My major surprise is Steam has a General discussion forum! who knew?
Also, replies say that while this method may rid store of some card generating garbage, It hurts small developers that really need that extra cash and coverage - Though I rather cards don't even exist, as they do, I prefer they help those first.

I think the intention is assuming the purchases cut vs submit fee will be less then 1, Steam still gains money.
And considering Steam claims these garbage makers have thousands of bots (which even isn't that of a problem with the current cloud offering and prices), all they have to do is create enough games to idle (and feed their bots steam accounts with them), so that the whole process will remain profitable.
Heck, as a DevOps I can probably hack together a viable pipeline that generates such bot fully automated, then auto scale as much as required until the barrier is crossed to enable cards. Once it was done once, rinse and repeat with 10 more titles to x10 gains, then x100, that will be viable for a discount at the cloud provider...
This arm race could scale indefinitely - It won't cause the garbage makers disappear, It will just make them smarter and bigger, at the expense of all the small decent developers. The only solution will be ditching cards altogether.

Isn't this in regard to game ratings and SJW whining cuz boobies and violence? If so, good on them.

While your post was quite interesting (and I do pity that other thread was deleted), I just couldn't get past that last sentence.
What exactly did you say? o.O
Some of these don't look half bad. The mermaid has nice drawings, Alice looks somewhat cool, Queen of sees has good reviews.

Yes, exactly this. I only spot them during a sale. or via a giveaway in IndieGala...
But then again, I never try to buy on Steam in the first place, I just (used to) assume that if it got on steam, it's probably better then staff that only sold on itch.io (or previously Desura). This is no longer the case, and as some said is clearly on purpose.
Steam needs to decide it they have a stance, for example in terms of dealing with card induced Shovel-ware, or have no stance at all and just handle distribution - Ditching they whole store Idea - as they can't expect actual intentional browsing when they let everything in. But If they really choose this path, stop pretending you give a crap about "taste" and "recommendations".

What i mean is, someone could argue that it's not porn, because the girls aren't really girls, but personified tanks. As such, the "underage ones" might not really be underage, too. Kind of like if someone made dirty images of Babbette from skyrim. There's a big question of legality and morality when facing such concepts, and I wouldn't even dare begin trying to discuss it in any place a government might watch. I don't even really have a stance on it, because of the obvious conflict. I have ideas that come from principles, but they're mutually exclusive. That said, i'm not a participant, either. It's the kind of question that society really needs to ask itself when we know such issues are slowly emerging.

EDIT: For clarity, Babbette is one of the oldest characters in Skyrim, but she's physically a child. This happens, because she's a vampire.

Good.

That said, I hope that Valve pours a lot of money in R&D for personalized filters. That would be necessary for maintaining freedom of choice, while addressing the issues of pro-curators.

I still don't quite see how that's supposed to work. Number of bots isn't the issue. Keys don't work anymore for purposes of unlocking the trading cards, nor getting the publishing fee back.

They need to get a $1000 in sales through the Steam store to get the $100 fee back. If they want to use bots that's 300 for Valve's cut, and then 100 back, so $200 spent just to get their fee back, and then depending on how the confidence metric for trading cards work, they may still not have unlocked those

40+ years later we still have folks who think spamming will make you millions. New ones pop up every day.

At least now that's $100 *per* game, I have to believe those people would realize that eventually, when they notice their games aren't making money that they need to stop xD

I didn't even consider they can actually get that money back, it's cool Valve compensate developers that prove their game is viable.
My observation was on the purpose of reaching the point of getting cards enabled, then continue spamming bots with sole purpose to cash in on the cards themselves, both in terms of developer cut of sale and the card sell price,
Until these gains > 100$ submission fee, which will still generate profit, and that's the only barrier really.

I suggest everyone to read a few essays on freedom of speech, thought and expression.
I'm pretty sure some of you -especially the most "fervent advocates"- don't actually know a dime about what those really mean.
That said, I'll show myself out.

Oh, and another thing, are these garbage makers really that poor that 100$ fee per game is so significant? I suppose even the worst bundle deal should net at least 5$ per game, and spamming 20 bundles across is already > 100$.
But even without it, silly people buying any garbage at under 0.2$ sale price for cards alone will also reimburse some.
In the end, if 100$ is too large a sum for the small garbage maker, they can easily conglomerate to a larger entity.

Like I said though, by that time, unless your game is actually selling to people, you'd already need to recoup at least $200, and its' not even clear if at that point Steam Trading cards already unlock, Steam uses some kind of confidence metric for that. So if it seems like you're gaming the system, there's a good chance that'll get caught.

I'm actually okay with this. I've never made any bones about being platform agnostic in the past, and I feel like this is a good move, both for freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

Yes, there's going to be bad games, shitty asset flips, some games released simply to make money from undesirable demographics, depending on what your view of "undesirable" is. Your personal definition is much like standard personal opinions, everyone's got one, they all stink. Mine included.

That said, Steam has a fairly robust refund system in place, and if you're not a discerning customer and get got by a bad asset flip game, you can return it for full price, as long as you don't have x amount of hours in it. It's a fair system, and it's there to help protect consumers from predatory developers. (Digital Homicide, I'm looking at you.)

Weebs get to have their anime tiddie ninja or cute moe games, the ess jay dubs get to have their walking simulators, and the rest of us get back to buying what we like. If the market for something exists, the money trail will evidence that, and if something truly doesn't have the "right to exist," which gets copiously thrown around, much like the words "literal Nazis," then the market will also reflect that, in poor sales, high rate of returns, etc, which their analytics will most likely more than give them the information they need for what will actually continue to make them money. That's the bottom line.

Also, if you're worried about trudging through massive asset flip dumps to find quality games, use the tag or search system. It really does cut down on the crap.

It's 100 dollars per game, not sure if that applies to DLC. It might.

As for cards, the game needs to sell X amount of units and/or have X amount of user reviews, not really sure how it works. But new games can't have the cards instantly, unless you're a bigger studio.