We had a very long discussion regarding Steam in these forums not too long ago.
I do understand your frustration but at the same time I understand that it’s a free market to a degree here (but I will explain my point of view on this below), I do agree that many garbage games are clouding the good ones, even if you pay lots of money for marketing, these games will still make the store waters too murky for passerby’s. All good games still need strong marketing and if your game is good it will stand out regardless of the ■■■■ that is out there.
I may also not agree with the term ‘Couch dev’ even though I think I know what you mean by it, however I do agree that there are so many kids out there with such ease of access to current technology these days and countless free assets enough for them to show how they slapped a dik and two ballz together and made it a ‘scrolling shooter’ in under an hour, called it a game created a new Steam account using Dad’s provided daily HotDog money (yes it’s almost that cheap) and uploaded it online readily accessible to millions in the world.
Growing up in the 80’s and nineties we were lighting candles and celebrating every time we were lucky enough to find a book that could provide 10% of information that would solve a given problem. Time’s have changed and gotten spoiled, I don’t like it but it’s the way it is now and you must learn to adapt.
Now adding my two cents on the free market idea here it ahs become a little more complicated in the digital world regarding this matter and has made that line blurrier. In the real world when you want to put your goods in actual stores, almost entirely for all goods you have to really go out there put your time, take risks and produce and then negotiate, pay a moderate sum to the store, and make sure your product is at the very least competitive enough somehow even if its mediocre.
On Steam and such digital sales this free market has been pushed to abusive levels well beyond your everyday capitalistic terminologies. Producers no longer bother with product quality neither does the store for that matter because it’s cheap to click a button and upload, producers also pay nothing to put up their products on the storefronts and could care less if they sold the product or not since they didn’t spend any penny making it in the first place and just move on to the next thing all the while piling the site up with endless scrolling of endless titles God knows what.
The problem is (hypothetically speaking) if a store was crazy enough to do this type of business in the real world with physical goods involved and you don’t like it, then as a producer of these goods you will have countless other stores with countless other sales options and negotiations to choose from each competing against each other with each having lots of their own customers, but in the indie game’s world you just have Steam and then maybe GOG, after that it’s just Sony and Microsoft. That’s it! that is all. and that situation is somewhat of a perplexing thorn in the free market conundrum in our case.