Curation and discovery are tough problems for game storefronts. The easier it is for legit games to get onto a store and be seen by customers, the easier it is for asset flips, shovelware, and outright scams to do the same thing.

In this writeup, Chris Zukowski discusses several of the current trade-offs being made by the Steam store to combat the flood of fake or low quality games that came with Steam Direct replacing Steam Greenlight. It’s clear that the same barriers which make those games less viable on Steam also make small-scale, low-budget, but legit games less viable as well. It’s less clear whether there’s a better solution.

While we often speak of games' unique hooks, we rarely speak of the context around them. Chris Zukowski argues that a game’s “anchors” - points of familiarity which inspire confidence in prospective players - are just as important, and in fact that while a good hook may get someone to look at a game, the anchors are what will get people to buy it. It’s thus important to identify and provide the right anchors for your game - here, Zukowski provides an example of how he determined the vital anchors for the Metroidvania genre by using public data available on Steam.