The best way to sort giveaways is to search and add to your Wishlist the games on the store which you'd actually enjoy (The endless scroll down feature on the Store does give a fair view of games recommended based on your browsing history or purchases). If I'm entering for giveaways, I just sort by Wishlist and Recommended and if I'm unable to find a GA worth entering for, then I simply don't enter. The puzzles on the discussion and the generic "which X game do you like based on Y" does sometimes yield interesting options based on opinions from fellow gamers on SG.
I'm here for the discussions, anyway
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Yeah, I mostly look at giveaways by Wishlist/Group/Recommended first, and if I have more free time I look at "All" and start checking out more recently bundled games... and this is how I try to discover new games I may be interested in.
But my wishlist isn't that big, so there are rarely more than a couple GAs there.
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Even mine wasn't earlier. It's not bad to have a bigger WL, and I personally pop into r/games or r/patientgamers and sometimes r/gaming to dig around for new games. Depending on how large your steam friend list is, you'd be surprised how many games you can discover based on what your friends are playing. I found out about a majority of great games based on the screenshots uploaded by some of my friends which shows up in Steam's activity bar.
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Wouldn't it be nicer if Recommended worked by average review score instead of "what you've already entered"? I can see the thinking behind the way it works now, but... maybe two different filters? Like "your favorites" and "top games"?
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It's interesting to think of ways to regigger Steamgifts to encourage people to give away worthwhile games. People have reacted badly to suggestions that we tinker with CV (since it's not supposed to be an incentive structure), but I think it's fair to point out that the current way CV works is a big contributor to the flood of bad games on SG.
(Granted we'd still see a lot due to bundle leftovers, but those are fine. It's still silly to incentivize people to buy ten copies of a terrible bundle - or terrible games that happen to have a sale that falls just above whatever point gets them in the bundle list - and give them away here rather than giving away better stuff.)
One possibility would be to somehow rate games based on some combination of how many active SG users have them wishlisted and how many giveaways there are already, and award more CV for games that are more "in demand." User score and metacritic score could also be taken into account somehow, with games that have terrible ratings in one or both (or games that have few / no user reviews at all) awarding less CV, and games with high scores awarding more.
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CV is an incentive structure - lots of users strategically decide if and what to give away to level up. Denying this or repeating that it's not the purpose of the thing doesn't change reality.
This said, I was actually only talking about the giveaway filters, those on the left in the home page. Wishlist only shows you... giveaways from your wishlist and Recommended - somehow counterintuitively - only shows you giveaways similar to what you've enterered in the past. I was suggesting to add a filter which shows you the "good games" - probably according to their rating on the Steam store. Another interesting filter would be "unbundled".
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I would hope that it is not looking at my "browsing history" because of all the games that I must give a quick look at to decide that it is garbage.
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I don't think money is a factor. Most garbage games sell almost nothing and if they have decent ownership it's due to keys being given away.
Valve isn't lazy, but they are a least-effort company. They will only 'fix' this issue with crap games when they think it is a major problem and they have a low-effort solution.
It's like how they 'fixed' the rampant phishing problem with 2FA and a bunch of other restrictions that made gaining access to others' accounts considerably less lucrative. Valve does much, much less, and we the users do a lot more within a system that requires more hoops to jump through.
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Well, if we follow Valve logic, they could remove the review system altogether. No more badly-rated games, no more large publishers not liking how their multi-million dollar game being downvoted by users after spending so much time to make journalist give them 80%+ scores.
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Valve does react to heavy criticism though. Review system is basically the answer to a bad game flood.
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Valve reacts to bad press, nothing more. Granted, they do things in those cases to appease the masses. Surprisingly enough, they managed to actually abandon the paid mod system as well, something that may have had come with great physical pain for them (whereas Bethesda almost surely will implement it after they have enough people rely on bethesda.net for mods).
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I don't think that really fits my characterization.
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But what happens when you have 959 items in your wishlist...
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More of places like DIG where you can get very cheap games and then sell the cards for net.
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I try not to fill my Steam library with junk games I'll never ever be interested in playing. The small profit isn't worth the small time investment to me.
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Well at least someone is the voice of reason on this subject.
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Yeah, I never got the whole card thing. You're just wasting hours idling a game so you can make around 20 cents per game. Yes, you can spend 10 hours idling 5 games for $1, but I don't think it's really worth the trouble. I just consider cards a bonus on top of a good game or one I enjoy and am actually playing.
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It's not really the idling but the time and effort it takes to put the cards up for sale and then manage things from there. It's significant when you are talking about a good number of cards. Not to mention that farmers drive the prices down and for many cards you only get half of the revenue because of the fees and because people are dumb and push the price below what makes sense from that standpoint. To piggyback on your point, if someone thinks it's worth it then they probably have no money, no income, no job, aren't really trying to get one, and are dependent on someone else for their day-to-day means.
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*only applies to the western hemisphere
Plenty of countries where it's actually worth to do.
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Only to someone who lacks ambition in life or the will to follow through on what it takes to make it better or to improve their means.
Spending your time farming and selling cards for scraps is no substitute for these things.
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eh? I'm talking about monetary value.
In Russia average wage is $300. Those 5 cents per card are 10x as valuable there than in the west. Imagine getting 50 cents per card, suddenly things will look very differently.
Also store prices are 75% lower, so these 5 cents additionally have 4 times the spending power there.
Very well worth considering these circumstances.
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I wonder.. if I post all my 8000+ cards on the market.. how much money will i make from it.
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A lot I guess.
I just sold about a hundred of mine and made about 10 USD
So multiply with 80 to get a rough estimate...
As a side note, it took me a good 45 minutes to put them all up, it's a lot of click work these days.
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Bottom line $400 I'd guess, depending on games possibly some 100 more
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In Russia average wage is $300.
And by that, I assume you mean USD 550.
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Just took the first number found on google ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It certainly is far lower than EU/US being the point ^^
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Lower than EU average. I live in an EU country though with only slightly better wages (but still EU1 Steam prices) and there are EU countries with actual lower salaries.
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What would you say, is farming cards worth the time,effort then?
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Not in a Western country, no. At least not as anything more than a nice side-income that one could do without if needed.
It can be a viable thing to do in some SEA countries though, if they can turn it into real money through CS keys. In Viet Nam, 1 USD/day can be considered an almost decent salary. This is the reason that for example Russians or South Americans never went into the MMO farming business, but SEA people did.
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True, forgot about the fees and having to spend the time to put them all up, which was made even more tedious and annoying by Steam requiring you to confirm each market transaction on your phone now.
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you have addons/scripts that wil put all your cards on the market ;) And if you're using Elulated Windows SteamApp it offers an option to one-click confirm all market listings ;)
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Not to mention that farmers drive the prices down
Bless their souls. Thanks to them, I could finally afford quite a few foil badges as well.
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It would certainly be nice if they overhauled the Greenlight system, but it's going to take a lot more Digital Homicides before Valve changes things. And now they have VR to push as well.
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I don't even both looking at new releases. There's shit upon shit upon DLC that I have to sift through for the possibility of finding something mediocre. It's just not worth the time anymore.
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You can search for only games in the New Releases by selecting Games over on the right, like in this link:
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&category1=998&os=win
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Somethimes I think that Enhanced Steam should optionally support a feature that filters all games that don't have al least an overall of %80 positive reviews (very positive). I'd probably use it.
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Yeah, I've also found that a game has to have at least "Very Positive" reviews to even maybe be worth your time. "Positive" or "Mostly Positive" is still usually trash.
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Looking at the rating is something that I go through before making a purchase on Steam.
However recently I have been slipping a bit on that front so your story is a good reminder for me.
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That's is how I do it since a few month, I only enter giveaways with at least 80% positive reviews and the number of reviews is at least near hundred.
Now I noticed the problem within my steamlibrary, the reviewer can only choice 'recommend' or 'not recommend '. At the end an average game got over 80% positive reviews just because it is not bad enough (like 3 out of 5 stars) to 'not recommend'.
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all i can really rely on anymore is top20 "special" relevance sorted sales.. and even then sometimes shit is a hot seller.
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you can use something like this http://www.lorenzostanco.com/lab/steam/ to filter and sort your library... maybe by genre(tags) and score/reviews
talking about new releases, I understand your position
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Its a bit different for me, when I started there were games I must have. Now I just collect for the +1, all the cheap (and to be frank - trashy) games are excellent for it. There are maybe 1-2 games I actually want to buy to play per year.
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A man needs a hobby.
(I have a friend who buys everything he can just so he has it in his account... doesn't play maybe 5% of what he has, and he doesn't have any game that costs more than $5)
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Well, what he said. I do set a limit to myself though - if it has been bundled, then no more than 20 cents can be spent on it.
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Have you played Stardew Valley? Indie and great game
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Well, on Steamgifts it is certainly a problem. But one of the actual intended ways to sift through the sea of games (other than looking it up yourself) is to follow a curator who shares your taste and takes over the tedious work of checking up every new game. That is the actual reason this whole curator concept has been introduced.
Other than that you can try to trust recommendations of your Steam friends. Maybe that will work out. For Steamgifts the most viable solution would be the wishlist feature (although you have to expand your wishlist on Steam before that).
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Jim touches on that in his video. The curators were one solution to the problem, but most people forgot about it. He doesn't update his anymore, like many others.
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Fair point. But a solution is there. It is just people not using it accordingly. I can't argue much about the actual problem since I for one am glad that there are this many games coming to Steam since I have several games on my account which otherwise would not have been available for me. And for me finding one in one thousand is good enough. Other than that even if we do not credit it or even notice it Valve tries to better the search function (friend feed, recommendations based on recently played games, user tags). All systems which would work better if the community would behave better.
Other than that I sometimes have the feeling that people await for Steam to show them magically only those games we are 100 % interested in and kicking the rest out for us to never be seen.
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I saw that video yesterday too, I think its 80% of the entire library is from 2013 as well, can't remember the exact fact but yes, some moderation of steam(especially greenlight) is needed.
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SteamGifts, filtered to show (probably) good games.
(With poor odds of winning.)
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Thanks for this. I didn't know you could filter this way.
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Steam, good home of 90% shit - don't even care anymore ...
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This somehow never bothered me. I get info about good or interesting games coming out from youtube channels i have subscribes to which deals with games coveredge so no need to dig throu all that shit steam is filled with lately.
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4,976 hidden for me and some are okay-ish games, but more than 80% of them shouldn't even be sold.
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Wow, I thought I was the only one noticing this. Over past few months, there was a shitload of new games flowing in to SG from all the bundles sites and most of those games are of, let's say, doubtful quality. Some are even pure scam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/513230/. At this point I pretty much buy bundles from HB exclusively, because they still contain interesting games. Occasionally BundleStars has something nice in the store, but beside that, I don't even bother...
My hidden games counter has stopped at 3300+ and it's just too bothersome to check all those new, crappy games and hide them as well, so I mostly just browse my wishlist and join the mass giveaways.
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Ugh, watch those review ratings. At a quick glance, this doesn't look terrible, based on the headlining review scores. Gotta read up to know for sure. :/
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I was actually browsing metacritic in search for some new, interesting releases that I haven't heard of and this game was on the 1st place 'by userscore'. The rating on Steam is also pumped up by some bots or whatever. I've never seen such a flaring scam attempt. Good thing the refunds now exist...
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And the new and 'improved' rating system was supposed to fix this, right?
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Yep. Thanks to the new improved rating system, there are about 1000 positive reviews for that game (which, interestingly enough, don't show to me when I have the language filter set to anything but Russian) against the few dozen negative ones that make up the entire store page review section (if your language settings filter out Russian).
And even better: if the game gets bundled and 1000 more negative reviews come in, they still won't budge the ~90% score down.
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At this point I pretty much buy bundles from HB exclusively, because they still contain interesting games. Occasionally BundleStars has something nice in the store, but beside that, I don't even bother...
That pretty much goes for me as well. Predominately those two and maybe the odd bundle from another party on occasion...
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people buy whatever they see in the store > devs make money > valve takes their cut > people idle cards > devs and valve make even more money > everyone is happy.
i don't like it, but it's a business and i'm just a customer. can't do anything but ignore trash and never pay for it.
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Yep, it's not going to change because more trash bundles sold = more cards = more Steam cuts, everyone else making money off of us buying trash bundles. Stop it guys!
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they don't want it to stop, they need to +1 their libraries with all the trash available on steam 😁
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*clutters Steam library full of crap*
*plays 3DS and PS3*
Why do I do this? D:
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better/more appealing games less distracting clutter and solely dedicated on 1 purpose play games - not trade crap, socialize or browse the web in between while "drowning" in a pond of potentially playable games and being tempted to add anything there is and is being offered for a penny and a dime ... just to feed that nagging piggy
checked recently a ~ 100 ps vita games (as there was a exploit for it) - doubt i'll play any but hell
i'd sure be tempted > Odinsphere, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, Ys: Memories of Celceta ...
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I don't really care about bad games, they're not getting any attention anyway. Maybe Valve should increase the amount of upvotes a game should get on Greenlight to get on Steam.
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Or they could actually factor in downvotes on greenlight, since currently only upvotes matter. You can have 95% downvote rates, but if you hit the upvote barrier, you can publish it.
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And that's why I no longer rely on the Steam storefront to keep me up to date about interesting new releases.(http://indiegames.com/ is my main source for news on interesting indie projects)
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Every time I see an ugly sweater for sale at the store, I think "who on Earth would wear that crap?"
But, there's someone out there for every ugly sweater I don't like.
Steam has a lot of ugly sweaters. I just ignore them. :X
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Ah yes, Digital Homicide is just the Karl Lagerfeld of Steam. They can't help it that we are uncultured ruffians. :(
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Every time I see an ugly sweater for sale at the store, I think "who on Earth would wear that crap?"
Colombian narcos keeps the ugly sweater trade in business. ;-)
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You've just made me stop and think about my own habits... Why am I doing this?
Thanks, I think?
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I was watching Jim Sterling's latest video yesterday and it made me realize why I've been spending less and less time on SteamGifts.
Video
This chart made by Steam Spy shows that 4200 games were added to Steam in 2016. That's 40% of Steam's entire library. And 3000 games last year. Compare this to 2012-2013, when I reached my peak of SG activity. 380 games 565 games. The second half of 2014 started the decline for me. I think part of it was the deluge of shitty games and countless bundles that started happening.
When SGv2 launched, I had over 1000 games "Hidden", and I though that was a lot. Now I have almost 6000. That's 5000 shitty games I've had to look at review scores for, check out their Steam page, maybe watch a trailer. Just to find out it's another shitty shovelware title on Steam. It's not worth my time anymore. My biggest frustration now is trying to find out which games actually ARE worth it in this sea of garbage. I love great indie games, all of my favorite games from the last few years have been indies. But I'm not sure how to find out about them anymore.
I dunno, I'm not sure what the point of this post is. Maybe just to share my shock about the rate at which Steam's storefront is growing, and not in a good way.
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