@perfidioussinn: I'm guessing you're one of the potential few that doesn't have the majority of their PC games there.

As angry as I could potentially be with them I can't imagine going that far. Not at present, at any rate.

Hah. I thought the thread title was a typo at first. After all, Valve couldn't possibly get more hands off right?

Reading through that statement, it feels like Valve either missed the point or is being willfully obtuse (highly possible). Like sure, objectionable content is a part of the conversation but an equally large (arguably larger) part of the problem is the straight up trash they allow to be released on their platform, the asset flips, trading card generators and the like, which aren't so much controversial as they are detrimental to the marketplace. If they don't want to curate for subject matter that's their choice, more power to them, but really feels like there should be some standards of quality checking. Have some sort of basic cert process at least.

I don't believe for a second their claims that they spent time curating before this.

Valve's lackadaisical approach to steam has only ever seemed to get them in trouble, so the fact that they are doubling down on this is absolutely insane. This is going to explode in their faces at some point.

@ripelivejam: I'm not primarily a PC gamer, but I do have 20+ Steam games that I haven't touched through sales and whatnot. I'm fine cutting them loose.

This just seems exceptionally stupid.

I don't care. I don't buy product I haven't researched.

I'm generally not a pro-censorship guy, and honestly, my first instinct was to empathize with the assured beatdown of trying to police all the games on Steam. However, this is fucking Valve. It's a multi-billion dollar company. Since they're more than happy to print money off of their storefront, you'd think it wouldn't be too much to ask for them to curate said storefront. It ain't like they don't have the resources to do so, and there's a pretty damn good argument that it's a massive disservice to their customers to just throw their hands up and essentially say, "hey, you filter through all this bullshit".

This is a bad look, for multiple reasons. The unabashed apathy of the "the Steam Store is going to contain something that you hate, and don't think should exist" statement is kind of incredible. What that actually reads is "we give zero fucks if our non-effort leads to you being inundated with tasteless shit". Even apart from outright offensive content, Steamtrash is a very real thing and has made it near-impossible to use the service to discover new games. The "well, I can get that info from other places" defense doesn't really hold water, either, as that just means that the onus falls on sites like GB or the gaming community itself to unearth the gems amidst a pile of trash, and that will only become harder to do now.

At a certain point, doesn't the question become what, if anything, is Steam doing (beyond simply existing) to deserve to remain the world's biggest gaming storefront? I mean, it's pretty much a glorified FTP server that just operates on a casino-esque rake. The fact is, though, their current clout gives them the ability to massively impact the industry, positively or negatively. One could argue they have some level of obligation to ensure a minimum standard of game quality and to not tacitly support the proliferation of stuff that's simply awful when they're profiting off of all of it.

As perhaps the only storefront who can consistently afford to stiff-arm asset flips and utterly tasteless games that pretty much everyone can agree shouldn't exist, that they choose to sit on the sidelines out of laziness/cowardice and count their money is disappointing to say the least. They could easily go "hey, if you want your game featured on our massive storefront, you need to adhere to some general standards". They've instead chosen to wash their hands of responsibility for their own trashpile, yet sure as fuck aren't going to stop taking in the money said trashpile generates, and that's infuriating.

I look forward to an influx of rapey anime games and school shooting simulators. /s

The problem with steam now is good games getting buried in bad games. There a bunch off indie studios saying steam is fucking them over and are now focusing more on the switch ports of there pc games, cause there game didn't get any advertisement in the "latest" section. I mean c'mon Aids simulator a game where you kill African folks in order to stop aids ..... get your shit straight valve.

Good, censorship should have no place in the modern age. There is always going to be a lot of garbage on steam, ignore it and move on, or uninstall steam and buy your games elsewhere it is simple.

Aren't Curation and Censorship two different things ? it's like going to a Guggenheim museum, and it being filled with all styles of art cause it wasn't curated or is that censorship to?

Wow. It's a shame that I have a pretty extensive library there, otherwise I would quit using it completely. For the past year or so I was already unable to find anything because "new", "on sale" and "coming soon" sections were all full of garbage, and now I'm guessing there will be more of it.

And yeah, I have no idea how people managed to twist this into a censorship issue. Half the games on there barely work!

I don't like the decision - but, it's not surprising, because it's the direction they've been moving in for ages. As other people have pointed out, as long as the money keeps coming in from being a game delivery service, the benefit from being a game discovery service is moot. But it's short sighted on a lot of levels - given how decentralized Valve leadership is, I wonder if somebody panicked and went "Screw it, we don't care anymore" and put this change in just to take the heat off.

The big problem is, in the Internet of 2018, the moment you say "No more filters", nothing but crap rises to the top. And if you think what's coming out now is crappy, just wait until people take the Steam declaration as a challenge, and see what they can get posted to the store. It can get a HELL of a lot worse, and for a lot more groups. Nobody is safe - and I think the real challenge for the people who say "Censorship has no place" will be when they're the group that's specifically targeted.

Nobody twisted anything. This statement is because some rogue employee at Valve started going after previously-allowed adult visual novels for no reason. They got their hands slapped, but Valve had to issue a statement in response to the furor.

People conflating this with the asset flips and school shooter simulators are being intellectually disingenuous.

Has anyone solved the discovery/filter problem in their app stores? How well does Apple curate their store? Is it easier to find what you are looking for on their store?

Valve has proven again and again that they are not equipped to manage the behemoth of a store they created. They know it, which is why things like greenlight are built on the premise that "it will police itself", like it was the invisible hand of the market applied to games. However, cheap games straight out of tutorials with lots of asset swaps are the order of the day, and the one time they tried to police the environment the criteria was so arbitrary and the backlash so (justifiably) noticeable they are abandoning the idea. Admittedly, Steam being hands off is a lot better than them being unilaterally and unquestionably policing their store, but neither attitude is ideal.

This all boils down to Steam being a terrible place to discover new games. You are better served with forum threads, other stores or even youtube suggestions that seeing Steam recommendations.

@cliffordbanes: Not really. The apple store, google play and other environments have massive discovery and filtering issues. The only way it seems to work is with massive amounts of trained employees, and that is not viable for stores of that size.

If Steam wants to be the repository for all kinds of games, more power to them, but the problem for me is that it is so hard to find anything good on Steam. Discovering new and interesting IP is impossible. There are just too many bad titles. At least they should make an effort to do some curation themselves. Put the garbage titles in a bin marked, "shovelware" if they must but put the good stuff front and center.

This is an outstanding decision, finding good games on steam is never a problem and people that complain about it being cluttered are making an issue out of something that never was one. Like complaining about quick asset flips is ridiculous, it takes anyone a good 2-3 seconds of looking at a game to judge that. Do people actually spend money without doing research? Steam also has a refund option on any game.

I remember a few years back when it was a nightmare to try and get onto steam, and that scenario is infinitely worse than how it is now. Its a marketplace, and they should not curate it more than the obvious things like they stated. Its a reality of the world we live in where anyone with a computer can create something and put it out. Its almost impossible to curate that. Not even Apple manages to do a very good job, how would Valve be able to do it better?

@ghoti221: I have been specifically targeted since childhood for ridicule and much worse, I still think people have a right to make what they want to make because censorship doesn't solve problems, it hides them.

This seems..fine? I'll just continue to look at things I'm interested in and ignore the things I'm not interested in.

Yes, literally, all the time, every day, people in all walks of life, in everthing always.

Is it good that dude in his basement working his ass off for a pretty cool game can get it on steam easier? Sure. But don't WELCOME asset flips as if we should just be happy they are there.

Why are asset flips ever a problem? Don't buy it? Like the trade off here is that, by having stricter curation maybe the dude working his ass of in his basement cannot get onto Steam. Which scenario here is better? That we have a few asset flips, but we also have tons of awesome indie games that deserve to be on there. Or that we get rid of the asset flips, and also some of those really cool gems. This is what happened when Steam had much stricter curation a few years ago and being on steam or not could mean not having money for food for certain developers. Yeah in an ideal world there is a perfect medium here, but trying to achieve that is almost impossible. Not even Apple can do that.

Asset flips and completely broken garbage games are NOT problems, since they are labeled "overwhelmingly negative" within minutes and anyone can immediately disregard them from a few screenshots alone. It is the other side of this that is more important.

Sorry if you have spent a lot of money on asset flips, but you can just refund them too you know?

Lol I haven't spent a dime on them, but way to bring the argument to me instead of steam.

Same here, being a Chinese kid growing up in the late 1970s, early 1980s. The thing is, if you decide not to censor anything, you then deal with the other half of the issue -- allowing anything to be said without consequence only encourages people to continue saying those things, until they reach a point where you're dealing with a much bigger problem, and God knows how many people get hurt along the way. Even if they don't hurt you, they might hurt others... or, worse yet, they won't hurt you until they reach a point where they're so powerful they CAN hurt you -- at which point, it's too late to do anything about it. (History is very illuminating on that point.)

Besides, censorship isn't some black/white thing - like we censor everything or we censor nothing. We can find a compromise. We can look at our society and decide "Okay, yeah, we want to be as permissive as possible, but there are some lines that we won't cross, at least in a public forum, to try and preserve courtesy, decorum and safety."

That's the point. Valve, by their statement, has given up all responsibility for the matter about preserving courtesy, decorum and safety. They're going "it's up to you, and who gives a damn about the collateral damage about what we publicize on our soapbox." It's not an inclusive environment which is the goal of public discourse, it's exclusive, because only the loudest, meanest voices will come out on top. (And I don't give much credence to the concept of removing 'illegal' or trolling content - you can hurt a lot of people without doing anything illegal, and who defines what trolling is?) When there are no rules, it's the law of the jungle, and that means, in the end, only the loudest, angriest, meanest people get heard -- and, historically, that has NEVER ended well.

And also remember - Steam isn't telling people you can't make your game. Steam told people in the past "Make your game, but we'll decide if we'll sell it. If we decide not to, go sell it somewhere else and God bless." Instead, Steam is telling people "Whatever. You can sell the game on our service. We don't care as long as it doesn't land us in court." So this really isn't a censorship issue, since the game can still exist, and it can be distributed other ways. What this is about is the question "What responsibility does the owner of the dominant game delivery service have to society?" and the answer, according to Valve, is "None." Which is what corporations are about, they're allowed to do that -- but we can't then close our eyes and pretend that nobody's going to get caught in the crossfire.

I would say that "*shrug* I guess both sides have a point, so what are we supposed to do?" isn't really the right way to go.

There are white supremacists, rape fetishists, jihadists, and sundry others who will happily make wish fulfillment games and put them on Steam - where do you draw the line? Because you'll put the line somewhere - "illegal, or straight up trolling"? In the world of today, what does "straight up trolling" mean? And what does Steam think trolling means? Illegal? Most expression isn't illegal (at least in the US), it's just kept out of public view by the people owning the platforms - except Steam, apparently?

Also, though informed users might not use the browsing functions on Steam, but it's the biggest platform for PC games in the world, and they should be responsible for what they present to people - their editorial non-choice is still a choice. Just because I personally don't have Youtube running randomly doesn't mean I don't care that its algorithms pushes flat Earth stuff and racist conspiracy theories on people.

@tru3_blu3: The problem with this approach is that Steam lets users tag games If I'm not mistaken, Dark Souls is tagged as "anime", so if you block that tag you'll never see Dark Souls content unless you go looking for it. That's not even counting things that have a legit anime aesthetic but aren't visual novels - things like Dragonball Fighter Z or The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky. Somebody could reasonably tag Gunstar Heroes as anime and then you'd never see it.

@ghoti221: You are right, censorship is not black and white and I obviously don't think people should be able to say whatever comes to mind without consequence. In the terms of products though, I think it should be up to the consumers to dictate their threshold. What offends me, doesn't offend you or her or so on. Do I want to see school shooting simulators or racist assholes getting their way? No. I also don't want to see a mob dictate what is an isn't offensive and so they can start "burning books." The loudest, angriest people are the ones who are always heard, in every way, which is why trash 24 hour news and legions of people on youtube are so popular. Honestly if it is ok to sell anywhere else, then it should be ok to sell on Steam. Historically censorship never ends well, even selective censorship like this case would be. Steam being the biggest swinging dick could influence other sellers to not sell and so on and so forth. We can agree to disagree here, I understand and appreciate your comment, thank you, but I don't think steam has a responsibility to protect society from itself, society needs to take responsibility for itself, if people don;t like this policy then they should stop using steam, just like if they don't like the content they see they shouldn't buy it.

@adamalc: Me not buying a game glorifying racism is not the same as companies stamping out that game from existence. You might not believe or think they should, I do, because plenty of people will buy that game and I honestly don't give a fuck about someone's enjoyment in a title that would be made to literally live out a white neo nazi fantasy.

What's hard is identifying that game versus just a shitty shooter that you just seem to kill middle easterners only because you're fighting a battle against them in their countries. Valve just said it's too hard, we rather rake in billions and let you fuckers sort the shit out.

Fine with me...but please, for the love of good, make your surfacing and discovery algorithms better. I'm sick of going through the 'Discovery' tool only to be suggested an asset-flip trash-tier game "Just to see if you are interested"

Seriously? Why does that even exist? Are publishers able to pay extra to get these games to surface in the discovery tabs and home page? Make my discovery based on what I've played in the past, what I've added to my wishlist, and what a high number of people are currently playing and nothing more.

@vortextk: That's fine and you are entitled to your opinion, but what point are you trying to make here? Why do you care what people buy? Will their lack of ability to buy it on steam suddenly change them? Nazi's are an easy scapgoat to make some self aggrandizing point, but how about war? War itself is an aberration and should be despised by all, should war games be "stamped out of existence?" Who gets to be offended and listened to and who gets to just be offended?

Valve, what happened to you, man? You used to be cool. Absolutely everything that company has said or done has been so out of touch, so backward thinking, so avaricious, so lazy, that I cannot help but think that their stranglehold on the market has become a pox on the landscape of PC gaming.

Wait, does that work? Because that sounds like my idea of paradise. Can I make it work for the entire internet rather than just Steam?

I'm very tired of Steam's hands-off approach to everything. The perfect example is the stupid histogram of review scores that they came up with so you could see if a game was being review-bombed or not. That is such a typical Valve solution to a problem.

Also, Valve wanting to wash their hands of offensive content is a copout, because they take a % of all the content. They are a retailer. It's like Target taking a cut on swastika flag sales, and saying they don't want to do moral policing. Sorry Target, it doesn't matter what you want, you're angry customers are leaving. That doesn't really fly for a retailer, who is ultimately responsible for the products they sell, whether they want to be or not.

And have you heard of any store that has such low standards that they will sell anything as long as it's legal? Wow, that's a pretty low bar. Is your product bad, but not SO bad that the cops come? Sure, I'll sell it for you! How about a basic bar of quality like, "does it run on modern computers"? (many don't without customer work-arounds).

If this means they're going to continue to allow broken and terrible games/asset flips on their platform, that's disappointing and really makes Steam a worse off place. I'm sick of seeing a bunch of garbage games released hourly that bury independent developers' actual video games. I don't know how many small, decent games I've missed because they're right next to like 40 shitty shovelware asset flips.

If it means they won't remove games based on the content or themes within, then I'm cool with that. Just hope they don't go too far and leave up hateful propaganda or some shit. Mostly I just want them to stop allowing pure garbage on their platform. I mean, this stuff is bottom of the barrel. Get it together for god's sake.

@adamalc: If valve made a fucking decision, THEY would get to choose, and like it or not we would have a real answer.

Jesus christ, true.

A retailer not wanting to be responsible for the products they bring to market is a copout! I strongly dislike their "solve everything with an algorithm" hands-off approach to everything. I'm going to be actively avoiding Steam purchases from now on.

I wasn't aware they were really putting all that much effort into policing their storefront in the first place.

@adamalc: You're walking a dangerous line brother.

I don’t see this as much of a problem. I’m never going to steam to just browse and hope to find something new, I’m going there specifically to find something I’ve heard about and watched a video of elsewhere. If you are blindly throwing your money at a video game now it’s not the storefronts fault

This prompted me to start trying out GoG Galaxy today. I will continue to use Steam's game support services when needed but I will try when possible to find alternatives to this company where available. I will attempt to find alternative storefronts for game purchases when possible. I no longer want to support this behavior through my purchases.

Pretty much! You can say or create what you want, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee you the right to a platform. A company like Valve is still well within their rights to determine what is and isn't fit for their storefront.

Edit: Also I guess I fall into that category of people who don't often browse the store, though that largely has been due to it becoming worse over time, sales being less worthwhile, and sites like Greenman offering a better experience as far as purchasing my games go. My issue is that this is symptomatic of a larger problem with Valve. That they really don't seem to care. Greenlight and Direct were both halfassed, Family Share is constantly broken, the Steam controller was a wet fart, paid mods was a step beyond "poorly implemented," sales are increasingly tepid, the tagging system is lousy, the list goes on. Seeing them lean into it and straight up taking a stance of "we don't care to do this!" doesn't give me much confidence that they're ever going to improve the experience of using Steam.

While I don't like the idea that games like Hatred will find their way to steam, the way to make those go away is to forget they exist and don't give them the chance to say "THE GAME STEAM CENSORED" and trick you into buying their garbage. People had to run out and buy it because everyone was so offended, and then they got to realize that it was just trash and they'd been tricked.

Steam has discoverability options with the Curator system and Discovery Queue. Stuff that shows up on New and Trending are reliably either good or something people are laughing at, so that's where I go to check out the new stuff, and if I think it has promise, I'll throw it on my wishlist and let Steam tell me when its on sale, and if there hasn't been a quicklook I'll go check out gameplay on youtube, and on the rare occasion I get suckered by my own stupidity, I know within an hour and can refund it.

People were furious when they dropped a handful of anime games with questionable content, so they literally can't win anywhere. People that participate in that weird card trading economy buying and selling cards from 99 cent games would be angry to lose those too. Small independent developers that get lost in the mess should understand that marketing is part of having a successful game, it isn't up to Steam to advertise for them.

This whole thing really reminds me of when Valve tried to roll out paid mods on steam (and to some degree a lot of new things Steam has tried to introduce in recent years). They try to make changes or ad something to steam, but they make big changes to steam in a slapdash and rash way without announcing beforehand what they are doing. When they the community and press justifiably pushes back Valve doe not try to find a good middle ground, but instead they drop the whole concept and completely wash their hands of it.

Having a way to let modders get paid for their work would be awesome, but Valve lacks the attentions span and ability to communicate with their consumers to actually create a solution that would make that possible in a good way. Similarly it would be nice if the steam store was actually curated and not filled to the brim with trash, but because people pushed back when Valve made a rash and poorly thought out move towards that they decided to take their ball and go home instead of actually finding a good solution to the problem. Steam has really started to feel more like a lazy student project rather than a store run by a multi-billion company in recent years.

@brackstone: whenever they crack down the response is the same.

I'm definitely mostly in the "that's fine" camp. I don't think that Valve has a particular responsibility to help "good" devs be more discoverable than "bad" ones, and the less involved they are in discovery the better IMHO. I just need Steam to allow me to buy a game, and I'd rather rely on other parties for the discovery part. Relying on the storefront to have the consumer's best interests at heart just seems like a foolish proposition to me.

Their "anime" games example was not the greatest one for sure. But even there, I think the sort of person who would filter out "anime" games wouldn't be too bothered by how simplistic that classification is.

@splodge: And I will do my best to not buy and care for them.

Until some websites bring those games into the limelight.

XD

How are they supposed to police it? Play every single game to completion and debate internally whether it should be sold or not? If somebody makes a game and if even just one person finds it interesting, who are Valve to tell that person they shouldn't enjoy that game on their platform because they don't like it? I've seen steam new releases be filled with visual novel stuff, but I've also seen it full of COD DLC, both of which I personally can't stand, but sometimes in life the world stops revolving around you.

Just today I found out about Hitman 2 by looking at the Top Sellers list. No one buys the asset flips so they fall to the bottom anyway, I only find out about them from Jim Sterling. If you're looking for something good to play, sites like GiantBomb help with that. No problem.

Hands-off seems fine to me. I wouldn't trust them to properly moderate their store. And that is not really a knock against Valve but I wouldn't trust most companies.

I'm surprised people would want Valve to have that type of authority. I would find it to be a little worrisome.