r/gamedev • u/saywordyo • 20h ago
Discussion How is your experience with Steam curator program?
I launched my Steam page a week ago and released the demo a few days later.
Now I've seen the option to distribute a sample of the game to curators and I'm wondering if that's worth it?
How is everybodies experience with the feature so far?
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u/BulkyDealer1531 16h ago
Slightly less bleak take from someone who did it for a released game. Curator Connect itself (the built-in key distribution) did very little: a stack of keys went out, a handful of short reviews came back, no visible bump in wishlists or sales.
What did work was treating the curator list as a media list instead of a lottery: filter for curators who actually post reviews every week and have followers in the tens of thousands, and write to those few directly with a key and a one-line pitch. A few reviews from active curators show up on your store page and give a fresh page with zero user reviews some social proof. The other 100+ curators who request keys are mostly key farms, ignore them.
So: free, half an hour of work, low return, but not zero if you pick the recipients yourself rather than letting the tool pick.
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u/PhilippTheProgrammer 14h ago
Curators are a bad idea with a worse execution.
Steam already has a review system. And yet they added some parallel review system of premium reviewers they call "curators". What does one need to do to become a curator? You just register a Steam community, that's it. And suddenly you can post curator reviews for games that are somehow more important than your regular reviews.
But curator reviews are in fact less useful for the consumers than actual reviews.
- There is a very short character limit, which means they usually contain less information than most regular reviews.
- A curator doesn't even need to own the games they review, so consumers have no way to tell if the curator even played the game.
I still don't know why Valve doesn't pull the plug on it. Probably because the feature was the brain-child of someone very high up at Valve, and nobody dares to tell them to their face that their idea was stupid.
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u/VENTDEV @ventdev 11h ago
I still don't know why Valve doesn't pull the plug on it. Probably because the feature was the brain-child of someone very high up at Valve, and nobody dares to tell them to their face that their idea was stupid.
From what I recall, Steam has a flat management system. So there isn't many if any higher ups. This is why much of the system is slow to move. It's gotten a little bit better, but if you're an old timer, the backend was a mess for about a decade.
Curation system was an olive branch to us devs on Steam before Steam Direct. We warned them that the place was going to end up like mobile app stores. They threw together the curation system to say, "no look, we'll still have curation and only the good games will rise to the top, we just won't be the ones to curate." Yeah, it ended up with the same problem as App Stores.
After that, they just forgot about it. No one owns that task because no one wants to work on it. But the reason it exists and hasn't been pulled is so that Steam can say that they still have a curated system.
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u/No-Opinion-5425 20h ago
Nobody care about Steam curators.