Ladies and gentlemen, we may be facing a problem. We've likely all heard of Valve and Steam, right? If you haven't been under a rock and know what I'm talking about so far, and if you look at the daily deals and weekly deals as such, you may have noticed all the latest releases this year. You'll be surprised to know, as was I, that there have been more releases on the Steam store this year so far, than the entire year of 2013. How do we know this? Gamasutra did a little research on the matter and concluded that we'll have an excess of 2k new games on Steam by the end of the year.
Is this due to greenlight? Partially, but it appears that more and more games are being released on Steam more than ever without the use of Greenlight. The theory is, that if one game gets greenlit on Steam by a developer or publisher, that very well may mean that future releases for them won't need to go through Greenlight. It does a good job already of filtering stuff out, but with the number getting greenlit compared to what's already been released this year, it doesn't truly make sense. Is there another deciding factor?
Steam Early Access may very well be to blame for this too, as with some people abusing it, or being forced to use it, it can seem like a way to bypass and give reason for the game to be released early to gain money. Still, there are more and more titles being released that are neither confirmed as being going through the greenlight process or early access. Therefore, we may very well be seeing the future of Steam releasing games, and letting the community police them, if there is an infraction occurred.
Posted 23-05-2014, 21:57
I'd say that makes it all the more amusing actually. An unintended motif highlighting how a small adjustment to the way you look at something can make a tiny problem exponential more drastic, or a slight mistake suddenly become a comforting boon.
Or maybe I'm just talking pretentious bollocks
Posted 23-05-2014, 20:40
Funny things happen, and it does its job here even with that mistake.
Posted 23-05-2014, 19:21
Well, I didn't really choose it for it's scientific accuracy. It was just the first, simple, image that came up when I Googled 'steam saturation' and I thought it was amusing in context.
RE: The news. The only complaint I have is the higher number of shitty games coming through. However, that's more than balanced out by the significantly higher amount of top quality, that would otherwise have gone unrecognised, independent start-ups that have capitalised on the much more relaxed submission guidelines
Posted 23-05-2014, 19:03
Something is wrong with that graph - it boils at 100 °C only at the pressure of ~ 1 bar (100kPa). At 0 bar pressure, even ice will evaporate (without becoming liquid) even if the temperature is below -50 °C. The graph would be correct if the first point of pressure was 1 bar, not 0. Interestingly, this blunder comes from a company which specialises on pressure valves for transmission lines and boilers.