Is Epic the Cure to Steam Slop?

So, there's this here video essay:

Steam Is Drowning In Slop_ Now Valve Is Fighting Back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anhT2L3cnz8

I don't actually recommend watching it. It has some interesting
information but the presentation is naff and I don't agree with the
conclusions. Still, it does bring up some interesting facts. Mainly,
that for the majority of (Indie) games, it is the first _two days_ of
sales after being released on Steam that determine if a game is going
to succeed or not. Mostly because of how Valve promotes new games on
Steam; on release, it gets pushed into the general 'show to everyone
queue'. If it makes enough sales (generally, more than $250K USD) then
Steam will continue to show it to people; otherwise, the Algorithm
doesn't push it into people's "see what's new and hot queue". And once
that happens, the game is pretty much dead. If nobody sees it, then
nobody buys it.

     [Of course, if you have a marketing budget you can either
      pay Valve to promote your game, or entice people to visit
      your Steam page directly through regular advertising and
      astroturfing. But that sort of resource is usually only
      available to established companies... and most new games
      on Steam are not published by them]

Valve does this in order to try and stem the flood of AI-slop and
asset-flip games that have come to dominate Indie releases. The idea
being that, at first, it has no idea if a game is good or not, so it
shows it to everyone. If nobody likes the game (e.g., nobody buys it)
it gets dumped into the AI Slop bucket and nobody has to see it
anymore. I suppose, algorithmically, that's as good a method as any
else. Valve doesn't benefit from having thousands of shit-games that
nobody wants. It would rather just show you games you WILL buy... but
how to do that?

     [The essay goes on at length at explaining why this is why
      the Steam's "Next Fest" sales are so awful; they're basically
      the preliminary filter to get eyeballs on new games, getting
      its users to teach the Algorithm what's good or not.]

Where I disagree with the video essay is the idea that this is the
ONLY solution Valve could use; they COULD curate their marketplace and
prevent obvious slop from appearing. There's no real reason that Valve
needed to add 19,000 new games to its marketplace in 2024 (of which
less than 2500 sold), especially when so many of them are such obvious
crap. Valve could demand higher standards from its developers, either
by demanding a higher fee from unproven developers. None of them are
without downside, but there _are_ alternatives to just opening the
flood gates and hoping The Algorithm sorts it all out.

But that's  not what I came to tell you about.
I came to talk about the draft.*

No wait, that's not right either. I came to talk about how Epic Games
is probably serving a very important part in making Steam better.

Because it's well documented that many developers first release their
games on Epic (sometimes getting paid for the privilege), but they
don't actually start making money until they move the game over to
Steam. There's a variety of reasons for this; that Steam has a much
larger user base and generally does a better job at promoting games
than Epic are the two most cited. But the general idea is that you
release on Epic, work out the bugs, and when your game is in
reasonable shape re-release on Steam and get the sales.

Which means that Epic serves a very useful part of getting your game
good enough to get past that first two-day/$250K filter. Not only does
the Epic release give you some much needed beta-testing and (slight)
income from the few users who buy it there, it also allows you to
build up some user-interest so that when you do shift over to Valve's
marketplace, you actually have a chance. Your game won't be grouped in
with the other 350/week games that get dumped into the "slop zone" and
ignored forevermore. It might actually sell, and gamers might actually
get a game worth playing.

Who knew Epic Game Store actually had a use? ;-)
















* if you got that reference, congratulations! You're old.