While many of Valve's failings ultimately come down to how they present titles, they seem to equally stumble when it comes to making sure a game actually has the content being advertised advertising. Time and time again, players have been conned into buying broken releases which somehow managed to be released despite not only displaying false information about their content but sometimes completely fabricating gameplay. The most well known example of this was Infestation: Survivor Stories, formerly The War Z, which outright lied to customers in order to draw in an audience it could leach money from. Its page featured false screenshots of NPCs which did not exist, weapons which were not present, and many shots of vastly better graphics than the game could support. Worse still, the developers actually straight-up lied about its features atop of this; along with grossly exaggerating server populations and area sizes, the game also advertised an experience system which was never implemented into the game - you didn't even need to start playing to realise something was drastically wrong. Not content with just lying to customers and latching onto the success of DayZ, Hammerpoint Interactive opted to also pinch content from more successful studios. Artwork from The Walking Dead and various online images were photoshopped slightly in an effort to pass it off as their title screen, and the game featured the entire terms of service for League of Legends in place of its own, completely unedited - so anyone who bothered to read it would keep seeing "League of Legends" in place of "War Z". Bare in mind this took only a scant few minutes following its release for the community to pick out these falsehoods, yet Valve allowed it onto their distribution platform without a second thought. Even after the forums erupted into a veritable firestorm of bile and hatred, Valve onto temporarily removed the game and allowed it to return with a few minor edits weeks later. This wouldn't be the only incident of this either, with following games such as Earth: Year 2066 and Air Control proceeding to do the same thing, and similarly be released onto Steam without any opposition. The fact multiple games can get away with this is astounding beyond belief and is a sign of just how lax Valve's standards are. If Steam is to continue to be taken seriously it needs to take measures to prevent this occurring again by making sure future developers cannot con their community into buying polished turds of releases with the barest shred of truth on their front pages.
A gamer who has played everything from Daikatana to Dwarf Fortress. An obsessive film fanatic valuing everything from The Third Man to Flash Gordon. An addict to tabletop titles, comics and the classics of science fiction, whatever media they are a part of.
