An Ubisoft insider alleges that the company is not happy with Valve and Steam for revealing concurrent player counts for its various games including Star Wars Outlaws.Fandom Pulse is a reader-supported publication.
I mean, is “do better if you want a better public image” really that “tech bro” an answer to this problem? It feels like you’re putting “don’t fuck over the customer” into the “bad” category here…
I think you’re misrepresenting the point. Valve’s hypothetical point, which would be “do DISPROPORTIONATELY better IN MY PLATFORM if you want a better public image”, but also my point. Valve has a looong history of moving key parts of their platform to either automated or crowdsourced solutions, with very mixed results. The greenlight process, the review process, the curator system, the controller mapping library… The techbro approach isn’t about “don’t fuck over the customer”, it’s about “use gig economy processes to run the service and its features with a skeleton crew”.
That’s a thing. You can like their approach to customer support practices and still acknowledge that is a trend.
Except their actual point would very likely be “if you want better numbers, do better” at least in response to “we don’t like our numbers, hide them”.
And all of those things aren’t exactly “gig economy”… the first and most obvious is reviews. Something that is just… normal for users to do. Unless you’re saying you want valve to be the one to decide if a game is good or not, and completely remove user feedback?
The greenlight process was less “do our job for us” and more “vote on what you like.” They explicitly held the final decision, but gave users a way to have a voice in the process. This is about as close to “gig economy” as they got.
Controller profiles are literally an easy way for users to share their profiles for games with other users. The alternative is a single profile valve thinks is best being the default, and you having to fine tune things to what you want, even if someone else says “hey man this is the perfect profile for this game.”
You seem to be taking issue with users having a say and the ability to share with each other on a platform, and you’re complaining about core things users like about Steam.
Just because users “do work” on [thing] doesn’t inherently make [thing] “gig work”. And even if it did, if users are directly asking for those features, why is that a problem?
I mean, is “do better if you want a better public image” really that “tech bro” an answer to this problem? It feels like you’re putting “don’t fuck over the customer” into the “bad” category here…
I think you’re misrepresenting the point. Valve’s hypothetical point, which would be “do DISPROPORTIONATELY better IN MY PLATFORM if you want a better public image”, but also my point. Valve has a looong history of moving key parts of their platform to either automated or crowdsourced solutions, with very mixed results. The greenlight process, the review process, the curator system, the controller mapping library… The techbro approach isn’t about “don’t fuck over the customer”, it’s about “use gig economy processes to run the service and its features with a skeleton crew”.
That’s a thing. You can like their approach to customer support practices and still acknowledge that is a trend.
Except their actual point would very likely be “if you want better numbers, do better” at least in response to “we don’t like our numbers, hide them”.
And all of those things aren’t exactly “gig economy”… the first and most obvious is reviews. Something that is just… normal for users to do. Unless you’re saying you want valve to be the one to decide if a game is good or not, and completely remove user feedback?
The greenlight process was less “do our job for us” and more “vote on what you like.” They explicitly held the final decision, but gave users a way to have a voice in the process. This is about as close to “gig economy” as they got.
Controller profiles are literally an easy way for users to share their profiles for games with other users. The alternative is a single profile valve thinks is best being the default, and you having to fine tune things to what you want, even if someone else says “hey man this is the perfect profile for this game.”
You seem to be taking issue with users having a say and the ability to share with each other on a platform, and you’re complaining about core things users like about Steam.
Just because users “do work” on [thing] doesn’t inherently make [thing] “gig work”. And even if it did, if users are directly asking for those features, why is that a problem?