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)
Unless someone comes up with an effective signal-to-noise filter to get rid of all this shit in all aspects of the web, the internet will become entirely useless, save for forums and smaller/indie websites, basically any website that relies at least mostly on meaningful communication and human moderation (like here).
Honestly, that’s almost a win/win now I think about it.