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"Who gets to be on the Steam store?" - Valve plans to start allowing everything on Steam that isn't "illegal or straight up trolling"
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- Title
- Steam Blog :: Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store?
- Published
- Jun 6 2018
- Word count
- 1169 words
I'm really glad to see this stance. Steam is easily the largest, simplest platform for consumers to use for gaming, consolidating games into a single service rather than leaving them splintered and spread across multiple services that you're likely to forget about. Opening themselves up to accepting all legal, good faith content provides even greater value to the consumer, and makes things less of a headache for devs and publishers.
As long as they keep up the good work with robust filters and searches, I'm fine with it. Let a thousand flowers bloom, even if I wouldn't pick them myself.
For instance, I have zero interest in visual novels. But I can see some people are super interested in them. As long as I have a way to search that can reliably filter them out, I'm more than happy to let these organic movements flourish and do their own thing.
I wonder how this will play out.
Putting the sexual content aside, eventually there's going to be some very distasteful content on Steam. How well will they segregate this content from other content? What about steamworks integration?
They say they will have two red lines: legal and trolling. The first is hard to implement regionally but at least there's a guideline to follow. The second is ripe for abuse -- is intentionally provocative art trolling? Where's the line between art that's meant to make people respond, even viscerally, to challenge people's preconceptions and beliefs, and trolling? Is it going to boil down to something like this famous quote?: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."
It sounds like they will be taking a pretty hardline stance with this. They will likely also tag such submissions in such a way that they will be filterable.
If they don't outright ban problematic content, they'll probably take the Reddit "Quarantine" approach where only users that are explicitly searching for a certain type of content will find it.
Trolling is a bizarre rule and steam has already proven that its moderation is poor, to say the least. However, I think it's more for people who are inciting hate whether it is through racist, sexist and other problematic messages in their games. Ultimately, it is Steam's responsibility to protect its brand and allowing problematic content hurts that.
The trolling rule in specific is probably in reference to the recent debacle with Active Shooter
Not only that, but lots of troll content is explicitly obvious. Games get created with the likeness of news-involved individuals, such as people in current court dramas like sexual abuse proceedings.
Troll games are very very obvious and easy to spot. They're low quality, clearly intended to provoke based on a very recent topic. Would have zero recognition or attention if they were not about the current topic.
If a game actually has value beyond that of the topic - ie, is a game that isn't smashed together and terrible. Then its position will expand beyond just being troll content, at that point it will be an actual game, but with a topical subject matter.
I see troll content as the famous description of what is and isn't pornography:
"You know it when you see it".
On one hand, this is nice to hear. On the other, much of Steam is already filled with garbage, low-effort games and opening the floodgates like this might just worsen the problem.
There's still a $100 barrier, not that that really helps.
I'm in two minds about it, I like that it's much more open and not restricted by American prudishness but at the same time a totally hands off approach... I just can't see it leading anywhere apart from the sewer eventually. I don't even look for new games on Steam anymore since I agree it's just full of utter dross.
Oh cool, Valve gets to continue doing nothing to make their platform a desirable place to be and get to claim credit for supporting "free speech" or whatever.
They were removing visual novels, but people didn't like that. That's what this is about.
Yeah, I'm happy about that specific case. I can imagine it extends beyond that, though.
They didn't remove them though, right? As far as I know their algorithms auto-removed them due to a bunch of reports, then they had to go through and replace them manually. It was a coordinated effort to remove posts.
They removed a game recently about school shootings, I think it's more about that.
What about the platform is undesirable? I would understand your point if we were talking about a forum, but this is a catalog of video games.
I don't care to see some equivalent of "gang rape epic rekt feminazi simulator 2018" when I scroll down new games. I have deeper problems with giving these kinds of games a platform, but here I just mean from a user experience standpoint, it's awful.
It's also pretty clearly just laziness / unwillingness to invest in enforcing any rules they've ever had...so they're just dropping the rules. This goes for all parts of steam, not only the store. Supposedly there's not supposed to be hate speech and harassment on Steam but we all know almost no one ever gets banned for it. I'm predisposed to liking Valve because as far as game development goes I think they're some of the best to ever do it, but they've proven that they can't handle being the biggest game distribution platform, nor can they handle managing the community features they stack on top of that.
Steam is already full of low quality asset flips piggybacking off of memes, abandonware (especially early access titles), and just generally bad games, drowning out indie developers who put their lives into their games. This will only make it worse, and Valve is just making an excuse not to have to exercise any critical thought to maintain any level of quality.
Wait, this wasn't the case already? There are tons of terrible, low effort games and abandonware on steam already. I shudder to think of what this might allow
Space (cough) Engineers (cough)
Launch on Early Access, make a quick buck, recycle assets in Medieval Engineers, make more monry, jack up the price 200% to triple A levels and stay in Early Access for the fourth year.
I got it for free so I'm a bit biased, but I haven't hated Space Engineers. I played it quite a bit about 4 months ago and it seemed decent. I would only buy it on sale but it's a good bit of fun if you have a building itch. My only complaint is the UI can be really clanky and once you build your ship there's not tons to do.
Mods are great for it too.
No, they've been removing visual novels which was controversial to say the least.
To be fair, we don't need another god damn Sakura VN cluttering up the store so I see where they're going with that
Good.
Well, I "left" steam some time ago in favor of GoG but if they deliver on this, I could go back from time to time to see what's there.
The reason i choose gog are not related to this articles but still, it's good to see the stance they choose. IF they follow through.
How'd you do that?
Just left your library, or bought everything again?
I left my library. I mean it's not like I lost access, I just stopped buying things.
When I did it I think I was around 3-4k € of value but I'm always been a deal shopper so I paid a lot less money for that.
Also, the recent GoG connect helped me bring on GoG lots of games I've had on Steam.
And in the end, on Steam I had like 3/4 of the games being fluff gotten in package deal either on Steam or [something]-bundles websites.
Would this mean crap like Zonitron can come back? It's not trolling, it's just shovelware.
Well the thing is that on Steam that approach can be effective.
If I can hide what don't interest me, there is zero chance I'm going to have to deal with it and that absolutely a good thing. Because you're not on Steam to have others interact with you, you're there to buy stuff and leave.
On Reddit, or any platform for discussion, it's not really feasible, without a moderation, for the simple reason that even if you hide some content (like through RES) you still interact with other people that will let that content "leak" anyway into your favourite content.
What is “straight up trolling”, and who gets to decide that? This seems like really unclear communication to me.
That recent school shooting simulator, comes to mind.
Valve. It's their platform so why shouldn't they get to make that call?
Right, but say I’m deciding whether I want to make a game. How do I know whether Valve will consider it “straight up trolling” or not? There should be clearer guidelines for what they mean when they say that.
Well, you could look at their history of removals to get a sense of what they consider "trolling" and compare those to your game idea to determine if they might view it that way as well. And if you can't tell from that, you could also email them and ask if the game you're making would be appropriate or considered "trolling".
It's really no different than ~ "don't be an asshole" rule. Common sense goes a long way and not everything needs a 5000 page rulebook.
The problem with throwing in "clearer guidelines" is that you run into cases where people will deliberately toe the line so that they're not breaking the rules according to the written word, but are still clearly working against the intent of those rules. It's the "I'm not touching you!" scenario, and the best way to avoid the "I'm not touching you!" defense is with broad rules that apply to multiple arbitrary classes of shitty behavior instead of a few concretely defined ones.
That being said, here's a general rule of thumb: if you're not trolling, you probably have nothing to worry about because odds are you've developed your game in such a way that it's clear that you've published the game in good faith. Additionally, if you're worried about how the subject matter of your game will be received, then you're knowingly entering risky territory in the first place, which means you'll likely be taking extra precautions to e.g. add disclaimers and carefully consider the purpose of the game and whether or not you're handling it in a non-trolly manner. In other words, you'll likely police yourself well enough that if you're publishing the game in good faith, it will probably pass the sniff test.