As the first cinematic Dump Months of the year wraps up. It's time to talk about quality control in the entertainment industry. To answer any questions that may arise; _No this is not a violation of free speech. _No this will not shut out legitimate film makers and game developers from making a name for themselves. |
This is to keep greedy, talentless hacks from spamming out junk into theaters and store shelves just to make quick and easy revenue on unsuspecting customers. Such practices can be misleading with the trailers looking a lot different from the final product, or just simply catering to the lowest common denominator. I'm talking about the Seltzer-Burgs, the Uwe Bolls, the Micheal Bays, and the Happy Madisons out there. Those that have no intention on improving the quality of their films and just abuse the licenses of pop culture icons just to sell tickets. I will dive further into this issue in the film industry in the upcoming episode of Theatrical Dumpster. So far in this round I've dealt with Monster Trucks, Resident Evil Final Chapter, Rings, Fist Fight, and Fifty Shades Darker.
The same can definitely go for the gaming industry. One platform that has become notorious for substandard barely functional releases is Steam. Thanks to it's Greenlight submission program that has been in effect for 5 years, amateur developers have spammed junk games with little to no effort put into them. This also made it difficult for superb indie titles to make sales. According to many curators, nearly 40% of all of Steams games were released in 2016 alone. That's almost half of it's entire library!
The same can definitely go for the gaming industry. One platform that has become notorious for substandard barely functional releases is Steam. Thanks to it's Greenlight submission program that has been in effect for 5 years, amateur developers have spammed junk games with little to no effort put into them. This also made it difficult for superb indie titles to make sales. According to many curators, nearly 40% of all of Steams games were released in 2016 alone. That's almost half of it's entire library!
This chart sees how wide the flood gates have opened since Greenlight has been in effect. You can see how more and more users just dumped incomplete and non-functional projects onto the store. This got so out of hand that Valve has finally decided to pull the plug on it's Greenlight program and replace it with a new system called "Steam Direct". Direct get's rid of the popularity contest voting system in favor of a application with a progressive fee attached to it. However it's unclear whether it will keep all of the joke submissions at bay or not. |
You can see the trailers from some of the obvious joke submissions. These include but are not limited to asset-flipping, plagiarism, scams, re-skins, and meme baiting. It may surprise you that some of these games ACTUALLY made it onto Steam.
Anyone who's been tuning into this issue knows that it's Valves response to the amount of garbage piling up more year by year by shady developers. Including the notorious Digital Homicide who tried suing 100 anonymous Steam users for saying negative things about there games until Valve had to kick them out. More information can be seen here.