I’m okay with this. Valve is a distributor at this point. Store front & curation? Humble Store, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming, Gamersgate, Wingamesstore - they can cover that side of things for me. And they have been for at least a year now.
I think at least some people at Valve really believe they can do this. However, their track record so far is terrible, and I question how much motivation the company has on it as a whole when they’re so far ahead in market share that there’s no real concern about customers getting fed up with bad suggestions or lists filled with garbage.
Yeah, that wont happen. First Amendment lawsuits will demolish any attempts at it in the US.
Have a bunch of gamers get scammed by buying a whole bunch of lolz hot topic games that pushed them to the top seller list after they campaign on political sites to get them there, what could go wrong! 6mo to 2 years later more articles about legit games not selling and why some wound up just being recruiting tools.
Yeah, I’m real skeptical about their ability to deliver on that front. But honestly I’d still rather they abandon curation entirely than randomly decide they don’t like selling certain things and ax something I might actually want to own on Steam or in its unadulterated form. I don’t need to discover things through Steam, recommendations on other sites/podcasts/etc will get me where I need to go and I’ve an enormous backlog as it is.
I honestly don’t get the big deal over curation. If they’re a “store,” I’m not sure why that store shouldn’t be able to pick and choose what they sell. As a publisher, they should be able to pick and choose what they publish. If they want to abandon the right to do either, well, I guess that’s their right as well, but it won’t be without consequences.
I’ve always liked Steam. Easiest way to buy and use games I have always thought. But this latest thing sounds like some lawyer told them the safest play. Sigh. Personally I’d rather not have steam sell those dumb porno video stories. I’d prefer them to edit them. Out. Let some other handler (even a "Steam X) sub server do that. I don’t really want to see all that crap mixed in with my Warhammer 2 stuff. Really I don’t.
Are you seeing porn games with your Warhammer 2 stuff now?
I must’ve gotten a different version.
I guess one thing I’m not sure I understand in all of this: does Valve accept games for sale that have not been rated by the ESRB or PEGI? Some of you are making this sound like it’s gonna be a free-for-all with stuff that makes Hunie Pop and House Party look tame.
Because if you’re going to have anything beyond the scope of what you’d see in an R-rated movie in a game, it’s going to pull an AO rating from the ESRB, and Steam’s policy has always been, no AO games.
Of course they do. 90% of the games on Steam have not been rated by the ESRB. Do you think the ESRB has time or money to rate this crap:
Huh. Guess I never noticed. I do know of their well-established refusal to carry any game that has earned an AO rating from the ESRB so figured that was one gat they had up. Turns out that it’s a red herring even so.
It also suggests that if Steam ever does want to curate for content, they can just cop out to that – only accepting games that have an ESRB or PEGI rating. Though I doubt they would.
The majority of games are not ESRB or PEGI rated. Both are voluntary ratings guidlines by developers , primarily larger retail ones, who sign up for them. Most Indies do not.
However the point of the ESRB and PEGI was to provide consumers with purchasing information and in that regard Steam has its own age gate (that pop up asking you) which developers can set if they believe their game has mature content.
I doubt Steam would ever require PEGI or ESRB in the same way Apple or Android wouldnt. Its just impractical for the number of games released digitally.
Which is why I typed–in invisible pixels, yet again–“Though I doubt they would.”
But yes, I understand the problem there. Just suggesting that if they ever really want to throw their hands up, that’s the Gordian Knot solution.
Yeah I gotcha, just adding reasons why you were correct.
Splendid. So now I will get to see even more games like the one last week where the object was to shoot all the black Africans who gave you AIDS. I am not making this up.
I have been a big fan of Steam over the years but as soon as someone has a good client with a decent return policy and a curated store I will happily move my dollars there. I am rather disappointed.
Only selling rated games would indeed be an option. Just have the publisher fill out a table with rating orgs, ratings and countries. Then activate the product for all covered countries.
Rating every game is possible. It’s only a problem of scale. Throw money at it and it will disappear. *
- Example: In Germany every game sold at retail needs a rating by the USK. The USK plays the games until they are sure they have seen all there is to see. A few hours for FIFA, “all the way though” (or as close as reasonably possible) for violent games. Roundabout 1500 games per year are rated. Plus GamesCom demos, etc. The really controversial stuff is pushed upward to the BPjM, which either puts it on The Index or sends it back to conclude the rating process. Unrated product is treated identical to titles on the index: they can be sold but not advertised in any way accessible to minors.
Valve could as well check every single game and filter out the rubbish by hand. How many games are there, minus the GOTY editions and DLC? The store earns a billion or so per year. Valve could easily afford to create 500 student jobs plus management, and then have every game checked and the results verified via four eyes principle. But they probably don’t want to, because games they refuse and games they kick out don’t earn them money.
I think the bigger driver is Valve’s own staff.
I imagine a company like Valve attracts people who are more on the “laissez-faire” end of the spectrum. They like Valve because there aren’t any real titles and they (theoretically) get to work on whatever they want. Add to that the fact that game developers in general tend to be that type as well. Except for the marketing department, of course!
So I bet that when they decided to remove Active Shooter from Steam it kicked up a pretty robust internal discussion about who Valve wants to be and what they want to represent. And it appears that the ones who argued that Valve should not be curating their store at all won.
I think it’ll end up being a bad decision for them. I think they’re naive and we’ll see the impact of it in short order.
I mean we’ve already seen them get lambasted by the mainstream for the school shooter game thing. It’s going to be that times a hundred as every nutjob racist lunatic throws together an asset flip about shooting black people or raping children or whatever.
God forbid they pay a couple people to check things. It’s not like they’re a multi-billion dollar company or anything. Oh wait.
Exactly. Create a content team of people of diverse backgrounds. Give them some general but non-specific guidelines, and then basically tell them “You’ll know it when you see it” for a game to bar from sale.
And then – here’s the controversial bit – when you do bar a game from sale, don’t tell the developer who submitted why it is barred. Which I realize sounds like a shitty thing to do, but when you draw those kinds of specific lines in the sand, you invite trouble. (To use Granath’s example from above, if you refuse the game about killing Africans who give you AIDS and tell the developer it is due to racism in depicting senseless violence towards black Africans based on white supremacist attitudes, they’re going to “Whatabout” you on Renowned Explorers.)