Steam announced today that they are looking to take a more hands off approach regarding what is and isn't allowed on the service in a blog post

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1666776116200553082

This has been a long time coming due to multiple questions regarding how steam deals with what many see as an overcrowded marketplace as well as having some questionable or sexual explicit content. In the blog they say they will allow anything that "isn’t illegal or ‘trolling’"

Personally I feel like this is the wrong approach and is a sign that we need more software distribution options for games. It kinda feels like they are basically saying they are never going to a fix a system that makes it impossible to dig through the shovelware and that they are going to continue to give a platform and make 30% off games with possibly harmful messages.

How does everyone feel about this? Should it be a total free market or should there be some "code of conduct".

This is a bad decision. Really bad. I think I'm done with using Steam.

I cant help but feel the same way. The big issue is that even other game stores mostly sell steam keys now and I think that kinda thing will make it where most people just will accept it. Steam is where their content is. Where their friends are. I don't blame people that make that decision more so saying the fact that its hard to avoid the platform maybe isn't as good of a thing as we thought? The idea of one place for all the games seemed like a good idea a decade ago. Now I'm not so sure.

I'd rather Steam be hands off than overly restrictive.

Happy they stepped back.

They can get more hands-off?

The only thing this really effects is browsing the store; I don't spend much time doing that anymore anyway so I guess this is a non issue for me.

Seems like there is a decent opportunity for someone to make an indie game store that could sort through this cesspool and shine a light on the gold.

"Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable."

This statement doesn't exactly fill me with confidence considering that the Steam store is currently recommending I get Jurassic World Evolution because I own Cook, Serve, Delicious.

How the fuck could they be more hands off? They barely curate their platform at all. If anything, they could use accurate curation so people can accurately find content that matches their interests, be that adult content, quality content, or releases from devs they care about.

@bradbrains: Yeah it's a problem, there really need to be other good options for PC gamers. At least there is gog that have been releasing a lot of new indie games. Personally I'll just stop playing as much until something changes because I don't want to feel like I'm supporting Steam and their policies.

I'll be interested to see what filtering tools they come up with, but the bottom line is no one is being forced to buy anything on Steam. If you find a game offensive, don't give the devs money.

It seems to mainly be a response to people questioning why certain games with hateful messages were allowed on the store in addition to the controversy of them giving notices to some of the dating sim games. This seems to be them going "Well were are going do nothing about either. go crazy kids".

They mention fixing the tag system to allow you to filter content but I think @austin_walker puts it well in this tweet that they seem to be missing the point that was being brought up that caused them to make a response in the first place

Well, given that their sudden crusade against eroge ended up not being much of a thing, I'm indifferent.

I mean, yeah. Feel free to step in when someone makes a game about school shootings, but I don't necessarily have any issues with their curation system since I mainly buy the big budget/known developer games anyway. It's a potential cesspool that I can easy avoid and only occasionally hear about from Jim Stealing.

In too many words Steam explains that they will continue to do basically nothing.

Do you feel that based on that they are being "untruthful" for a lack of a better words in their anything but "illegal or trolling" comment? If a high ranking neo-nazi released a game that was something that seriously expressed their views (so not illegal or trolling) They would probably remove it right? Or would they say "its your choice. It makes us mad too"?

this might end up biting them in the ass.

if one were to take the temperature of the room re: other tech platforms- such as facebook, uber, twitter, etc. the move has been towards MORE moderation, not hands-off-the-wheel. the whole "we just build a platform but aren't responsible for the content on it" approach is falling out of fashion, rather quickly.

ultimately this won't affect me or my usage- i go to steam with purchases in mind, not to browse. and i generally don't seek out stuff on the fringe, at least for games. but i wouldn't be shocked if they walk this back.

This doesn't change much. The steam store has been a bad way to find games since greenlight started and it has only gotten worse since. At this point I don't know why anybody would use Steam as a way to find new games. This also won't solve Valve's problem of needing to draw the line somewhere. How much nudity, or violence can a game contain before they ban it. Also, how much "game" does a game need to have to be allowed on the platform?

HOW HOW (in a Alex voice) can you be more hands off then they already are? So is Brazzers gonna publish games now on steam what's going on!

I'm not surprised people here are in disagreement to this. I for one am a-okay in giving consumers freedom of choice in what they want or don't want to see on the store. You don't want to see anime games and dating sims as much as I do? Now you can possibly filter them off your searches and get advertisement for all the games you, as an individual, want to see. I think wanting your stores to restrict or ban products that certain people want is a bit biased and kinda fucked up, and this is the best the most moral way to go. I don't see the problem. This can make everyone happy save for the politically passionate, and fuck the politically passionate.

You say that jokingly but does this remove the patch necessity that some of those sim games have? Can Jeff finally play that VR school girl game without having to download a patch from the publisher website?

@bradbrains: This strikes me as a direct response to that incident with risque anime games a few weeks ago. They even deliberately call out that they aren't being pressured by their payment processors (read: Paypal) here, as was widely speculated.

Personally, I'm rather OK with this development, since I don't really want some nanny at Valve telling me what I can and can't buy. It was a real bummer to see them crack down on harmless anime games while ignoring economically harmful asset flips, card farms, and achievement farm junk. If they're going to ignore that stuff, I'd rather they ignored games that some of us might actually like playing as well.

At least this policy is consistent.

Look ma', no hands!

It's all fun and games until lawsuits start to happen.

I agree that we need more options out there, that aren’t just publishers looking to maximize their margins (nothing wrong with that as long as it provides a good experience, more power to the EAs of the world if they can get more money from their product). However, I never really got the issue with Steam being the way it is. People say it’s them not being able to avercome the challenges, but I think it is very clear that Valve has never been big on the idea of controlling and curating their marketplace. There is immense value in a truly free market. I don’t mind relying on word of mouth, outlets like Giant Bomb, and even just dredging through the Steam catalogue with DLC hidden in order to see what’s coming out.

I would much rather see them go in this direction than start veering the other direction and going the route of YouTube and suppressing what people want to put on their platform.

I would be happy to see someone like GoG to focus on a quality marketplace that doesn’t just let whatever out there, but I value Steam’s place in the market.

This is a really refreshing direction for them to go, in my opinion. I’ve never had a hard time discovering games on Steam, when I did rely on it directly to find something new and interesting.

We used to see beauty in the freedom of moves like this. It was what made the internet so special: free trade of information.

What I’d really like to know is why people feel this is a move that should be opposed on moral grounds. I can see feeling that this will make the practical issues on Steam (which I think are valid even if they aren’t problematic for me).

I’ve seen a few comments to the effect of “I don’t want to support these policies so I will stop or reduce my usage of Steam going forward.” Why is this an issue in that way for folks? Freedom of speech is embraced generally by folks but for some reason similar openness on a marketplace is not only not celebrated but actively opposed.

They really blundered the handling of stuff like this recently and stepping back to not make these moral decisions for developers, publishers, and consumers seems like a good thing. I don’t want to buy from a marketplace who tells me that I can’t see vaginas in a game or something, even if that something isn’t an interest of mine.

Trying to create some universal standard for what is okay and what is not okay impossible beyond bare bones stuff like “don’t break the law.”

There used to be a time when a lot of good things were widely considered inappropriate. Having freedom to create what you want protects people who want to make things. Censoring games, preventing them from existing on your platform hurts creators. A horror game should be able to be horrific in whatever way best serve’s the game. A porn game should be able to be porny in whatever way best serve’s the game. Although we live in an age where a lot of demographics that were previously hit unfairly by such judgement calls have a lot more support and acceptance but in my opinion that doesn’t mean we no longer need the freedom to create whatever we want to create and express whatever we want to express. These freedoms should not be restricted by a single entity’s idea about those topics.

The problem with Steam is bad games, not the types of content that the games on Steam contain, in my opinion.

GoG has plenty of issues of it's own, but at this point, I think I'm all in on that service unless EA can get more third parties on Origin or Amazon/Twitch really start to go all out. My biggest problem with Steam is just that browsing that storefront these days is just a godforsaken nightmare because of the countless shit you have to wade through. Sometimes I don't have a specific game in mind I'm looking for, I just want to see what's out there and Steam is pretty terrible for that in my opinion.

I get it, it's a lose-lose situation. Too open and they get responses like this. Too closed and and blahblahblah no free market, unfair, etc etc. It's an impossible choice to make. I'm simply saying that for me personally, I prefer a curated storefront in spite of the cons that come with it.

In any case, this just makes me want to reiterate what I've said before: Steam needs more competition. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming them. It's just a shitty situation that the only place to get most PC games is on Steam.

I'm always surprised to learn people do this, which probably explains why I don't see the problem with Steam. I've been using it as my primary PC gaming store for a decade, and have quite literally never browsed around looking for random games. Social media and sites like this are my filter. I don't have time enough in the day to play stuff I know for a fact I'll like much less look for more.

@bradbrains said:

Not the easiest line of questions, but I think I can answer at least some of them with this: People, whoever or whatever they are, can create whatever they want and share it with the world, but they also have to deal with the feedback and consequences for the content that they present, and also criticisms about their character given how people work. So if removing said game from Steam is a repercussion for universally negative opinions, so bit it. And even if the opposite happens and the game stays on Steam because no one at any level has a problem with it, so be that as well; and I can more or less say the same about Active Shooter whether or not that games was intended to be an honest artistic statement or a low-class cash grab. But with that said, I'm an artist, so I'm probably a bit more open-minded (or naïve at worst) to these sorts of things and try to approach these things more logically as opposed to emotionally.

Overall, this seems like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation where Valve moderating the games that go up on Steam will cause some backlash, and passively moderating the platform will cause some other issues. So I think this portion of the conversation comes down to which set of anticipated issues are the lesser evils that people can be adapt to, versus what can potentially destroy their business and have people go somewhere else.

But how are journalists (i.e. the GB crew) supposed to surface the quality games if they too are inundated by an endless, unorganized stream of garbage? Jeff, Brad, Drew, and Jason have all complained at separate points about having to spend hours sifting through the New Release list to find things that are QL-worthy.

Their sheer aversion to work continues to astound me. How greedy must their senior management be if they are that unwilling to hire anybody to do even the bare minimum human labor. Everything in their mind can be solved by some algorithms at some nebulous point in the future, meanwhile just letting everything run wild now unchecked no matter who pays the price.

They just do not care at all about the extreme toxicity they allow to fester on that site in product selection and in the forums. They don't care that low quality asset flip and stolen games clog the storefront. And they don't care at all the gamers can't find games and game makers can't make sales because discoverability is a joke due to their complete lack of even basic standards.

I see the potential in this, as it would have the possibility to improve the browsability of their store (which is what benefits the consumer). However they're still a company, it's still a store, and they're still gonna push their profitability as hard as they can. They're in this mess because they realized selling ALL the games meant they could make ALL the money. That philosophy isn't gonna change. They still want to expose you to as many titles as possible and they still want you to impulse buy whatever the new or popular thing is. Limiting your exposure to games is the last thing they want to do, and this will most likely not go any further than allowing you to filter away things you don't want to see at all (which only means they can expose you to more games that you are more likely to buy).

If the sum total of the marketing effort of a developer is dumping their game onto Steam and hoping journalists notice, I would say that developer is not going to be successful. Even if Valve paid a human to play through everything that hits the Steam store and reject the cynical asset flips and unplayable garbage, that would still be the case. There are just too many devs making too many games right now. It's an industry problem, not a Steam problem.

Basically what I was thinking when I saw this, minus that whole episode with the sexually explicit content lol

I remember the olden days of yore where I looked at the Steam new releases list every 5-10 days and was able to easily discover plenty of great new games. I hardly ever buy anything on Steam nowadays, since it's simply impossible to feasibly keep up with releases and 95% of it is utter bullshit.

I'm not sure how large of a segment of Steam's user base is like this and I might be in the minority, but the "flood gates open" approach does not seem like a great business model.

Legit question, is there anything Steam has over a service like GoG, other than a massive playerbase? Because it has seemed to me like, for years, Steam has gotten worse and less usable. While GoG, even outside of the DRM free thing, has been adding cloud saves and achievements and things people want and expect, all the while maintaining a more curated store.

@luchalma: Well, the massive selection could be considered an advantage, depending on perspective. I might be wrong about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if you still find cases of actually good and/or reputable games you can only find on steam. Actually, after doing some searches on recent games I've played on Steam I couldn't find several of them on GoG.

Guess their taking que's from the google play store?

@frytup: how is it not a Steam problem? Their barrier for entry is way too low. $100 is basically asking to be abused. Even if it were $5000, that'd still be stupidly low. How many people are even buying these games to make this terrible service worth it?

I honestly respect Valve's refusal to do any work. Curate our platform? Nah, we'll pass. Make video games? Don't really feel like it. It's a level of laziness that I aspire towards in my own life. Salute.

I like that Steam is such an open platform, allowing for games of all sizes to exist on it. People claim Steam is too crowded to browse but i haven't had a problem.
As far as sexual content is concerned i hope there are parental controls in place, it's not something that affects me personally.

@ares42: Steam absolutely has more games, and not just the rubbish ones. But is that just a symptom of the smaller customer base? If gamers decided en masse that they've had enough of Steam and migrated to GOG (or Origin or Uplay etc.) then developers would be forced to follow. But if THOSE services got big enough, would they too just become complacent and lazy? I just wish PC gaming at least had a duopoly, so there would always be a reason to improve.

Yeah that would maybe be a good thing if Valve were in the slightest bit capable of developing good curation tools, but they evidently aren't if my game recommendations are anything to go by. The problem with allowing you to filter by tags like "anime" is that it could be too broad as well, and potentially blacklist games you might actually be interested in because the tag is too far reaching. Given how Steam likes to suggest games tangentially related to what I have in my library, it already seems like the way they classify things is fairly broad, meaning they either need to reevaluate the way they handle tags or make filtering them out a lot more granular than their statement implies.

And hey, they haven't actually rolled out those changes yet so who knows precisely what form they'll take, but it's Valve, so I imagine whatever it is will be completely fucked and counter-intuitive.

You can't completely absolve Steam from the issue, when they are the ones that dominate the market they sit in. They very much hold the keys to the kingdom.
While they may not be able to completely solve the problem on their own, they definitely have the influence to effect change.

@deckard said:

GB and other outlets are going to have to base what they cover off of word-of-mouth and games they have played/seen at trade shows. There is nothing else they can do because, at a certain point they are the ones that are meant to try games and then tell their audience if the game is worth playing. It will just continue to be another menial part of the job like checking all the email they get.

Steam as all the new releases. With a few notable exceptions every new PC is released on Steam. GOG only gets the ones that are released DRM-free. GOG also curates their store so, it is an even smaller subsection than that. Steam also has integrated mod support.

This makes sense. As long as the tools they create are good enough to block out most of the stuff you don't want to see. They seem aware that a change like this requires better filtering & parental control settings, so that's a good sign.

It reminds me a bit of the Spotify situation. They decided to stop featuring artists like R kelly & XXXtencion on their playlists because of the actions they did in their lives. That sounded reasonable at first to me. If these people are doing terrible stuff , why would you want to give them more exposure? But after thinking a bit more about it, that means that they are implicitely vouching for the character & the actions of every artist that they do feature. At that point, what's the line that needs to be crossed for an action to be so terrible that you can't be featured anymore? anything illegal? Prison? Murder? Rape? As a company that has millions of artists on your service, you don't want to be put in a position like that because it's simply unfeasible. You rather let the customer be the judge and decide what they want to engage with.

Personally, i rather be able to make that decision than end up with a store that misses half of the games i want to buy and makes it harder for devs to put their games out there.

GOG has murkied the waters a bit over time, but i thought that the idea of having this store curated around quality classic PC titles was a very potent idea. We're just at a point where so many games are being made that even if you got rid of the 'my first game' type of projects, it would still not be a store you want to scroll through looking for a game you want to play. Also, perhaps some of those 'my first project' types of games would've been really cool. Like that Dogolrax game that Jason(?)played during an extra life stream. A 5$ product, sexy anime lady in the thumbnail. graphics that don't immediatly instill you with confidence, but as soon as Jason was exploring this weird alien world with crazy bosses, multiple people in the chat were like 'oh man.. this looks pretty awesome! '

Steam Link (which I use frequently), workshop, and access to a lot more games. As I said, the "less usable" claim goes right over my head. If you're like me you only open the client to either play games or buy a specific game you already know you want. The avalanche of garbage is irrelevant to me.

@luchalma: I feel like that's a chicken-egg situation though. If Steams major selling point is the broader selection, then the best way others can compete is to neutralize that advantage. But if they need a bigger user base to increase their selection then they're just back to square one.

So, uh, they were curating the marketplace BEFORE? Going full laissez faire doesn’t exactly seem like much of a shift, given how much of the store is inundated with disposable trash. At least we can rest assured that trashy visual novels will be safe from those who would take them.

Admittedly, the dark reality of the steam marketplace as a consumer is that I already know what I’m going to buy 80% of the time, and the other 20% is when something with good word-of-mouth goes on sale. That doesn’t excuse it, obviously. I have to imagine it’s a nightmare for smaller developers, but even if things were like they used to be 5-6 years ago, I’m not sure how much I’d actually comb though the marketplace in search of some hypothetical “hidden gem” currently buried under mounds of asset flips and lazy android ports.

I've uninstalled Steam, they have done more harm than good to the gaming marketplace and I won't support them anymore.

I'm capable of finding what I want so I'll still buy direct from Steam if the price is right, or if that's the only place where it's available and I want it. That said, I think this is way too big of a swerve in course correction. Guess there's more money in seedy visual novels than we thought.

I also hope this doesn't set a precedent in Valve kowtowing to their shitty forum communities.