It all comes down to what you value. Freedom of expression, or a civil society? You can–and should–try to have as much of both as possible, but ultimately, you have to choose which to emphasize. Both come with costs.
So… are they going to allow porn games?
They aren’t illegal, nor they are trolling.
According to their statement, I guess so. At least, they should allow porn games in countries with no laws against them.
I’m curious to see what happens with those anime visual novel games that had to censor content to get on Steam, then release x-rated patches on other sites. Or that House Party game that had virtual blowjobs removed.
Talk about unintended consequences, let’s play this out:
- Some 8-year old kid buys an insane porn game on Steam. Mom freaks out.
- CNN or other major media org runs a huge expose about all the ridiculous games anyone can buy on Steam.
- Valve’s comment is: /shrug. Free market, y’all. We don’t want to be the ones to tell people what they can play.
- Congress investigates. Calls GabeN to testify.
- GabeN says: /shrug. Keep your government hands off my videogames.
- Congress passes a law that requires all game makers to submit their games to a government-run ratings organization before they can be sold anywhere. This doesn’t infringe on rights because they’re not telling anyone what they can or can’t sell, just that they have to be rated.
Movie makers, television producers, musicians, and game retailers with makers have seen this potential before. That’s why they created voluntary ratings systems.
There’s no law that says kids under 18 aren’t allowed into R-rated movies. That’s totally enforced by movie theaters to prevent laws like that from being written. Same with M-rated games at retail.
This is going to go great!
If valve could put a wall between steam, the platform, and steam the store, that would work.
Steam the store can limit what it sells, but the platform could still offer odd games through other vendors.
A few third party vendors do something similar to this, but as long as steam can’t distinguish between the platform and the store, it probably won’t work.
The problem is currently Valve makes no money from games they serve as platform only. They only make anything off the games they sell in their own store. IIRC
Dramatic scenarios aside, I’m more worried about what it’s going to do with the already declining average quality of content. Browsing through new or upcoming releases is like digging through a dung heap. I do like that indie developers can participate in the market a bit easier, but for every Rimworld there are 2000 ‘Shower with your Dad Simulators’.
Yep, and it’s just crushing the spirit of many quality indies who have seen their sales plummet. In my years around the indie scene, i’ve spoken to many indies. Right now, i’d say about 20-30% of them (names you might recognize) are considering leaving altogether. It’s too hard to get seen, get noticed and get sales, which in turn makes it tough to justify the dev cost of products with higher quality assets. Players (and press) are just being flooded.
Not really. You can have freedom of expression and not provide an easy market for everything. IF someone wants to make a game about child porn in the comfort of their basement and share it with their friends, if there is no actual child involved the government and local authorities aren’t going to get involved… but that doesn’t mean we have to make room on a shelf at a local store for it.
This really breaks my heart, truth be told.
You have to admit though that there’s a huge bubble in gaming at the moment. It was inevitable that there would simply be too many games given the ease of development these days for smaller independent games. Anyone can do it, really, and that leads to not everyone being able to do it for money.
Yep, and that was my issue with all of these free “easy” gaming engines (Unity, Unreal Engine, etc). It opens the doors for anyone to make a game. Anyone. Regardless if you actually know anything about balance, design, curves, etc.
I never thought i’d say this, but I now longingly look upon the Greenlight days of Steam.
My humble opinion: That “bubble” will pop at some stage, and take a lot of tiny indie devs with it. It’s just a matter of time really.
Is it something to have an “issue” with though? Great games still get found and some won’t. It’s always been like that. I’ve been mining the SNES catalog lately. Do you have any idea how many games didn’t sell well on that system but were good to great? There are quite a lot!
It’s always been like this. Everyone can’t be a winner. I’d rather people have the ability to bring their ideas to fruition though if only because some great games will be made that maybe wouldn’t have been otherwise.
And yes, we’re probably due for a bubble pop sooner rather than later.
This may sound harsh…but I’m not sure that indie developers is a finite resource that we’re going to exhaust.
It’ll suck if game developers whose work I enjoy and in whom I trust decide to get out of the industry, but that happens in every market sector where people exchange money for goods and services. It’s harsh and it sucks, but if there is a demand in the market, there will be people creating supply to fulfill it.
Indie developers? Unlimited. Good quality indie developers who respect their customers and come up with interesting ideas without mounds of bugs? A VERY finite resource, IMHO.
1997 Menzo wants to come and punch you all lightly on the face for lamenting that there is now so much choice in PC gaming.
Democratization of game development is a good thing. The fact that you can make a PC or mobile game with a few people (or even just one) in your spare time is 100% awesome. Yes, there’s going to be a lot of shit, but I’ll take that over a world full of only $100 million “AAA” games in a heartbeat.
But not all of these games deserve to get played, and Valve suggesting that that’s not true is going to cost them as a business.
I agree with @Menzo. We live in heady times that rival the early days of floppies in a ziploc. Hell, you could make a mint making a game like Akalabeth today and selling a Collector’s Edition that comes on a floppy… IN A ZIPLOC!
It’s not finite. We have someone born probably every day who will develop enough interest to do work in the gaming sphere.
I wouldn’t put it as harshly as @triggercut put it but we’re not going to run out of people who want to make games at home, on their spare time… and will be good at it. That’s like saying we’ll wake up one day and not have any authors anymore/
Yeah, choice is good. But choice to the point where so many good games just get buried in a day or two isn’t good for the industry, IMHO.
Those are still costs. I’m not arguing with you that those costs aren’t worth it, but they are still costs. There is always a choice to be made.