The problem here is you think other stores actually let you buy and launch games reliably.

I’d rather just shuck external HDD than buy refurbs

Previously known as Lazy Game Reviews, covers retro PCs and PC gaming.

Not the biggest YouTuber but a pretty notable one

As in, the publisher has stopped them preserving it otherwise, so now the publisher must make it accessible somehow?

To fair to that rather silly commenter, Stopkillinggames puts the onus on the publisher while your examples are based on the individuals or other third parties providing the “fix”

Intel literally spent a decade trying to make there CPUs just a little bit faster, but not too much faster, every year. They succeeded in doing so, and we have this as a result.

The worst part is they aren’t eving running at 125w or whatever they claim, often into the 180w or 200w range to reach there own marketing benchmarks.

I there are some regulatory hurdles as well, like data collection and ratings board stuff. It would probably take some work to implement those.

What’s better about it?

Probably close-to-zero direct sales on any platform but Steam. It would at least get there name out there more, which it absolutely not nothing.

The hardware survey is so yeah?

Which is probably something steam could whip up given they do there hardware survey.

Well if it’s seaworthy, it will be on the sea instead of in it.

“Valorant-clone developer is bad at thier jobs”

I hope they end up with Riot’s community, if only for making me type out Valorant-clone

What don’t people understand?

I think the torment nexus is next, but no one would ever build that so we are fine

“We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong.”

I never claimed that it never happened? A single well known example and also the only one you provided, from half a decade ago.

Yeah, no one at Valve, the same people that won’t even make their games playable without a massive community uproar, is reviewing any of these. That being something which directly affects there reputation as a company and there bottom line through crates/keys, instead of there reputation as a storefront to publishers. The article even mentions Valve’s addressesing this was a reaction to devs salivating over EGS having opt-in reviews, more so than them actually caring about publishers

Developers have cited this sort of toxicity as a reason they’re excited about the Epic Games Store, which plans to address the issue with an opt-in review system.

Also in the same article, they describe the option I’ve been referring to. You are still able to see the marked reviews reflected in scores if you wish.

On top of that, Steam users will be able to opt out of this new system entirely by using an option that’ll keep review bombs in games’ review scores. And, again, people will apparently still be able to look at reviews that have been removed. Review bombers won’t have as much power to affect games’ standing with the Steam algorithm, but this could also just encourage review bombers to find other ways to evolve their tactics and get through what sounds like some still worryingly large loopholes. Time will tell.

If you want to review bombs or “review bombs”, you can still do so on Steam, and the score will reflect your preference for that, as opposed to EGS where you may not be able to see any reviews if a publisher doesn’t want you to.

New Organic LEDs are wild

The “Store content policy” option made it so Valve doesn’t have to manually do anything about “review bombs” or review bombs, which is a very Valve way of handling it.

Bringing up incidents from 3 or 5 years ago kinda solidifies that point, they put it up to the algorithm and don’t manually get involved.

They even say in that article, as an update, that they aren’t removing reviews. This function lets a user decide what they consider relevant, without removing reviews, and most importantly for Valve means they don’t have to manually do anything.

They still could, but again you found articles from years ago, they wanted a solution that requires less work for them and stopped the headlines, and that seems to have worked.

They added a feature that changed what review score you see based on a preference to see what may or may not be review bombs, I can’t remember exactly what it’s called, but I haven’t seen them react to so called review bombs since.