Curate or Filter?

Contrast that with non-curated channels, such as the PC indie market or Apple's App Store. Here, innovation both in terms of content and in terms of business model is rapid and utterly undaunted by the cumbersome movement of a long-established content market. iOS games are a great example; in the past couple of years, not only has their quality improved immensely, but their business models have shifted radically from up-front payment to freemium systems. That kind of shift would take many years to take root on a content channel curated by a major platform holder - on the (almost) anything goes App Store, it can happen practically overnight.

However, listening to the passionate arguments for non-curated channels which are made by many developers - most often those who have been successful on iOS or PC and want to make the leap to consoles - I find myself agreeing with the basis of those arguments, but not with the conclusion that curation is an approach whose day is done.

The App Store and its ilk, after all, still suffer immense growing pains from the sheer volume of content available. Apple tries to get the best of both worlds by insisting on a quality baseline - the games must, at least, work on people's devices, and cannot infringe certain basic rules - making the App Store a much more friendly experience for the average user than the rather wild frontier that is Google's Android market. However, even so, the App Store teems with games that lack ratings, reviews or any clear guidance for buyers.

Simply driving people to buy a game that's already a top-seller just isn't a nuanced enough approach

Top-rated and top-selling games are clearly indicated - a user filtration system which advocates of non-curated channels believe to be far superior to curation. But this approach, too, is flawed. If something is popular, it may well be quite good - but that doesn't mean it's to your tastes. If the digital transition has taught us anything, it's that the range and variety of human tastes in media is extraordinary. In music, in particular, digital distribution has started to erode the appeal of the mega-artist in favour of spreading people's purchases over a wider range of artists. That's likely to happen in games, too, and simply driving people to buy a game that's already a top-seller just isn't a nuanced enough approach.

The conflict between curation and filtration, in short, is a false dichotomy. For some consumers, a filtered channel, crammed with content which they can browse through using various filters and search tools, is ideal. For others, however, a curated channel is far preferable - somewhere that'll give clear recommendations and act as a trusted source for content. Not all consumers want the same approach, and preferences in terms of discovery methods vary just as much as preferences in terms of content and genre.

Indeed, far from declining, I believe that curation is likely to evolve into quite a powerful force in terms of games discovery and the path to purchase. Not just curation as it's practised by Sony, Microsoft, and so on - but an emergent form of curation which draws on the strengths of the App Store model, by establishing trusted channels for recommendation.

We can already see this happening, to a degree - speaking personally, I know that I've bought a large number of iOS games based on the mobile game review round-ups which are published on Eurogamer, for example. What is that, if not one step away from being, in essence, a curated channel? Wouldn't it make sense for that kind of content to actually be integral to the App Store - essentially a third-party, trusted-source curation "layer" which sits on top of the content repository? Consumers would end up subscribing to the source they trust most and buying games based on those recommendations and reviews - in the process, creating exactly the direct link between game reviews and game purchases which many publishers have long decried as a myth.

The argument, in other words, is not over which is a better approach - curation or filtration. Rather, it's over how each approach can learn from the other to create something better, and help to make sense of one of the biggest challenges presented by digital distribution - the sheer volume of content and how to let consumers cut through it to get to the games they actually want.