Ah, yes. GameGuru Steam games. Here's a playlist on YouTube that may interest you, this guy covers several of "these types" of GameGuru games, though he does swear a lot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsnL2iXMR5s&list=PLYL0JJsOk9mtnZjLUObjhgT_UN_e2SYn3&index=2
Quote: "What freaky Alternative reality is this bloke from to think people are going to pay this amount for an inidi game.
and out of all of them this has got to be the worst."
A lot of "developers" on Steam don't rely on actual game sales, rather, they request tens of thousands of Steam keys for their "games", and then sell those keys for a few cents a pop on various key sharing websites. Rinse and repeat, and hope Valve doesn't catch on. If they do, simply create a new "developer" account and start all over again:
https://www.vg247.com/valves-new-policy-on-large-amounts-of-steam-keys-spells-doom-for-cheap-game-bundles
Others used to take advantage of Steam's trading card system, creating crappy asset flip games, selling them for a few cents on Steam, and then relying on trading card sales to make bank because each time a trading card sold from one Steam user to another, the developers of that game got a small kickback. As such, Steam adjusted it's trading card policy so your game has to have so many sales now before you can enable trading cards (believe it's something like that now):
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/05/valve-takes-aim-at-fake-games-that-exploit-steam-trading-cards/
https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/valve-will-tackle-steams-fake-game-problem-by-placing-limits-on-trading-cards/
Once that gravy train ended, "achievement hunter" games started popping up. Crappy asset flip games for under a buck that have over 10,000 Steam achievements in them that you just get for launching the game:
https://kotaku.com/achievement-spam-games-are-causing-controversy-on-steam-1796528445
Other "games" contained malware that turned users' computers into Bitcoin mining bots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xClkx9UzsmE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0G0_ggH-ws
Even actual criminal enterprises on Steam have used crappy asset flip games to launder money for their real-world criminal operations:
https://youtu.be/BFmBT_Avf48?t=323
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2wyY1s1PuA
So, you never know what's really going on when you see one of these types of games on Steam, behind the scenes. It takes a lot for Valve to really step in and actually do something on their platform.
Quote: "With roughly 3 exceptions, every GG game on steam is, unfortunately, rather awful."
That most likely will never change, because GameGuru (and Max, by extension) unfortunately, suffers from a real "
catch-22" situation;
The appeal of GameGuru is that you don't really need to know how to make games...to make a game. So most people using it drag, drop and then publish. Then, on the other hand, anyone who actually
could make a game with GameGuru who possesses the necessary skills to do so, so their game isn't simply an asset flip (programming, 3D modeling, animation, etc.), simply wouldn't have any reason to use GameGuru, and if they did, they would really be shooting themselves in the foot with the limitations and workarounds Gameguru forces you to employ.
