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The old ways are best
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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I have to disagree. The amount of high quality games has never been higher, and there is something for every kind of player available. And i can remember a ton of absolutely awful games from the 90s and 00s.
AAA studios having enshittified doesn't mean that you have to go retro to find a great game.
There are also way, way more shit games you need to wade through to find the good ones. The vast majority of indie games are still shovelware garbage.
Just as it was in the 90s and 00s. Also, i cant even remember the last time Steam recommended anything close to Shovelware to me if wasn't on mt 15th run of the recommendation queue.
Next year curated sale spots are going to be replaced by recommendations based off your account history, in an effort to improve the visibility for niche games that people might be interested in. This will surface even more games that are currently struggling with low sales (reportedly the experimentation in that direction had very positive impact on less known hq games.)
It absolutely wasn't the same in the 90s, it was no where near was easy to develop and publish games back then. Now someone can cook up a shit indie game with prebuilt assets in a month. Back then you needed a physical publisher. There were trash games but there weren't thousands of them getting released every month.
Also my steam recs are full of shovelware games. But Steam's never had a good recommendation engine so that doesn't surprise me.
Just because it was harder to publish games it didn't mean that the average game was better. Survivorship bias is a thing. Noone even mentions the godawful crap that was thrown at us back then (outside of the honorable mentions like E.T.), while the absolute hits from back then are well anchored in the collective mind.
If your recommendations are trash, please feed the algorithm a bit, because that only happens if you never ignore things / publishers or someone played a bunch of trash in the past on that account, and when you never wishlist/follow games that interest you. You can curate what the queue shows you very well - the times i get a game that has even just mixed reviews are pretty rare.
Edit: that last part is because unlike other companies, Valve does not spy and analyze you from all angles. This also means you have to engage more with it to get a good result, because without accurate information it cant do shit. I prefer it that way - better they only use what i willingly give in a specific context than dealing with another abomination like Meta.
Yea really it's more a distinction between indie games and AAA games. The indie scene has never been better honestly.