Valve gives up on curating Steam

Illegal content for which country though? I assume anyone who sells across borders has to keep an eye on things or they run into legal issues. You can’t buy the same thing on the USA Amazon store as you can UK for example.

Active Shooter was not removed for trolling according to Valve. It was removed because the creator lied on his application and had been banned under a different name previously.

That said, we all know the reason it was removed was because the story hit mainstream news and made Valve look insane.

But of they’re going to stretch the meaning of trolling that far, then it’s not really “anything goes”. Because they’ve fallen into the same trap they claim they’re trying to avoid. Ambiguous definitions of what is acceptable.

Straight from their post:

Unfortunately, our struggling has resulted in a bunch of confusion among our customers, developer partners, and even our own employees. So we’ve spent some time thinking about where we want to be on this, and we’d like to talk about it now.

So the minute they use “trolling” as an excuse to pull a game that isn’t the explicit definition of what people think trolling is, heads explode and the whole situation remains.

With a flat corporate structure all the moderation hires they make probably wheel their desks to the fun VR lab team within 3 days of starting.

Sure, I’ll give you that. It’s a judgment call that they now have to make for no reason. But you went off into extreme P&R land that – just a hunch because I don’t know any of them personally – assumes the worst about what Valve considers acceptable and I suspect it’s nowhere near that.

And again, I’m also gonna go out on a limb here and say that a large number of these people who want to publish vile content on Steam aren’t going to be completely forthcoming, and get themselves blackballed for failing to disclose offensive content.

I just want fewer games on Steam. If Valve isn’t going to remove them for rational reasons, I guess we’ll just have to go with randomly cutting two games for every one that gets added.

There really isn’t all that much variation outside of Islamic countries even when talking about actual taped porn.

I don’t want less games on Steam, I want better discovery. I mean, stuff like the school shooting sim can go jump in the lake, but in general all the shovelware and recycled unity asset stuff can stay, as long as it’s downvoted so I don’t see it.

Then their risk of being sued is almost nil. Not a lot of these countries outright ban things. They simply will not stick them on the shelves, digital or physical. These are games, not real people… even the adult stuff some people don’t like, are drawings. I can understand if they are hesitant to ban this Japanese inspired game but screwed in some European styled RPG is fine and face that question, but to say the market be the will on their storefront… it;s a coward’s approach.

So Valve will keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing for a long time now. Got it.

Well, the definition of obscenity is famously based on community standards. An anime game centered on incestual subway groping may go over fine in San Francisco and obviously Tokyo, but what about Iowa and Vatican City? But yeah, I don’t imagine the legality threshold is going to be tough for Valve to duck.

What about Milan and Minsk?

Fun fact we had to change The Sims cover in Saudi Arabia so it was all men as they objected to showing women unhooded on the box. Sadly I cannot find a google image of it, but it was pretty funny as the poses remained playfully sexual, so it looked like a bunch of gay guys having fun.

They never asked us to change the content in the game however, my understanding is this is a cultural norm in that country, outside the house you have to appear to be a certain way, but inside the house it is understood you do what you like.

Does Amazon for instance curate what books they allow to sell? Refuse books with offensive, questionable content in them?

Personally I am not a fan of curation. I never see those shitty games when I visit steam, but even if I did, I do not buy games on steam by randomly browsing steam, I go there already knowing what I want to buy. Even if there were ten bazilion offensive games there, it has no effect on me and if anyone buys them, that’s their problem.

That’s hilarious, if you do find the pic post it!

I will! :)

Amazon has pulled products from their store shelves before, for a variety of reasons. They’re not afraid to do it but they have a lot to go through. It’s all about their customers bringing it to their attention.

For example…

So I guess I’ll at least say: I get where Steam is coming from.

There is absolutely nothing that I have ever encountered in my life more difficult than establishing and codifying acceptable use/moderation guidelines for a social media platform. Which is something I had to do in March through May of 2016, during primary season.

Everything you think you have planned out? Ha! Right, good luck with that. A platform is basically hyperactive fourth graders on triple espressos, and rules guidelines for acceptable behavior/product to sell are the substitute teacher. Oh, having trouble with neo-fascists are you? Yeah, they’re a problem.

But guess what? Once you say “No more racial slurs,” you find out that they’ve got an entirely different way of expressing them. And so you ban those. And then there’s feigned ignorance and complaints about that.

But that’s OK. They come up with NEW stuff.

Because every rule you make is someone’s line in the sand. And someone – whether it’s 4channers in social media or rogue game developers – will see that line and work their best magic to step across it in unique and difficult ways that force you into new policies. And the goal is to eventually force you into a policy where they can then hit you with the “What about?” haymaker that hits someone or something that has until now been perfectly acceptable and something you never thought twice about.

And now you’re trying to write new policy.

And they’re waiting for you to draw those lines, so they can fucking step over them again.

And so it goes, around and around.

And I can understand why Steam eventually just said “Fuck it.”

And with that being said, with as much money as Steam makes, a moderation/content compliance team that just focuses on doing that is probably what they should’ve done. So, to paraphrase Chris Rock, it probably is a bad thing to do…but I understand.

Having lived there and other locations in the Gulf, that is absolutely correct. They are interested in “protecting the public” from inadvertent/unwanted exposure to offensive images, period.

There is no win-win solution for this with gamers and valve.

Valve curates, gamers get mad when stuff is let on or left off

Valve lets everything on, take no responsibility, but gamers now have to wade through garbage.

They went with the cheapest option.

There’s a third option, which is what they are theoretically going with:
Valve lets (very nearly) everything on, takes no responsibility, but provides extensive tools so that gamers can navigate the store in their preferred fashion, seeing the content they want to see.

I don’t know what those tools are going to look like or whether they’ll end up being as useful as promised (very little they’ve done on that front has been so far), but IMO if we get tools that are capable of delivering a properly customized Steam store experience, this is in fact a more or less win-win solution. And supposedly they’re not going to change anything re: the minimal stewardship they’re currently performing until we get those tools.