From a non-cynical stand point I agree, everyone should get there fair whack at it and there really shouldn’t be a barrier… It really should be down to nothing more than skill or talent, if your game is better to play / more fun then well done… You deserve it.
I just can’t see it happening in reality and I’ve not seen a convincing arguement to the contrary yet, I’d love to be proven wrong here and I can’t see how a targeting algorithm is really going to help in an ocean of potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions of games (give it time). It’s not all on Valve either, if the mobile market is anything to go by dev’s will start undercutting each other until free (or nearly free) becomes the minimum viable (expected) target supplimented by IAP / Pay to win / AD revenue. Not only does that do a disservice to developers but to gamers as well.
Games (especially PC games) cost money to make, especially for somewhat adventurous games and having legal protection to cover your behind is a good start… One of the good things to come out of this is generally the level of quality will probably rise with the amount of games / competition but there’s only so many top downs / endless runners people will play before they start expecting more. The baseline will increase and lets face it you’re not going to be creating the next Elder Scrolls level of game on a shoe string budget. Although we might get the odd cool whacky idea that’s fun, as rare as that is (if anyone can ever find it)…
Sure, I agree that a higher fiscal barrier to entry won’t remove all rubbish games and yes it can potentially block some awesome one’s but it’s better than en mass shovelware kicking everyone in the shins…
Again, lets see what happens in a year and again I hope I’m wrong, personally I’d like to see more startups become successful / more jobs / more positivity…