Steam appears to have a quality problem with 80% of games not breaking free of ‘limited’ status
IT’S no secret that more games are being released than ever before, and this makes it difficult for both developers and players to find the games they’ll love.
Almost 19k games were released on the most popular PC gaming platform Steam last year alone, which is roughly 52 games a day.
Big-budget games are almost guaranteed a spot on the front page, but smaller titles have a hard time being discovered.
As you might expect with the sheer number of games being released, not all of them are passion projects from the developers.
Steam users have often complained about shovelware, games that are thrown together from purchased assets.
These games are low quality, and churned out in high quantities to turn a quick profit.
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Steam’s owner Valve has been aware of this issue, and introduced the limited feature, which limits the game’s features if it has a low player count.
This means that the game doesn’t include badges and achievements doesn’t count towards players’ achievement goals.
According to data from Twitch’s head of games , almost 80% of the games released last year were given limited status.
Many have been using this data to claim that almost 80% of the games released on Steam are shovelware, but this doesn’t paint the full picture.
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To see if all limited games are shovelware, I looked at games published by Ratalaika Games on Steam.
This is a publisher that releases budget games made by small developers, many of which are solo projects.
Games published by Ratalaika Games vary in quality, but I’ve played plenty of its games and there are a few hidden gems.
Looking through the library, I could only see one game that didn’t have limited status, and it is one of the best Ratalaika games, League of Evil.
Everything else I looked at had limited status, even games that I thought were fun, like Devious Dungeon 2.
As limited status is based on number of players, smaller games that are hard to find on Steam can be given this status despite being good quality.
On the other hand, viral games like Banana, where you just click a banana over and over, are unlimited.
Without human curators deciding which games are good enough to appear on the platform, it seems that we’ll continue to have issues with quality and discoverability.
If you want to read more about Steam, check out the games in the speedrunning Humble Bundle.
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