Why Valve Should Give Jobs To Journalists

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Valve needs to hire unemployed journalists for $100k a year to help combat negative Steam reviews? Please tell me this guy is joking or just trolling everyone. Either way, I guess it worked. I posted a link to it and we are all discussing it.

I think if you want to keep reviews you have to accept that the only real way to fix 1) 2) and 3) is to have at least some paid reviews. If I owned steam (I’ll get this on a t-shirt one day), I think I’d take a chunk of the sales profits (steamspy suggest roughly $200 million this sale, so say 30% is $60 million, lets spend 2% of that, $1,200,000) and hire a bunch of reviewers, full-time. I’m sure the world of games journalism has a bunch of unemployed writers that would love the job. Lets pay them $60k each, with admin & health insurance and all that, we get 12x$100k reviewers. So that’s 12 full time games reviewers working for valve. Not a lot, but not insignificant. They don’t have to review all the shovelware, just the games selling thousands of copies. Suddenly we have a bunch of ‘pro’ reviews mixed in with the wider range of existing ones. Now a big part of the problem is solved, but I’d go further and do some weighting based on another metric.
 
No. If a game developer wants Paid reviews for their game, then they hire the reviewer.

If you want to fix steam reviews, put requirements in place: More than 3 levels/missions completed. Review history, if the user has nothing but negative reviews and is trolling, remove his privilege. Those two requirements Are a pretty good start.
 
I think this is an interesting idea. I do agree that developers should pay for their own reviews. However, I also think that Steam could provide unbiased reviews and also ensure that all game have better reviews than all those "would take an arrow to the knee again - 11/10". Don't get me wrong, those are funny but not necessarily useful.
 
Not sure about unemployed journalists, but they should consider hiring a communications manager to let the world know what they are doing.
 
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GG showed how and why these guys are unemployed:

They're terrible at their jobs and they bring political bias into everything

These are the last people who should be paid by valve to review games
 
If you go with the assumption that steam wants or needs user reviews to be better than they are, you don't need journalists. You just need to employ contract labor to go through reviews and flag them as useful and useless, which is pretty self evident form their content. Then provide a score based on the useful reviews. I'm sure a ton of functional individuals would love to get paid $30k a year no benefits to do this from home.
 
I think user reviews are doing a fine job at rating games. I have yet to be led astray by the user reviews. This guy is just cherry-picking intentionally funny, trollish, or angry reviews to make his point. Most users are smart enough to filter through these themselves. Developers are just mad that they can't sell us their shovelware anymore by paying off the journalist clique.
 
What's the first thing you do when you read an Amazon review? You look to see if this person actually owns what they are reviewing. So, in addition to what others are saying (scojer), put requirements in place. At least that will give you a way of filtering the comedy/crap reviews from the real ones.
 
Valve as a company is fascinatingly eccentric. Clearly, they have some highly talent and extremely intelligent people working for them--yet their choices are inscrutable--I know money is not their main focus, but a means to an end, but still, money is money. It is almost as if certain directions or decisions, no matter how common sense and relatively easy to implement, bore them.
 
Lol advocating for astroturfing on steam games. That's like the worst thing valve could do for their ecosystem built on trust.
 
Most gaming journalism is a joke. Too often the reviews are bought and paid for by advertisers. Gaming journalists are also increasingly using their reviews to push a far left political agenda of feminism, political correctness, and social justice. I read game reviews to make purchasing decisions about games, not to be force fed some political agenda.

It's getting to the point where I tend to go by word of mouth, user reviews, and a few YouTube critics like Angry Joe who I've come to trust to give honest reviews.
 
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Steve said:
Valve needs to hire unemployed journalists for $100k a year to help combat negative Steam reviews? Please tell me this guy is joking or just trolling everyone. Either way, I guess it worked. I posted a link to it and we are all discussing it.
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why though?

article is just plain stupid, just how most modern game "journalists" are.
 
I don't expect Steam to make judgement on whether games are good or bad, but I do think it'd be a nice for new releases to be vetted for a few certain points. For instance, making sure it actually runs in a vaguely playable state, that it doesn't contain flagrant copyright violations, and that it's not one of the many of Unity asset flips that seem to keep getting shoveled onto Greenlight. Not everything's going to be GOTY but there could stand to be a reduction in the amount of sketch going on imho. No telling what gems get missed in the process of sifting through all the guff and blergs.
 
People who take Steam reviews seriously are morons. Steam reviews are 45% memes and 45% teenage gamer rage.

They're either:

"I did this, then this happened, then I something." 11/10 le epic meme XD"

or

"I don't know how to verify my game files' integrity, omg lazy devs"

The other 10% are paid shills.
 
Because there aren't enough paid shills in 'tech' and gaming?

Somebody need to tell these people to STFU and get a real job.
 
DF-1 said:
why though?

article is just plain stupid, just how most modern game "journalists" are.
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That is confusing to me as well...

In any case, this would be a conflict of interest, as Valve, although the haven't made much in terms of games lately, is a game making company. Having reviewers/"journalist" would kind of defeat the whole unbiased part of it. But then again, I guess that's what they probably want, and that's probably wh they are out of a job in the first place.
 
Valve is not in the business of selling good games and not bad games, they are in the business of trying to sell as many games as possible. They would never want to be in the situation of having someone they pay persuading a customer out of a sale.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Most gaming journalism is a joke. Too often the reviews are bought and paid for by advertisers. Gaming journalists are also increasingly using their reviews to push a far left political agenda of feminism, political correctness, and social justice. I read game reviews to make purchasing decisions about games, not to be force fed some political agenda.

It's getting to the point where I tend to go by word of mouth, user reviews, and a few YouTube critics like Angry Joe who I've come to trust to give honest reviews.
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Was with you until the Angry Joe comment. He isn't immune to the shilling and grandstanding. I will never watch his Youtube videos, but I do like his streams. You can't hide the bad aspects of a game or your true emotions when you're playing a game in real time. One of my favorites was when it looked like he was literally dying when playing Quantum Break.
 
Does anyone take AngrJoe's review as a serious review? I mean, I more or less watch them for the entertainment myself.
 
Angry Joe is an outrage-clown who frequently doesn't bother putting enough time into a game to learn anything beyond the basic mechanics or identify any issues in multiplayer that might go an hour without being noticed. If that's entertaining for you, that's cool I guess, but to take him seriously? LOL, no.
 
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