Should Greenlight actually have been called red light? 13 stinkers that will make you wish you'd lost your wallet instead
Steam is great for PC gamers. A seemingly endless list of everything from AAA blockbusters to tiny indie releases, some of which use the platform to break through to the big time.
But standards dropped when Valve introduced Greenlight in 2012 and offloaded much of the curation of fringe titles to users.
The push to support indie developers with Greenlight was laudable, but it also seems to have allowed some very questionable practices to flourish, which Valve seems only now, belatedly, to be trying to stamp out. For example:
- Gaming of the voting system by less scrupulous developers
- Early Access games that over-promise or mysteriously never get finished
- 'Asset flipping' in which barely developed base materials are thrown together and flogged as if it were a proper game
- Games suddenly changing overnight with the latest patch.
As a result, keeping this article down to just 13, which you lucky people can buy on Steam, proved exceptionally hard. So please, Gabe, don't leave it until spring before you start a thorough ‘Steam clean'.
13. Infestation: Survivor Stories Classic/WarZ, £6.99/$9.99
Owners (according to Steam Spy): 1,041,642
This is a game you may well have heard of for all the wrong reasons. Originally called WarZ, perhaps to piggyback on the relative popularity and success of DayZ, the game promised what can only be described as completely non-existent features. When people who had paid good money for it complained on the WarZ Steam forum, they were (they claim) banned.
Remarkably, Valve, the laid back company that runs Steam, intervened and the game was taken down. But not for long. The developer simply tweaked a few things, removed some of its more egregious claims, changed its name and re-pimped it on Steam.
This, as you might have guessed, is yet another zombie survival horror. Except you're not just trying to survive attacks by hordes of zombies, but from other players online.
However, the mechanics are poor, and the zombies not especially challenging (except in sheer volume). Furthermore, the game in its heyday was infested with cheats, while legitimate players who complained said they were banned.
That said, setting the game to Offenbach's Can Can does offer a whole new entertaining perspective ...
Steam reviews:
"Got banned after five hours of gameplay. Submitted post on their forums for a reason why. That was years ago and I still don't know why. 10/10 best customer service."
User name: Zone
"The less than two hours of my gameplay was riddled with hackers using no clip, aim bot, super jump, super strength, unlimited health, no detection etc. I died countless times in 30 minutes from hackers shooting from more than three miles away, through walls. The mechanics in the game are poor, as well as the mêlée combat."
User name: Kitsune_Akki
