I'm in full agreement and it's been something I've been hoping they'll do for years. I'm a small time niche developer who does release things on Steam which hasn't gathered much attention, but some people are just shitty and don't have a place trying to run any sort of personal business and I fully believe don't have a place on Steam. I think a quality of a person has more to do with it than not, even good people can make bad games (and visa versa) so I can understand to some degree Valve's hesitance, but there's some very clear cut cases. Valve wants to make the system more running from the users, thus the Steam Explorers system being implemented and improvements to curators coming soon, but I think the opposite should also be true; when a developer is demonstrative of being a shitty person who abuses their users, critics, and the like then they should be held responsible for it.
I understand that's a slippery slope as there are some people online who do witch hunts and may try to attribute these traits simply to people they don't like and try to get vocal support behind it, I can already see some groups trying to call foul at determined "SJW" developers for instance and that's going to be annoying as hell to deal with. However I do fully believe cutting out obvious examples can help the storefront a lot.
The truth is these 'fake games' are a smaller number of games than many think, most developers are earnest in trying and aren't shitty people, but the few who are can poison the well and make people associate the unknown developer as being attributed traits of those of the shittiest among them. It's not good for gamers, it's not good for critics and personalities, and it's not good for other earnest developers. I think when you get to the point of threatening your customers, tossing derogatory insults, trying to silence people, and other shitty behaviors of the sort is when you should without a shadow of a doubt be breaking Valve's rules and losing your ability to sell games on Steam. I think this simple thing would solve a lot of issues.
I know this is a favorite topic for Jim and I'm not saying he's wrong. But do we know how well these people are at getting sales and actually keeping them given the refund policy? Like outside the clutter in the storefronts how big a deal are these shady developers.
They all seem so obvious I would think (and hope) it's not that successful
It's not as big of an issue as some things, since honestly most games and game developers are in fact not shitty scumbags, most games on Steam are actually earnest attempts by decent people and you'll find a lot of the same 'problem developers' at the heart of the 'fake games' movement. But even these fake games maybe take up less than 5% of Steam's total library and Valve has been removing them. But I think them responding to stuff like this faster would be a net gain for everyone involved, while I do think Jim in some ways blows the problem out of proportion I do think it is a problem that should be addressed. But I can't think of any specific trash game that's been some hit though, but I also think the issue is less "bad games", though I think that's what some think it's about but bad games isn't the issue and the refund policy helps against that. I think the real issue is those people who are what I'll call "Toxic Makers" (as I don't really want to call them game makers) who just make trash or even okay games, but then spread toxicity around. The people who just are not people you'd want to do business with as Jim put it, and are unpleasant all around or abusive at worst, and should ban them from selling games onto Steam for breaking that sort of trust, bullying others, and being toxic to various people.