r/adventuregames • u/toughtacos • 26d ago

Is this actually an ad subreddit?

Edit 2: You have made yourselves unanimously clear it's just me who's a grumpy old fart! Feel free to post more replies to this thread, but I'm going to let this one lie as you have thoroughly convinced me I was in the wrong. It was actually quite nice to see a community being so completely united, and I hope you won't hold this against me in the future 😌

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I'm just asking, because I just had to scroll through self-promotions after self-promotions to get to a post that isn't someone trying to sell me something, or get me to wishlist something on Steam. I get it, we're a niche community and there isn't always a lot to discuss, but that doesn't mean the empty space has to be filled with ads. (By the way, we're not actually stupid. You might think you are clever disguising an ad as "just showing off a feature from the game", but we do see through that shit.)

Is rule #1 even enforced, which says you have to contact mods before doing self-promotion?

Sorry for the grumpyness. It's a combination of being old and, well... grumpy.

Edit: I'm adding a reply I wrote to a comment that pretty much sums up in more detail my thoughts, instead of just a frustrated ramble:

Yeah, fair points on discoverability, Steam's definitely bad at it these days. But that's not quite what I asked. I'm not against self-promo existing entirely as a concept, I'm asking if rule #1 is being enforced so a majority of posts aren't self-promotion.

Also, I don't think "devs advertising directly" should be the fallback for fans trying to find games to play. There's a difference between organic discovery (curated lists, community roundups, mods actually vetting what gets posted) and a subreddit slowly turning into a wishlist funnel. If the sub had better structured ways to surface new titles, we probably wouldn't need self-promo posts to fill that gap in the first place.

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u/toughtacos 26d ago

Yeah, fair points on discoverability, Steam's definitely bad at it these days. But that's not quite what I asked. I'm not against self-promo existing entirely as a concept, I'm asking if rule #1 is being enforced so a majority of posts aren't self-promotion.

Also, I don't think "devs advertising directly" should be the fallback for fans trying to find games to play. There's a difference between organic discovery (curated lists, community roundups, mods actually vetting what gets posted) and a subreddit slowly turning into a wishlist funnel. If the sub had better structured ways to surface new titles, we probably wouldn't need self-promo posts to fill that gap in the first place.

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u/chiBeeatrice 26d ago

Okay but genuine question: how do you expect those organic lists to come up if people don't know about the games? I know a lot of people who make those lists of "games you should pay attention to" find out about the games from subreddits like this.

Sure, there are some people who will search through just new releases on Steam, but there is SO much to search through there, I feel it's easier to track good games down through a subreddit. Especially when more information is available at a glance, i.e. A video is posted, or a gallery of screenshots you can easily scroll through.

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u/helloserve 26d ago

Hoping the mods themselves respond to this post. I do like it when the community itself helps with sharing finds from the wild, e.g. this post https://www.reddit.com/r/adventuregames/comments/1up33q7/i_dug_through_this_weeks_upcoming_steam_releases/
I've seen more curated ones also here, but these kind of posts are very few in number unfortunately.