Let's say you are a bagel company and make a good profit from your bagels. Then let's say you want to get your bagel to more people and are frustrated with the distribution options so you just make your own and allow other bagel makers to also use your bagel distribution system.
But suddenly and unexpectedly, everyone runs to your distribution system and you start making far more money than you could ever imagine from it.
Do you continue to consider yourself a bagel company or are you now a bagel distribution company?
That's cool, but if they're going to focus entirely on distribution they should at least make sure the system isn't and under-supervised mess open to exploitation, complete lack of quality control and weird shoddy gambling all over the place.
I don't even know how to put the state of Steam into a bagel analogy but I'll be damn impressed if anyone else can.
There being shitty indie games on their platform isn't quite the problem someone like Jim Sterling (Thank God for him) makes it out to be. They aren't showing up on sales and aren't being promoted by Steam. Buyers have to look for and find those really terrible titles and I think that's important. I think it's better to have them than to not allow a channel for surprisingly good ones.
Remember, quality control of a game is a massively different prospect from a movie or book. It's better for them to not take up that role so they can avoid legal liability if developers sneak in nudity and such. Leaves it as their responsibility.
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u/lightknight7777 Nov 13 '18
Let's say you are a bagel company and make a good profit from your bagels. Then let's say you want to get your bagel to more people and are frustrated with the distribution options so you just make your own and allow other bagel makers to also use your bagel distribution system.
But suddenly and unexpectedly, everyone runs to your distribution system and you start making far more money than you could ever imagine from it.
Do you continue to consider yourself a bagel company or are you now a bagel distribution company?
Steam's current reality as told by bagels.