So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.
With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling.
Yeah, this won’t last long. They will still have to remove shit like Active Shooter or face the wrath of Congress (and to a lesser extent, consumers themselves). How do you think Gabe Newell would do testifying in front of them?
How much time do you think will pass before someone puts up a game that glorifies Nazis or simulates harassing women on social media? I’d give it a few months.
The subject of your post is completely accurate, they’re giving up. Want to put up a game about lynching black people? Sure. Shooting kids in a middle-school? Why not? Go for it. Japanese incest subway grape sims? Absolutement!
This is absolutely stupid. Rather than abdicating their responsibility entirely, what they should do is allow the community to vote on games they believe should be removed and then have humans review those that sink to the bottom there.
I think they are right putting the criterium straight-up at legality. If US congress (or EU brussels) wants shit like ‘active shooter’ gone, they’ll have to find a way to make that illegal.
A hard ratings system would be great to have, so I (and my kids) won’t have to see all the pervy manga games and horrible nazi power fantasies and what have you.
Like the man once said: “I detest what you have to say, but I will die fighting for your right to do so”
It just doesn’t take a genius to see where this is going to go. Twitter tried the hands-off approach. So did reddit. But the world’s deplorables see it too and shout to themselves, “soup’s on boys, let’s do this” and that’ll be that.
They are protecting themselves from litigation by putting the bar at legality, but they aren’t standing by their values. Try to turn the tables, imagine you’re running Steam. Would you want to sell a FPS set in a middle-school?
No I wouldn’t. But then I wouldn’t run a marketplace that pretends to be the place for everybody. I’d run it like schurem’s boutique shop for awesome games. And it would have only three games in it.
Who wants to be the place for everybody? Why should Steam be overtly egalitarian? It isn’t a communication platform like Reddit, it’s a videogame store.
The ESRB (and other ratings boards) and game retailers have an unspoken agreement about this. Wal-Mart passes the responsibility to the ESRB to protect them from terrible shit by saying they won’t carry AO (Adults Only) games. The ESRB in turn acts as the gatekeeper.
Valve will need a similar gatekeeper if they want to survive long with this policy.
Anything that isn’t illegal is OK now, so hardcore penetration is a yes, but nothing with animals, underage humans, or bondage combined with sex. In the USA anyway.
I’m OK with all that, actually. I care about hatred and abuse, not porn.
Everything is OK now, according to Valve. It’s probably the worst decision Valve has ever made, and it is going to cost them dearly.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why they would do this. Is there a huge market of pervs who are underserved? Don’t they know what is going to happen when School Girl Necrophilia Simulator is released?
It isn’t definitively illegal, no. Some jurisdictions have ruled that cartoon or computer-generated representations of sex with children are illegal, but it isn’t established everywhere. It probably shouldn’t be, as the reason kiddie porn is illegal is because you can’t make it without committing a crime, and that doesn’t apply to CGI.
Cartoon or CGI representations of necrophilia are completely legal, in the US anyway.
