I have to agree with you on the idea of Valve rigorously vetting the contents of the store. It’s something I see people talking about regularly, but if you put a little bit of thought into it, it’s fractally unworkable: each individual part of it is just a bad idea as the whole thing.

First and foremost, that’s not something that’s been done since there were more than 10 games a year coming out. The local video game store, the physical magazines, the current app stores, none of them vigorously ranked for quality let alone content. They do some but just the raw volume alone, both in terms of release quantity, and the length make it a monumental task.

Bard (take that as you will) told me that in 2023 14,532 games were released on Steam. When prompted about the average length of game, Bard gave a wide range of numbers, ranging from as low as 10 to as high as 35. Splitting the difference and taking 20, that’s just short of 300,000 hours. That’s 800 hours of gameplay a day.

A general rule of thumb for a single 24/7 8 hour shift requires you to have about 5 employees to cover the three shifts a day, the weekends, sick-days, holidays, etc. So you’d need a crack squadron of over 150 gamers working around the clock to have just kept up last year. If you’re assuming that you could give shit benefits, low pay, and have dingy working conditions, you’re still looking at 15 bucks a hour with multiplier of at least 2, if not 2.5, to cover withholding, insurance, the shitty benefits you do provide, etc. And generally, people are at best 70% productive. Tossing that all together, and assuming I didn’t fuck up something royally, I’m getting 20 million bucks to just pay people to screen video games.

That’s also ignoring that you’ll be swamped in massive repetitive strain injuries, this doesn’t include management, hr, etc. I think you’re looking easily at 30 mill, realistically. Then you get into how to implement the metrics, who does the scoring, what does community input look like? I believe the MPAA uses a panel of 8 to 13 raters to help their process and reduce variation, so taking 10 on average, that’s….300 million dollars in salary alone.

We haven’t talked about infrastructure,floor space,lighting, etc. What do you do about updates? re-rate the game? a company to create a great first release, then fuck it up with an update creating an absolute mess of a game. The time just to install video games. The computers. Shit. We’re at something 1500 gamers. Valve, the company that produces things, is 360 people. That’s quadrupling the size of the company.

And how many lawsuits are you going to deal with, what’s the appeal process look like, what’s the impact to profits? And sure, one could look at their those and argue they can afford it, but they’re going to end up rejecting some movies as part of processes so that’s going to go lower. We’re approaching a half a billion dollar investment of ongoing costs for what amounts to bullshit.

I think steams approach of allowing a return within the first two hours does a pretty good job of balancing the needs of protecting the consumer from shitty developers, to protecting the developers from people who will happily buy a game, pay it, then return it.

And it doesn’t make half a billion dollars a year evaporate.