8. Release Schedules
Valve CorporationOne particular failing of Steam right now is the order in which developers are allowed to release their games in, or rather the sheer lack of any structure for such a thing. It seems that most games are allowed placement whenever they are pushed forwards by a publisher or grouped together by Valve. While this might have made sense with a better sales page layout, it causes more than a few problems given Steam's layout and certain decisions by publishers. Just for starters this pushes down other new releases outside the initial view; as games are effectively listed one after another in a column, should a bigger publisher opt to release a vast number of titles onto Steam at once, they can very easily muscle out most of their competition, thereby ensuring that their titles will garner the most attention and secure more buyers. Just one offending example from recent months was by Activision, who opted to release the Amazing Spider-Man 2 onto Steam along with all of its DLC outfits at once. As it stands, this suggests that Valve has no desire to give each title a reasonable chance to draw attention to itself. This would be bad enough if these were only new games, but many publishers have taken to uploading ancient titles en-mass, especially if they have recently acquired older IPs. As a result, this is not only severely marginalising the potential revenue of indie developers but makes life harder for users to browse through genuinely new releases. With no apparent structure to these releases or an option to filter out older titles, Steam is drowning in decades-old games, shovelware, hastily assembled cash-grabs, and the sorts of titles which give the industry a bad name. For every overlooked gem like Skyborn, Meltdown or Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages, there are hundreds of cheap titles which would have been laughed off even the iOS App Store.