Valve gives up on curating Steam

Let’s not forget that there’s a very large community portion of Steam with message boards and stuff. It will not take long for alt-right and other terrible communities that have had trouble finding a home elsewhere to realize that they just have to make a shitty knock off game to open a forum there.

I mean this won’t kill Steam, since it’s an easy policy to reverse, but it’s for sure an unforced error.

That’s not a change in policy. Why do you think it was up there the whole time?

The official reason it was pulled is because the person making it was discovered to be a previously banned troll who was making fake games, not because the hypothetical content caused an outcry. You can argue that’s a CYA lie if you want, but officially they’d allow a serious developer to make that game.

If it’s not a change in policy why did they announce it?

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.

That is a change in policy as it wasn’t the policy before. Ridiculous no effort asset flips for one were being pulled (when they got around to it). This will no longer be the case. Games glorifying hate and Nazism weren’t allowed, or were pulled off the store if posted. This will no longer be the case.

So yea, this is a pretty big policy change.

I think it’s great. I would rather they spend time on providing filtering and other curating tools than try and figure out what should be allowed and what shouldn’t.

I am however not expecting porn games to show up on steam unless I actively hunt or switch it on. Will see how they handle it.

They did leave quite a bit of wiggle room with the ‘illegal or trolling’ statement, which seemed to go right over most of your heads.

Hopefully Valve will let us tick a box that removes all games with the ‘Child murder for the sake of it’ tag.

If they open the floodgates of “anyone can submit anything”, then that means it will take nothing for developers to ruin the tagging and filtering system. A game where you shoot kids in a school? Tag it as educational title. A simulator teaching hate? File it as a kids game. No algorithm/filtering will ever fix this (as Facebook has shown).

Illegal is cut and dry. It’s either legal or its not. Shooting kids is legal in games. Trolling is trolling and doesn’t cover hate.

@Gendal - this is a way to cut costs and maximize profits. More games, less official curation. If this was really about censorship, Steam could post specific guidelines. I think their EULA is longer than their acceptable game guidelines.

Let me just get out my magic future-telling crystal ball here…

Yep, that’s exactly what I expect here.

Shut up both of you and take my money. :)

Soon as a developer tried to game their tagging system to that degree Valve would kick them off. If developers manage to exploit the system too fast then Valve can throttle the developer sign up process. This is not Facebook.

This is also not an AI chat bot, this is a store where developers have to show up with a tax id and whatever else Valve requires. I am sure some things will slip out, I just think the professed fears and examples given so far are given me a headache from all the eye rolling it’s causing me.

Steam is the defacto marketplace for the entire PC gaming market outside of a couple of companies who’ve got enough leverage to drive sales to their own storefront for their own games and basically nothing else. I don’t want them deciding what I should or shouldn’t be buying, or worse yet, what sort of content games can contain (which they basically can do because Steam is a vast percentage of your average PC game’s sales so better to cut content than not sell on Steam. This is something Wal-mart does. It’s not okay.). They need much better self-curation tools before they step away entirely, of course, but I think it’s the right call.

As you note, uploading a game to Steam is not as simple and as say uploading a YouTube video. It actually requires a bunch of paperwork. I am fine with Valve erring on the side of a hands off approach to developers creativity.

I am also fine with someone else out there setting up a more curated style store, although I guess GOG is already this? I prefer the market leader to be more concerned about being as open as possible than say yet another walled garden.

And everyone should count themselves lucky, if I was King of Steam it would be the users freedom of expression I would be bringing the hammer down on, not developers.

I don’t understand why anyone could sue Valve for not selling their game. Whether the content is okay or not, there a not only a dozen other stores they can sell on there is nothing keeping someone from just setting up a website and selling their game themselves. There is no legal ban here… Wal-mart doesn’t sell every book either and they don’t get sued for that. Hell they used to not even sell CDs with profanity on it… no lawsuit.

If I am misunderstanding what you mean by this legality bar, my apologies.

This discussion has some actual good points that I can’t engage with without a lot more thought, which is another sign I should keep increasing my time reading you lot instead of the not-so-great-for-quite-a-while-now reddit.

But this is my worry as well. If you’re not on Steam, you don’t exist on the PC (and everywhere else is stricter) - every week on r/GoG (*) there’s someone asking if it’s a scam because there’s no Steam key! It’s not like everyone agrees on what the curation should be either, and then there’s hard topics gaming hasn’t really been able to cover as seriously as other mediums yet - oh, the backlashes and death threats that would happen…
What everyone can agree with is that filters and recommendation are pure crap. If they were in any way useful, the problem would be much smaller and we wouldn’t see this discussion come up every week - sadly, the internet isn’t the great equalizer, it’s the creator of unavoidable (lazy and greedy, for the most part) middlemen.

(*) I have no idea why I subscribed to it, either,TBH.

This exactly. If people want a more curated store, that’s a great market niche for competitors to occupy. When the biggest store does it, it just narrows the market entirely.

This is completely unsurprising if you’ve watched new releases over the past year or two. It’ll be up to curators like me and others to help folks find the good shit.

So what does Steam do when, “Kill the rest of the Parkland Schools kids” game comes out?

Think this won’t happen? Think again. David Hogg’s house was swatted with intent to harm. This is Donald Trump’s America where hate and irrationality are being normalized. Where kids are separated from their parents and locked away in cages for being nothing more than refugees.

It’s not kids without tax codes doing most of this.

You are, I was talking about suing Steam for putting up illegal content.

Regarding the policy, it is absolutely a change. Read the letter, they said they actually were curating before, but the volume was so great that it looked like they were doing bubkis.

Likely the same thing they did with Active Shooter Simulator? The “straight up trolling” clause gives them a lot of leeway.

The is the question that is currently plaguing humanity.