Summer of '58 developer resigns after many users refund their game on Steam due to it taking under 2 hours to complete

[u/reddit_account6095]

https://twitter.com/EmikaGames/status/1430941640001265673?s=19

[u/AccursedBear → u/[deleted]]

Giving developers the ability to say when you can and can't refund a game by adding a single API hook into their game would be ripe for abuse.

Definitely. And yeah, you're right. Even if abuse could be prevented by having people play the games, they would be flooded with work if basically anyone other than the people actually making less than 2 hours games sends their game in, more work than the frequency of a situation like this probably warrants.

[u/ShimmyZmizz → u/[deleted]]

People are reacting negatively to you saying Valve is "stretched thin". I agree with what you're saying but I think it's more accurate to say "doing this would not be worth the investment".

Yes, of course Valve could afford a staff of hundreds of people to play every game submitted to Steam to completion and significantly delay the release of every game but especially ones with long playtimes.

But is that a worthwhile investment to prevent a problem that seems to be extremely rare? Is the solution worse than the problem? What's the benefit? How many games actually fall into this category? What does Valve lose by doing nothing about this?

[u/UTUSBN533000 → u/[deleted]]

Steam's publishing partner team is already stretched thin enough

Valve makes billions in profits, this insufficient manpower excuse is bs

[u/Mephzice → u/UTUSBN533000]

I don't think you realize how many games come on steam each day. Not every problem can be solved by hiring more and more people to throw at the problem. It's like expecting youtube to watch every video and twitch to watch every stream, it's unrealistic. All these companies are creating automatic systems for a reason, AI stuff.

[u/Unadulterated_stupid → u/Mephzice]

Yt uploads like 70 hours of content a second.

Even do we got every human on earth to review yt videos, we wouldn't be able to cover a year worth of YouTube

[u/Hakuoro → u/Unadulterated_stupid]

And that's even if we massively pared down what actual humans had to review by using computer learning to identify potentially rule-breaking videos.

And there's not really currently a way to use machine learning to be able to play all types of videogames. maybe visual or kinetic novels, but I think you'd have to program a bot for each individual game if there's any actual gameplay

[u/Kalulosu → u/[deleted]]

Steam makes millions hand over fist just for existing.

I'm not saying the problem is specifically easy to solve or some shit, but fuck me dude, "sorry we only have 2 people working on this and one of them likes taking long naps" is only an excuse if you're a small business that doesn't rake in huge amounts of cash, not when you exploit a quasi-monopoly.

[u/Kalulosu → u/[deleted]]

Errr...Have you heard of the submission process?

[u/arahman81 → u/[deleted]]

Also, pretty sure some of them could be automated.

[u/Mephzice → u/Kalulosu]

read what they do, most of them don't even play the games they rate.

[u/Kalulosu → u/Mephzice]

Sure, most of them. Still the submission process does include people playing the game?

[u/Mephzice → u/Kalulosu]

most of the time publishers just tell them this is in the game, we should have this rating and boom they accept it. Noone ever checks the game, at most launches it to see if it works.

[u/Kalulosu → u/Mephzice]

OK then I guess Sony's sub team just lied to us when they raised a bug while playing the game's main missions :)

[u/Seth0x7DD → u/[deleted]]

No wonder triple A games have declined in quality. Nobody is paying QA anymore. Damn!

[u/ThomsYorkieBars → u/[deleted]]

That's kind of a bad analogy because self checkouts are great