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[JEMC]

caffeinade said:

JEMC said:

Well, they need to find a way to, if not removing all the sh!t that flood the store right now, at least prevent them to keep coming. Hiring more employees to check the submissions seems like the easiest way to do so.

As for the question of how ethical or not is the temporal hiring of more employees, well, every game developer those that when developing a game, firing them once the project is done, as well as every retail store in the world. It's a practice Valve knows about.

Valve does not strike me as the type of company that strives to bring employees into its main unit temporarily.
I could see them hiring a third party company to fill that kind of a role.

Valve has that per game, gate fee to play around with.
Currently set at 100 USD per game, if increased to 250 USD per title.
The problem could, just, disappear.
All without needing to hire and train employees that don't improve the overall production capacity of Valve.

In my mind Valve are currently in the observation phase of their plan.
Set the cost of entry to the minimum, observe and gather data.
They could then use the data gathered to inform further actions.

Sadly, rising the fee to $250 wouldn't solve it. Many of those garbage games exist for the sole reason of achivements and cards, which people use to earn more money from the market.

If they want to keep things under control, Valve should use a scale system. Something like publish a game, pay $100. From game 2 to 10, pay $500. After all, if you come back with more games it means that you've had success so you can pay that higher fee. From game 10 to 25 pay $1,000, and so on.

Of course, there needs to be some balance to that scale, and it can be something as simple as time. If you only publish one game or less per year, then the fee could be kept at $100, but if you publish more than 10 games per year (imho, a clear sign that something smells fishy), then rise that fee to something like x2 or more.

At the end of the day, what Valve should try to do is, if not reinforcing their system to try to keep the garbage out of the store, at least make it harder for those publishers to make money from their "games".