Valve and Steam are two parts of a single complicated machine. While players beckon Valve for Half Life 3, developers likely hound the company to increase visibility of their titles on the Steam marketboard. It's a place that's always changing, and it's apparently due another overhaul.
The recent announcement of Steam Direct - the successor to Steam Greenlight - isn't Valve's only attempt to breathe new life into their gigantic sales platform.
According to Kotaku and lining up with the recent trips Jim Sterling and John Bain took to Valve HQ, the company is looking into ways to combat 'fake games' and having them "sink beneath a sea of algorithms". To limit the chances of good titles falling victim to complicated code, Steam Explorers will be brought in to play through a queue of under-performing titles and flag those they think deserve a better shot at fame and fortune.
In another attempt to highlight some hidden gems among the growing sea of garbage available on the system, the Steam Curators section will see a similar overhaul by allowing for a greater range of content from critics. Things like video embeds and Top 10 lists will become a more centralised part of the experience with those curators being given more information about their efforts and more incentives to keep Steam users informed on good, niche titles.
In a similar fashion, Steam Trading Cards will be tweaked slightly to ensure those making bank through the system by abusing lazily developed games will find it more difficult to do so. It's all an elaborate attempt to cull Steam's reputation of inviting shovelware before it starts to grow out of hand.
