3 hours ago, trjh2k2 said:

I guess nobody else cares. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While it happens on rare occasion, it is not an actual problem people typically encounter.  

I've talked about it with a small number of people who have actually done it, and they fall into two camps: 

The first are the experimenters, the ones who know they are taking risks and are intentionally an early adopter.

The other are the innocents who searched for some text and picked the a product in what (to me) seems like random; they had no clue what they were doing, are not regular purchasers, and in their complete ignorance.  The person I know wanted a VR pool game, so they searched Steam for "VR Pool" and without doing any further research, picked one at random that appeared on the list. They were surprised and disappointed that the game wasn't what they expected, but given how they did zero research, they understood that it was their error.

Once burned, they quickly learned the meaning of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, which has been the case since humans started trading goods and services in pre-historic times.

Most people don't need the warning. Most people are socially savvy enough to understand what they need to do.  Some people will not learn no matter what warnings are in place, and for them sadly experience is the best teacher.  A tiny number of people won't even learn from repeated negative experiences, and no amount of warnings or guardians will prevent it from happening. Those are the people who find out about scams, are warned at every step of the way, the bank teller that tells them it is a scam and warns them not to do it, the Wells Fargo representative who tells them that sending their money to Nigeria is a scam and warns them not to do it, yet they still demand to send the money off. There are some people who, even when others guard them and block the transaction on their behalf, will continue to to show how creative they are at defeating those who are doing their best to protect them.

As society and individuals we do our best to protect from the obvious issues, but I don't think it necessary for those stores and distributors to do more than they're currently doing.  Just like in the physical world there are conditions that are fenced off with warnings yet idiots still hop the fences, evade the guards, and learn the hard way, in the marketplace there are people who ignore the cautions, don't read the notes, bypass the clear signs and other reviews warning them away, and spend their money on items of no value.  

So again, the stores put up reasonable cautions and warnings. Scammers exist. Caveat emptor.

Just now, frob said:

Once burned, they quickly learned the meaning of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware

But imagine that same scenario if they did a search and were presented with a list of a whole bunch of cool high quality stuff.  What would the customer have learned then?  If they discovered that there's value here, would they not come back to the store and try this again next time they're looking for entertainment?  Would that not be a great thing for the people producing stuff for that store?

Repeating myself...

Those marketplaces DO exist.  If you want the safety, stay on the lists of carefully curated games, the top-100 or top-1000 lists. Don't shop at open markets if you don't want the risk of bad goods.

The world needs both types of marketplaces and both types exist. Very few people are confused between them, and the current signage is -- for the masses -- more than adequate.

1 hour ago, trjh2k2 said:

ut imagine that same scenario if they did a search and were presented with a list of a whole bunch of cool high quality stuff.  What would the customer have learned then?

The problem with your idea is what makes one indie game more deserving than the rest to be on a store. Like @frob said there are existing stores that only sell AAA games.

The problem with gating indie games is how do you decide which gets to go in store and which don't. You can't play thousands of indie games every month just to vet the games. So these stores only sell indie games that are very popular, kind of how steam packs the best games first.

What could be used to decide what indie games should be allowed in the stores?

Even paying 10 people to sit and play games all day so they can check what goes on store or not, won't work. Games are subjective not everyone likes the same games.

1 hour ago, trjh2k2 said:

But imagine that same scenario if they did a search and were presented with a list of a whole bunch of cool high quality stuff. 

The implication of Frob's example is that there probably was a whole bunch of high quality stuff, but they picked a low quality one by accident, despite the odds. That's unfortunate, but refund policies are quite lenient these days. It doesn't seem like an endemic problem or one that is going to stop that person using that store ever again.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

The problem with your idea is what makes one indie game more deserving than the rest to be on a store.

Being a complete product would be a nice start, things like early access aside.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

how do you decide which gets to go in store and which don't

In theory, a shop like the App Store puts every app through a review process - I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that's a great place for some very obviously garbage products to get filtered out.  Like if the app is clearly a single view with some text on it that does nothing, or crashes immediately on launch, etc.  They were for a while rejecting games for being "fart apps" weren't they?  Someone somewhere has their eyes on stuff being submitted to the store, otherwise there wouldn't be an approval process in the first place.

I know that some filtering on that level already happens- IMO there's a lot of room to improve that process.

3 hours ago, trjh2k2 said:

Being a complete product

If the rule is "It must be a complete product" that is such a broad rule it's useless. Try defining what a complete game is without being subjective.

Technically a app that starts and only displays "Hello world" is complete. It starts it prints the text and is done. That is a beginning, a middle and a end. It's why it's THE beginner code.

Then to test if a game is "complete" you would have to play it from start to end. Taking you to the problem that you would need a full team to just play the amount of games released each year.

Then there is the problem that your reviewers won't like all games equally. This would be a real problem for Turn based games, Walking simulators and Visual novels that suffer from a lot of bias.

Also there is the risk that your reviewers go corrupt, refusing to release games unless a extra fee is paid.

Unless you have some kind of check list that is fair to all developers, manual reviews would just replace a small problem with larger ones.

The whole problem with this is the same as with laws: it can't be too broad, can't be subjective and should be fair. If it's not it will only do more harm than good.

There are already closed platforms where they have dedicated testers that play the whole game through and quality-assure it - Xbox One, Playstation 4, etc.

Other platforms take a different view. And if a product deliberately misleads buyers, or is unfit for its purpose, you are entitled to a refund, just like in any other store.