As much as both myself and especially Jimmy here at Cultured Vultures are going to try and hold on to physical media until we’re buried with our hordes of tat, the fact remains that in 2024, digital storefronts are one of the most convenient and easiest ways of engaging with this gaming hobby of ours. You can buy games from lots of places, but more often than not, the first place you’re checking is either Steam or the storefront connected to your console of choice (Xbox Store, PlayStation Store or the Nintendo eShop).
Still, despite digital storefronts being an almost necessity at this point, not all of them are created equal. It still feels like the Epic Games Store is playing catch-up to the big four at this point, but Steam manages to sit head and shoulders above all the others for one simple reason, and it’s a feature that should be added to every storefront going forward: the ignore button.
Precisely as it’s named, the ignore button allows you to essentially block a game from ever appearing in your recommended feeds, your Discovery Queue (another brilliant feature, by the way), and your searches on the store. If you’ve got a game that you’re sick of seeing the sight of, or a series that you’ve historically never been a fan of, the ignore button is the perfect way of ensuring your storefront is catered to your needs.
For me personally, I’d love an ignore feature on the Xbox purely so I can stop being bombarded with advertisements and store placements for The Finals, that new multiplayer shooter that decided to sack off real voice actors for AI instead. No amount of promotion on any kind of digital storefront is going to convince me to play it, as I’d rather poop in my hands and clap instead than support a bunch of AI grifters.
My issues with certain games aside, an ignore button on digital storefronts feels like it should be a basic accessibility feature for gamers with phobias and the like. While I’m personally not that scared to look at the thumbnail for a game like Choo-Choo Charles or Killer Klowns From Outer Space, someone else might be terrified to see it. Having an ignore button, or a filter for certain phobias like arachnophobia or coulrophobia, would make browsing storefronts a more pleasant experience for certain people.
You could make the argument that an ignore button could detract from players finding games that might actually be a good fit for them, but at the end of the day, storefronts are being curated for the player at all times. Pretty much every storefront has some kind of “recommended for you” section, so if publishers like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and Epic actually care about creating solid recommendations for us, perhaps it’d be helpful to them to know what you’re not interested in.
Maybe I’m putting too much stock into something that Steam probably considers a throwaway feature, but if we’re being told to embrace this all-digital future that seemingly all publishers are working towards, at least give us the decency to block things we don’t want to see. It’s the least you could do for us.
READ MORE: Ranking Every Halo Game From Worst To Best
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
