I wouldn’t lose much sleep over it. Curators could be great. Sure, if you sign on for a major gaming sites shovelware, you are going to get crap recommendations. On the other hand, if you find someone willing to sift through the indie shit bin so you don’t have to, that is pretty awesome. I subscribe to Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s curation. I don’t like everything RPS does, but I do like to see what they come up with. I still make my own choice, but I am pretty happy to see more than just the top 10 best selling games pass by my face. It will be neat when I find curators that match my taste even better so that they can do some sifting for me.
Whatever the case, if curation ends up providing no value, people will just merrily ignore it. Metacritic probably has more impact on Steam sales that curation ever will.
I think the much larger problem is that if workers unionize, the company will just tank. Video game development houses have to have one of the highest level of boom and bust in any industry. Unions work much better in stable companies that can delay a product or stop working for a few months. When GM builds a plant, that cost is sunk. To close it is incredibly painful. On the flip side, if the union gets too zealous in their demands, they have time to change course. GM isn’t going to go under if it suffers a few years of an over zealous union at a particular plant.
The video game industry is really different. First, while the publishers might have a little staying power, the development studies come and go quickly. You could never unionize a video game company. It would just merrily kill itself and start again under a new name. GM can’t say “fuck it, I’m out” because they have a multi-billion dollar plant in their name and some brand loyalty. Video game companies don’t. Further, the margin for negotiation is razor thin. Video game companies are already violently unstable, push one too hard and it will just die.
The only way to unionize a video game company would be to to try and form some sort of industry wide trade union. Good luck on that one. I could see a particularly abusive company provoking a union in ideal conditions, but the entire industry? That will never happen.
The real solution is to simply not work for those shit companies. No one works in video games because they have a gun to their head. You are not a factory hand or a replaceable service industry job. Any skill you are contributing to video games, especially the programming, is easily transferable to other industries with more sane practices. Just stop eating shit. Use those same skills in a new industry. Yes, the industry might be less fun, but that is why they are not treating you like you are an expendable resource.
Which is great, unless you’re employed by said rich person/company, and you have a mortgage, then your job/industry moves 2000 miles away and you either have to move with it to Podunk, or you don’t even get a choice and end up out on your ear.
The zero-sum game of swapping jobs between states does nothing but hurt workers.
Anyway, rich people who whine about leaving a country because taxes never do, anyway (source: everyone who said they’d leave the UK before Blair got in and didn’t), because for all their bluster they know they have it good (they’d just like it even better).
The thing is, curation is increasingly going to effect what everyone sees. There’s such a flood of new games being added to Steam that they no longer can show all the new games on the front page. Instead people see the better selling games. In the absence of a decent mechanism for discovery, what people will see are games “recommended” by various entities - such as the most popular Youtube players and curators. The ultimate goal for Steam is to dissolve the store-front altogether and just have curated lists, with Steam itself acting as a sort of game-selling protocol.
Every system has its flaws. The current method is Steam simply putting stuff on the front page when it either gets a pile of sales, or someone pays to put it on the front page. Bribery and most popular are hardly the best way to do it, and even then it isn’t all that bad. As for actual curation, like I said, I don’t worry. Presumably, if you follow a curator that gives nothing but shit advice based upon how much they are bribed, you are probably going to stop following them.
For me personally, the most interesting part of curation isn’t going to be following my favorite video game websites list, but finding nerds willing to really dig into the bottom of the shelf to find the good shit. My favorite music app right now is 8track which is basically just playlist. If you find a playlist you like, you can see who made it and start following them. I’m sure lots of morons are following Sony BMG playlist, and good for those idiots, but I don’t. I get some fantastically obscure stuff from obscure genres put together by some proper music nerds with no other motivation than that they want to share. The human touch (at least in music) beats the living piss out of every other form of discovery I have ever dealt with.
I have a feeling that, in the end, curation will only be one method finding Steam games. It isn’t going to be the end all and be all unless you really want it to, and if someone follows nothing but crap curators only takes their advice and so only find crap, well, they are an idiot and should stop doing that.
Right now it’s the worst of all worlds - even if you’re not following popular “curators” that have sold out their lists, the recommendations that Steam is making are going to be influenced by the sales driven by those entities. When the curators become their own distinct storefronts (which is essentially Valve’s plan for the future of Steam), that problem will go away. But right now they’re having an impact on what everyone sees on Steam’s front page.
