Unlike most other artistic mediums, video games can be judged both subjectively, as a work of art, and objectively, as a piece of software. They’re unusual in that the artistry and the actual production work aren’t as necessarily interdependent the way they are with other mediums like film or music. It’s a tough search to find a cinematic or musical equivalent of an otherwise brilliant, but extremely poorly optimised game. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of big releases hitSteamin a pretty sorry state in recent years, and I think it’s about timeValvetook decisive action.
The problem is that because the technical aspect of a game is so distinct from its merits as an actualgamegame, user reviews and Metacritic ratings can only tell you so much at a glance.Star Wars Jedi: Survivoris a case in point. It received critical acclaim (we loved it), but the Steam release was abuggy messthat ran horribly on most people’s hardware. Sure, the game is sitting at a mixed user reviews rating right now, but I’m just not sure if that’s enough of a warning. It doesn’t tell you anything specific by itself, and a lot of people aren’t going to bother reading the reviews to find out what went wrong.
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Most people who are interested in the game will have seen all the positive press it garnered and will probably buy it anyway. Some might even dismiss the user reviews as just another instance of such systems being abused by trolls and bigots. Just look at what happened to Horizon: Forbidden West’s user score on Metacritic whena vocal minority of homophobesgot wind of the game’s inclusion of a lesbian romance. So who can we trust?
There are a number of Steam curators who take the time to test new games and report on what kind of state they’re in, but this still doesn’t address the root issue. Curators are an opt-in system, with Steam users subscribing to the ones they like. Not everyone will follow the curators who are putting out relevant warnings, and as a result, they may end up spending a lot of money on a game that doesn’t work properly.
That’s the rub right there. It feels awful when a game you were looking forward to starts chugging along at 12fps, or when it routinely crashes to desktop. With prices going up all the time, spending your hard-earned cash on a game that flat-out doesn’t work as advertised can be a real kick in the teeth. Even more importantly, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of the consumer to check and double-check the performance state of a game before they buy it. Not everyone has the time, the know-how, or the inclination, and it’s not unreasonable to expect a game to work the way it should.
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That’s why Valve needs to do something. Steam is its storefront, and Valve ought to be curating itself. We’ve seen so many big games, from Cyberpunk 2077 to the more recentOuter Worlds: Spacer’s Choice, which wasnotorious for stuttering and flickeringdespite asking players to pay extra for a next-gen upgrade. Gamers need better protection from this sort of thing, and I don’t think it would be that difficult for Valve to implement it.
I should make it clear that I am in no way suggesting that all games should run perfectly and be entirely bug-free. That’s a naive, utopian vision and probably wouldn’t be worth the effort. On the contrary, bugs are to be expected, and they can even be a part of the fun on occasion, but there’s a big difference between a solid game shipping with one or two bugs on board, and a game releasing in a state like the oneRedfallfound itself in. I won’t be able to put it better than my colleague Jason Moth, who called it “an unpolished turd marketed as a premium product.” When $70 is on the line, we need to be warned about games like Redfall.
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All we need is some kind of stamp or badge that appears prominently on the store page of any game deemed not to have met the basic standards for optimisation. That way, potential players would immediately know that they are taking a risk in buying the game. I suspect publishers would push back on this idea a fair bit, but I don’t really think they’d have a leg to stand on if they did — the PR hit they’d inevitably take would surely outweigh the cost of actually making or porting their games properly.
My one concern is that historically, Valve has been reluctant to step in and do its own dirty work, hence its schemes like Steam curators and the ill-fated Steam Greenlight. Hopefully, they’re more open to intervening than they used to be, because it’s time something was done about the influx of rushed, half-baked, and downright broken games on their platform, and gamers deserve a lot better than this.
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