebody's paid job. Steam (and the similar mobile stores) have put all the cost and risk on the developers, especially since investment dried up and indie publishers have morphed from financers to service providers that come in after the job is done to sell you marketing and storefront SEO.
So I guess I personally would want Steam to hire a small army of content reviewers and moderators led by an editorial team that selects what to feature based on both business and creative considerations. But what I personally would want may not solve the problem the small indies this guy's talking about have, just... maybe not allow them to get that deep into the hole by keeping them from being able to get started in the first place. Mileage may vary on whether that's preferable. My personal choice is probably a side effect of being old.
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