1k is more than reasonable.

Sorta sucks if your in a middle income country, but there's always itch.

Big businesses also push out slop for profit. Look at Atari and the _E.T._ game. Warner Brothers forced them to push it out for Christmas instead of waiting for a quality product.

1983 was the year the gaming industry crashed because all these production companies cared about profit and pushed out slop. [0] Slop is not new, it has always been there.

This is why Nintendo brought gaming back. They rejected slop on their platforms and only wanted quality products to be bound to their name. They also limited the number of games a 3rd party could publish per year on their platform.

There are AI slop houses that pump out content to make a profit out of trash.

There are indie developers that use LLM for assistance and know wealth is the by product of a good game.

Wealth is a by product of a good product / solution / service. That concept is lost on majority of MBA and those that seeking to maximize their wealth. Private equity continues do this by reject this concept and moving to push out slop with brands that original built quality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

You’re saying we should support the billionaire overlords because some indies trying to use new tools will produce results that people parrot on the internet as slop?

I’ll take the slop.

Steam is in a weird position as a marketplace. It has to serve mainstream developers, indie but relatively large developers or at least polished games (the kind of thing that would've past steam greenlight fairly quickly back when that was around) and tiny, single indivial indies who may or may not put out something nobody else will (occasionally slop clones) (the kind of thing that've taken a while to pass greenlight). I'm not sure if and how they can create a system that works for everyone. A $1k ceiling is maybe the worst idea. It hurts poor indies but not ai slop studios as much. It's possible that the return of some greenlight-esque curattioj could work, but it'd be devastating if your game got rejected as a false positive for ai slop or anything.