There’s actually a few independent shortcomings happening. The alias solution is less about the punctuation and more about boosting the percentage of the title (or alias) that the search query matches so that it appears as a result with higher relevance
I think I can confirm that. Coincidentally there is a handy other game on top of popular right now with a ' in the title that might not have an alias yet, since it is only 10 days old.
If I begin typing, the new search feature will display it. Title is "PLANKTON'S PLAN - SpongeBob game"
This is what happened as I typed:
p l a n
game appeared as suggestion with the n
k t o n s
game dissapeared from suggestion with the s
" " p l a n
game appeared again. I do not think it matches the first word again, since it will not appear when typing otherword plan.
Then I mistyped, but the game stayed in suggestion and when doing the actual search it appeared in the middle of the results. But seeing the search string, this is because it is firstword+plan+secondword and the game will appear because of "plan". It will appear for literal search of firstword+plan+secondword
For that matter, the op game will appear in suggestion and search for "classic" alone.
This special case of spelling error is hard to diagnose, since that very grammar implies that the title will always be two or more words and the game will match for the second word, so the user and developer will not notice that it did not match the first word.
Of course I do not know how regular search engines handle this, but since they will find "Baldur's Gate" with "baldurs gate" without the spelling suggeston message, I assume they just match it similar to how they match cApItAliSaTiOn.
From some other trys, it seems search puts relevance on the word if it matches part of the word. So planktons as a single word will also find plankton's. Or arbys will match arby's and arbiter.
Anywas, tl;dr, if you want to avoid abuse of giving developers the ability to put forth aliases, just do some automatic matching of search terms or generate those type of aliases automatically, if it can only be done with aliases. Maybe only do that for games that would qualify for the new search feature. To my understanding it is not aliases. bg3 is an alias, and yes, Steam will show Baldur's Gate 3 for bg3, I guess they created an alias for that game.