Like, the ultimate counterpoint here would be, say, the Dark Souls and Nier:Automata Steam Discussion pages which (certainly used to) contain links and instructions for user created mods that fixed a plethora of bugs and incorrectly working features that the pub/dev knew full well were issues and ignored.
I addressed this in another post, but I'll expound more here in case it's pushed far back.
I'm not saying that the Steam forums serve no utility and I think it's a great point that it is 100% better to have that right next to the game for those kinds of abandonment issues that have been experienced on PC.
My counterpoint was in the absence of community forums on the store, a company should be putting together their own public community outreach platform, solutions guide, and all of the things you all are referring to from user-generated content.
In fact, many have been creating avenues outside of Steam to communicate with their fans in areas they can more actively monitor as opposed to the forums they have no control over. My personal example was Epic's Paragon had a ton of user content outside of their Epic forums and their own YouTube platform and Reddit page they set up as a part of community management to make sure to find people where they are.
This is not to say it's preferable they control everything but if you want to speak to them, I don't think saying "it sucks that guy is recruiting Nazis in your forums but it's only .1% of forums" is fair to say it's something they have to deal with. That's a bad vendor experience for them and something they cannot do anything about, so you have to deal with that in a venue they control and from there, you can still form your own user threads or discord or other online areas to handle the kinds of things you're talking about.
Ultimately, the long term position of PC will be that since you can buy games from Epic, Steam, Gog, etc. having a Steam forum for Steam fans doesn't resolve the idea around community. Each store having their own forum isn't the best way to approach community if I were a community manager. That's an exponential number of forums to monitor in addition to the wider internet.
Personally, if I were Epic I would make it a requirement in the registration process for games to have a community forum center. Even if it's a Reddit or Discord style setup, I don't think it's a too high hurdle to climb to tell developers, we provide everything you need to work on issues and show customers how to resolve them, but they have to have a way to communicate with you about patches and you need to outline your approach to development outreach during this catered phase to set a standard.
On the other side of it, you're referring to User-Generated content. I think it's great people do all of that. Again, as this process of store proliferation happens, The idea is that Steam would NOT be the place to go to buy everything. Neither would Epic so you need to have a community nucleus for customers.
If you're an Epic user that bought Hades, going to Steam forums would not be your norm because those don't exist today.
You would go to wherever that community congregates online. By the time Hades hits Steam, that place will have the history people are looking for. So now you get those community things outside of Steam so going to the forums about the game wouldn't be that same second nature it is today.
Does this make sense or do I just sound like I'm talking out of my ass? Lol
