As ambershee demonstrated, all of those games except for The Ship had publishers… so your point kind of falls flat on its face.
Going for low hanging fruit doesn’t help your case. Those cases are obvious, sure in that they’re non-content. But again, tell me - here do you draw the line? As I said before - 100 people, 150 different lines. It’s not a question of whether or not there’ll be a game that’s unjustly rejected, it’s a question of whether it’ll happen on day one or two.
My point is that I’ll rather take the extreme publisher end of the spectrum rather than the extreme developer end of the spectrum because the former at least has an image of professionalism as opposed to being overgrown children on twitter that embarrass the industry and have nothing but contempt for the gamer community at large.
Your opinion as a gamer is extremely irrelevant here. I personally hate Steam with every ounce of my being, as a gamer, but I will still publish my game there because it’s the largest available market and I can’t deny that fact as a developer and business person.
But putting it directly on Steam IS wasting everyone’s time. It’s wasting the time of the gamers who have to shift through baby’s first portal-clones, it’s wasting Valve’s time to eventually curate all that drivel and at the end of the day it’s wasting the developer’s time by giving them the illusion that they’ll face anything other than complete obscurity and failure. By going through the steps I outlined above, with smaller hobbyists that don’t have financial backing going through smaller storefronts the problem would solve itself. And it doesn’t mean that “being able to part with X amount has relation to the quality of the game”, as you falsely assert in your post, it means that the game *earning *X amount of money means there is a market interest to it and chances are MUCH higher that the game actually has some quality to it and it deserves to be put on Steam, where it’s completely reasonable for people to expect a certain level of quality from the products.
The argument for “if you don’t or can’t do X or Y, you are not serious about game development” has been dissected in every matter possible. It might be just anecdotal evidence but I’ll reiterate my own situation - $5000 is just under my annual salary, and I live in a non-English speaking third world country (Bosnia). Even if Valve’s price is $5000 per game I would be happy about it because it is entirely possible for me, in Bosnia, to find angel investors and small indie publishers to release my game. As such, anyone claiming “It can’t be done, you can do it because you’re rich or in a rich country, it doesn’t work that way in the real world!” is talking complete, idiotic nonsense that serves no purpose but to derail the thread. It’s simply, factually false. If your product is good, finding $5000 is trivial. Most investors, regardless of where they are in the world, do business with 6+ digit figures, $5k is ridiculously low amount for them.
But even in the hypothetical scenario where it really is impossible to get that kind of “funding” - my above outline suggesting to go through smaller storefronts until you build up a large enough audience and financial backing to be able to get on Steam still stands. If your game made enough money on smaller storefronts to enable you to pay the $5k Steam fee (still making the hypothetical assumption that it’s 5k) it’s a perfect indicator that there is interest in your game and that the game is of certain quality. This in turn means that the people who use Steam can reasonably expect that games that made it onto Steam have a certain standard of quality and are much more likely to have heard of you already (through word of mouth from the smaller storefronts) and are much more likely to actually purchase your game, so we get out of the pit of an earlier quoted statistic that 34% (if I recall correctly) games on Steam have never been launched.