And isn’t making the call about it being trolling in fact curating? They’ve given up that responsibility, so why would they be rigorous in determining something is a troll product? It’d be easy to dress a game up. Was Active Shooter a “troll” game? Postal?
And what about “Barely Legal Schoolgirl Necrophilia Simulator”? We promise all the CG girls are over 18, they just look really young.
They’re all 9,000 year old dragon spirits in the form of pre-teen schoolgirls.
I suspect this will fall under the pornography test. Active Shooter Sim, releasing right after another major school shooting? Hard to see that as anything but trolling.
As we mentioned earlier, laws vary around the world, so we’re going to need to handle this on a case-by-case basis. As a result, we will almost certainly continue to struggle with this one for a while. Our current thinking is that we’re going to push developers to further disclose any potentially problematic content in their games during the submission process, and cease doing business with any of them that refuse to do so honestly.
Feels like a lot of the bad actors will sort themselves out.
I wish this board had a /remindme command like reddit so we could revisit this thread in 3/6/9/12 months and see how this went for Valve.
In these shitcock days of exponential coward/troll/edgelord/nazi growth, it’s ever sadder to know that a walled garden may be exactly the solution we both need and deserve.
No editors at media outlets, no curation at Steam. Seems about right.
Add me to the people that don’t see this going anywhere but down to some really nasty ends.
Besides the moral aspects of this, as a business choice it’s not a great idea. This is very similar to what happens to pay on demand art sites that are catch alls, vs those that are curated. When your site gets flooded with trash, it very quickly becomes more trouble than it’s worth to sift through, especially when there are other choices.
Inevitably, Steam will make one mistake or another, and someone else will be in the right place, right time, to pick up the pieces. To me, this is a big stumble on their part.
They looked at how many hairs they were going to have to split grading all those anime-style dating games and decided that would actually cost them time and money they didn’t want to spend. Liberte and Egalite!
Even Origin could do that. But I hope GoG does. I held Valve in high esteem for so long, and this just flushes that right down the toilet. All the whiny losers crying that their school shooter game was pulled makes me sick.
Hehe yeah.
“Mr. Senator, our annual revenue is more than $1 billion in the store alone, most of that is profit, but we just didn’t feel like hiring three more people to curate the store.”
This is going to go great for them!
Spot on. Especially when the game hacks your personal info? Priceless.
Looks like a massive tidal wave of garbage coming on my upcoming tab, though I don’t know if it’s related to this or due to Steam’s bad, wrong opinion of what I might like. Maybe both!
I have to say, I already feel like that. Trying to wade through all of the shovelware crap on there is already a chore, and I very often just end up with my eyes glazed over and my interest lost in purchasing anything. For me, I wish they’d be way more aggressive with curation, not less.
right there with ya, man.
That’s how I see it.
It seems that most corporations seem to refuse to put in the money to make a viable market/community.
This is especially true of the Windows store, but it looks like it will be true at steam as well.
You guys realize this isn’t a change of policy in any way, right? They made a statement that pretty much says the same thing as when they started Steam Direct and is the policy they’ve been following all along.
well, okay. that just means that the policy I don’t like already existed.
No, according to their press release a game like active shooter won’t be pulled in the future because, “they’ll let the market decide”.