There is no two way on the fact that Steam is a great platform for PC gamers to come across many exciting titles and purchase them at a reasonable price with a minimum wait to play the game. It is a great platform for gamers, but do developers feel the same way?
Unfortunately, many of the developers have a different opinion as opposed to the gamers, on the topic. Although there’s still a wide split in opinion even among the developers, most of them aren’t happy. Yet, they do not have an equivalent platform to resort to and see Steam as their best shot.
Here are the top 10 changes game developers want from Steam:
Remove the ability for users to delete developers’ comments on their reviews.
Many gamers publish false information in their reviews, and when the developer politely corrects them, they delete the comment as they feel offended. Although big developers like EA or Ubisoft aren’t really affected by this, it costs small developers their plausible players.
Clarify what a developer needs to do in order to qualify for various featuring opportunities.
Steam does not reveal what the developers are required to in order to be featured. Due to this unenlightenment, developers miss out the opportunity to be featured on the front pages.
Bug reporting/technical support should be built into Steam/Steamworks. Filter issues that are Steam issues to Steam support team instead of to the developer.
Devs should be able to have one unified landing page for all their games.
This must a real pain in the ass. The developers do not have a unified page for all their games where they can interact with the community, instead, they need to visit each game’s page separately.
The Steam community feature needs better ways to deal with toxic users
There is no two way on the fact that there are many ‘toxic users’ on Steam that degrade the community. They go on to harass the small developers and Steam doesn’t really do anything about them.
Valve should increase the overall development of middle-class developers
Millions of middle-class developers often go unnoticed even after creating an impact and having significant sales, as a result, their motivation is drowned. It wouldn’t be so if Valve takes initiative.
Make review’s on the front page representative of the game’s review percent.
Steam selects the 10 most relevant reviews and puts those on the front page. This is mostly based on upvotes. Negative reviews generally get most upvotes, because users hardly campaign for upvotes on positive reviews.
The “Upcoming Games” list is becoming useless.
The upcoming list once used to main way to discover upcoming games, but with hundreds of games releasing every week, it is becoming clogged. Steam should gather some information about the game, prior to release and only display the truly deserving titles in the list.
Devs should have better tools and info for tracking and identifying players who abuse/hack multiplayer, bot/farm item drops, etc.
Devs should have the possibility to send messages to forum users.
If you have a few changes that you would suggest Valve to make with Steam, do let us know in the comments below.
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