It’s REALLY bad on Steam, but on many online platforms (sadly even itch.io) there is so much damn shovelware. Not even “slop” something below “slop”, sludge is the only word I can think of (no disrespect to Sludge Life 1 & 2, great games go play them). It clogs up online storefronts and really ruins searching games by tags.
It’s really annoying that my personal favorite genre, “immersive sim” has been utterly flooded with these shovelware games. Unless I know exactly the name of a game, I cannot find anything worthwhile. Good games, small games, gems of yesteryear, all that sort of stuff is just hidden by this layer of sludge. I like to browse storefronts (digital and physical) and just check stuff out, get a feel for what’s out there, but you can’t do that when there is “XYZ simulator: prologue” every other item.
It fuckin’ sucks. I really do think many real good games get lost in the sludge pit and have to hope that some internet video essayist/review or something discovers it by chance. I’m not saying everything is an undiscovered legend but I am saying, I can’t even find games on most of these storefronts because the whole thing is flooded with effectively spam games.
(I then feel bad that these scumbags can get a game on steam and i can’t even hack together a playable game jam thing, but that’s a different post)
This may show my age, but whatever. Before 4chan was completely overrun by fascists because of the utter failure of “containment theory” that was /pol/, I used to post on /tg/ (traditional games, tabletop and the like) and that board started to get overrun with “simulator” posts. It became hard to find actual discussion of tabletop games because there was what was commonly called “elf slave what do”
hog slop clogging up the first few pages.
Hog pandering is a ruinous industry and it’s making art in general worse. The treat printers are directing the natural resources of the planet into accelerating the hog pandering.