In recent times, Valve has struggled to draw a line in terms of what’s allowed on Steam. Controversy has raged over the removal of games with explicit sexual content, as well as objectionable themes such as the glorification of school shooters. In response to all of this, Valve has decided to open the floodgates even wider.
In a blog post musing on the difficulty of deciding on a case-by-case basis what should and should not be allowed on Steam, Valve’s Erik Johnson explained that the company does, in fact, have a team of humans that looks at “every controversial title submitted to us”, and employees frequently disagree like Steam users do.
“The harsh reality of this space, that lies at the root of our dilemma, is that there is absolutely no way we can navigate it without making some of our players really mad,” Johnson wrote.
And so, Valve has come to a conclusion: Allow everything, but give users tools to avoid the games they find most egregious.
“We’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling,” said Johnson.
“Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see.”
He said that some of those tools already exist, but other new ones will allow users to override Steam’s recommendation algorithms and hide, say, anime games – which strike me as the least of Steam’s potential problems under this new policy – from your store page.
In addition, Valve plans to improve anti-harassment tools for developers, so as to prevent them from being mobbed for creating controversial games.
All that said, laws across the world mean that “everything” may not be allowable in some places, so Valve’s still gonna have to handle some submissions on a case-by-case basis.
“Our current thinking is that we’re going to push developers to further disclose any potentially problematic content in their games during the submission process, and cease doing business with any of them that refuse to do so honestly,” Johnson said.
He concluded by explaining that Valve will certainly not approve of everything it, well, approves, but The Market Will Decide or whatever.
“If you’re a developer of offensive games, this isn’t us siding with you against all the people you’re offending,” said Johnson.
“There will be people throughout the Steam community who hate your games, and hope you fail to find an audience, and there will be people here at Valve who feel exactly the same way. However, offending someone shouldn’t take away your game’s voice. We believe you should be able to express yourself like everyone else, and to find others who want to play your game. But that’s it.”
Comments
72 responses to “Valve Says It Will Now Allow ‘Everything’ On Steam, Unless It’s Illegal Or ‘Straight Up Trolling’”
Well, I’m sure people wont utterly lose their shit in any way whatsoever at Valve for this particular stance.
Ikr. The balls on Gaben…
You’re dead right, there’ll be a huge uproar the moment something vaguely controversial is allowed to remain.
That said, good decision. I’d much rather the classification not censorship approach. If some people want “visual novels” with sex and nudity let them. If I can choose not to have those games pushed at me then I’m fine with it.
More tools to stop harassment directed at devs, I read that as “Giving controversial developers more censorship power over their game’s comment sections” Steam is truly the wild west now but one where the sheriff only does something when the train has already been robbed & derailed, This will mean more controversial games hitting the news, Steam/Valve are detrimental to gaming.
So the people who think this is a good idea would also think tv and radio stations or newspapers should just give up editorial control? or imagine if Facebook accepted defeat and allowed it be full of racist, sexist and disturbing gutter trash? (sure it is still not perfect but way better than it was). I just see it as Steam simply gives up and decides to trust game devs and gamers, what could possible go wrong. Cringe. its like they finally realised their once brilliant platform is now nothing but a haven for mediocrity, so they might as well go all in. Go full Deadwood.
Even in countries that have freedom of speech guaranteed by law, that does not guarantee them a right to a platform for it, or consequences from it.
I hold out to hope if certain games are identified as say promoting hate, they are not actively placed in positions of advertising. Something tells me they wont even try and do that.
Most of what you are complaining about falls into that category.
If Valve allows games with no executive file on to the store, What makes you think they’re looking at games for illegal activity etc.?
Where did they say there was no executive control?
They specifically said they still would still stop games that were illegal or blatant trolls.
A file with an Execute/ Run app etc. Valve doesn’t check to see if games actually work before allowing them onto the store, This is what i said above.
Wow really that’s pretty shonky!
The actual article addresses that. They talk about creating better tools for users to restrict what games will be shown in their feeds.
Here’s the thing, if it’s legal it shouldn’t be blocked because some person arbitrarily decided they don’t like it. Lets say some of the steam review committee hate Battle Royale style games, by your logic they’d be right to block them from everyone. Or it could be R Rated games like Witcher or Doom. Or crime games like GTA series or Mafia or Hitman.
If you’re a delivery platform then you should remain agnostic. The users will decide with their wallets if shit games make money or not. And if developers abuse the system Valve has already stated they’ll boot them from the platform.
Taking offence to something isn’t justification to censor its content, as long as you have the ability to filter the content without its removal and the content adheres to law.
Facebook should let the sexists and racists have a platform. If you let the extreme left have a platform then you should also provide the extreme right.
To me the idiot shouting that whites are the supreme race sounds just as stupid as the idiot to believes cultural appropriation is a negative thing. (When you break down the ideas they have similar structures such as preservation of the group).
Conservative vs liberal, order vs chaos, collectivism vs individualism, biological vs social constructivism both need to be voiced.
In both their are grains of truth.
If we fail to listen to others opinions and understand others points of view we will do a piss poor job of changing opinions and end up in San Fransisco driving a Prius and enjoying the smell of our own farts (or the conservative equivalent).
Steam is providing the platform and people decide if media on that platform is worthy of their time.
With the TV and radio example, there’s only so many hours in a day so broadcasting one thing means something else will have to be skipped. That doesn’t really apply to a service like Steam that could potentially host an unlimited number of games.
The parts of Steam that are constrained are the store front page, and search results (on the assumption that results too far down the list effectively don’t exist). It sounds like they’re trying to work on that by adding more ways to customise the recommendation algorithms.
I’d really like to see some options added related to price, gameplay duration, and interactivity.
That way you could filter to stop the $1.99 games appearing, or the converse – to focus on them. And duration is the same, I only want to see games that’ll take me at least 10 hours to complete, or 30 or 100, or the opposite.
And again with interactivity. I’m not sure how you’d evaluate it, but if a game is 100% interactive (ie: you’re in control the whole time, shooting, flying, whatever) that’s more appealing than one where you watch a video, then click a choice, then watch another video (interactive story). Seeing that % would be useful in decision making.
I don’t really care about the subject matter and content of games so much as the quality of them. This just seems like it’s going to mean Steam gets flooded with even more low quality games that are made “for the lols” or to continue to prove that sex sells.
So what? If those games sell enough copies then they’ve proven they deserve a place because people actually bought them. Remember Steam has a return policy now so if it’s utter shit you could get your money back.
Incoming even more shovelware.
Steam is not the place it used to be.
This is the correct approach, despite some of the concerns above. It’s better to allow everything on the platform and then let individual users decide what they want to see, than to have Valve decide what everyone should be allowed to see using a one-size-fits-all standard. Steam should not be a curated experience at the platform level, it should provide the tools needed to make curated experiences at the community level.
This is true. Steam is absolutely infected with absolute trash, to the point where it buries decent games, but attempting to restrict games because X doesn’t like Y is a shitty way to operate a store front like Steam.
Will it lead to more low quality shovelware? Probably, but the onus is on Valve to finally fix the storefront to make it harder to come across this trash. And yes someone will probably reply with “But my storefront only shows me stuff I like…” but it clearly doesn’t for everyone and flicking through lists to force its algorithm to not show total trash is a bad way to “fix” the problem.
This is key. The current tools are woefully inadequate. Curators were a failed experiment, and for some reason Valve were fucking tight-fisted about their filtering options. Currently you can only block three tags. THREE. Why three? There is a LOT more than that which I need to block, thank you very much!
Racing, sports, MOBAs, PVP survival, bullet-hell, platformers, MMOs, Battle Royale, visual novels, clickers, endless runners, rogue-likes, Free to Play, 2D Fighter, 3D Fighter… my GOD there’s so much I don’t want to see!
I don’t understand the curators. I follow 1, because he liked a lot of indie horror games that I liked and as soon as you start searching for indie tittles on steam your are in for a world of hurt. For some reason though the games the this curator reviews negatively still appear on lists for me as something I may like, just because the curator played it, even though he hated it.
I encountered that issue with following a curation group that monitored games abandoned by devs or which were flat-out asset-flipping shovel-ware. Seemed to have been solved at some point in the last year, though.
This is something I wanted to set up years ago – a sort of meta-reviewing site which matched your tastes to other people so you got more reliable reviews. It should be based not just on likes but dislikes. Just because you both like say Star Wars isn’t a good indicator because so many people like Star Wars.
But if you both like Star Wars and both hate Star Trek you’d probably get closer matches.
Yes so much.
You’d also need to control for external some external factors. For example, people who subscribe to the Humble Monthly Bundle probably own (or even play) many of the same games. That’s not an indication that they have similar tastes because they didn’t pick that collection.
That’s why I said like and dislike not ownership. I think it has to be based on active decision making from both parties. The example you mention is one reason, the other is missing matches. eg: I love Doom but someone else hasn’t played it at all. That doesn’t mean they dislike it, just that they haven’t played it. That’s the whole purpose of reviews, to find out if someone with similar tastes enjoyed something you haven’t experienced and help you decide whether to try it or not.
To go into more detail, the idea was that there’d be a series of set “genres” or categories that you’d have to like/dislike to create a more general profile. So you could say, like Action, but dislike horror. Then there’d be more precise like/dislike at a title level to provide more accurate matching. So you could say like Aliens, even though it’s technically horror.
The only problem with that is that hardly anyone consistently rates everything they play. For example, SteamSpy says that it estimates that the recent game Vampyr has been bought by 50,000-100,000 customers. But the store page only lists 1,402 reviews.
If your recommendation algorithm only looks at user ratings, you’re limiting the data set to a self selected subset of the community. The tastes of the group of gamers who have played a game may be different to the tastes of the sub-group of gamers who rated that game. So you probably do want to use ownership and play time as inputs to the algorithm.
No, I deliberately wanted it to be based on similarity of like/dislike and unrelated to ownership (for precisely the reasons discussed). It’s not about finding a game with a lot of good reviews, it’s about finding another person with tastes that are really close to yours – then trusting their reviews. That way if they review a brand new game, or an obscure game that barely anyone has tried you can (probably) trust their review.
Or heck, there’s stuff I love where the popular consensus is that it’s crap. But if I had a “matched” reviewer and they said something was enjoyable I’d give it a try based on the strength of their review, even though hundreds, or thousands of other people say “it’s crap”.
The tools should absolutely be improved, no question.
Yeah I dunno, like any retailer there really should be some minimum quality standards. Content wise, sure, everything should be on the table. But I think basic functionality and originality need to be looked at before that’s even a consideration. No-one wants asset flips or shit that straight up doesn’t work.
Much as I don’t like asset flips personally, I don’t think it’s right to deny them access to Steam’s marketplace. There’s an audience for them, even if I’m not one of them. Games that are just straight up broken should come under either of the two conditions Valve did indicate – an unusable game isn’t legal, and/or could be seen as trolling.
That said, I think the message from Valve here is intended to be about moral standards, not quality ones.
Fair enough. I’ve always assumed the majority of whatever market there is for asset flips was just accidental purchases – uninformed consumers or kids buying them without really knowing that they’re garbage. But there could be a legit market for them I guess, seems weird to me but to each their own.
That being said I still don’t have a problem with denying them access. Not a great analogy, but if I owned a CD store (lol, 20 years ago maybe…) and someone came in with a bunch of creative commons tunes burned onto a CD, I wouldn’t sell them. I’m not down with people selling other peoples’ work for profit even if it’s technically legal, especially in a creative field.
Also I suppose, at what point does the quality issue become one about morals anyway. A developer releasing a game that’s purely designed to fleece some unsuspecting consumer doesn’t sound like it’s being sold in good faith.
Where do you draw the line between an asset flip that’s a dodgy cash grab and a beginning developer working on their first game using pre-packaged assets to save time while they focus on gameplay? You could get a non-artist type who produces a fun game using pre-packaged assets.
As long as they aren’t illegally ripping off assets (stealing them from another game) then let them be. IF their games suck they’ll be called out for it quick enough.
Excellent question – do you prevent asset flips but potentially cut out genuine, hard working developers? or do you ensure the genuine developers get a chance but in the process allow a whole bunch of garbage onto the platform. Ideally there’s a middle ground out there, but steam has decided to go with the latter option – my guess? it’s not because they’re being magnanimous to budding developers, it’s because they get a cut of the profits from those dodgy asset flips.
I still think the market decides. Whenever one of the dodgy asset flips hits you see immediate backlash. I can’t recall seeing any where there’s been a lot of positive reviews and it’s only months later that everyone goes “omg I got ripped off”.
People are so vocal on steam and in 3rd party gaming websites that dodgy games get called out.
Yeah true. I’d rather we didn’t have to police it ourselves but yeah, the market decides eventually.
Wasn’t the Nintendo Seal of Quality introduced in the late 80s to combat this type of shovelware?
Maybe Valve should do this through their Curators?
While it may have functioned that way, that wasn’t its primary intention.
A lot of what Nintendo did back then was to counter the strong stigma against video games thanks to the 1983 market crash. The seal of quality was more for consumer assurance than confirmation of quality (just look at the AVGN videos where the LJN games were bad yet had that same seal).
As for Valve, I think even if they adopted the same measure and people overlooked such an act emulating Nintendo, many will still see the move as far too little much too late.
While I like the idea, I wonder whether it’s risky. I suspect they’d only be able to do a positive indicator. If they started attaching negative ones to games there’s always a concern that it opens them to legal proceedings. “They deliberately marked my game down to inhibit sales and cost me income of xxx”.
It’s certainly an idea that could be investigated more though.
There is a concern I have about this though. To quote the article:
This is all well and good, but what about the reverse direction?
This I feel is the real problem that Steam has. It’s not the asset flips by their nature, nor even the practices that grew from them (trading card framing, etc).
The real problem, to me, is what happens when the one executing the abuse is the developer and the ones receiving the abuse are the consumers.
There are number of such developers but the main ones that come to mind are the Romine Brothers (Digital Homicide), Ata Berdiyev (too many names to list), and Andrew Watt (#notaprivacyviolation).
I’m pretty such Watt alone is enough to raise concern. Even if one omits what he did to SidAlpha, his remaining actions on the Steam forums are of the most toxic imaginable.
Developers such as Watt has basically no tolerance to criticism of their products (complete re-uploads of asset kits or otherwise) and basically abused the flagging system for reviews and were quick to delete forum threads and bar users being critical of them.
The list could on but I’m already over labouring the obvious. If Valve is going to change the rules, I hope they also remember the like of Watt, Berdiyev, and the Romine’s as it is their actions that shame Value far more than the lack of quality (or even the lack of an executable) of the games on the store front.
It’s an issue of course. I can appreciate the difficulty Valve is faced with when deciding how to approach that, because there are two competing factors:
1. If reviews are untouchable, bad developers can’t manipulate it to fake reputation for their game. But…
2. If reviews are untouchable, abusive behaviour from bad players will just end up being dumped in there where the dev can’t moderate the abuse.
Probably the middle ground option is to disallow devs to modify reviews in any way, but allow them to report them for Valve to review and ensure there’s no abusive behaviour in them. Hopefully Valve will continue to employ moderation staff to handle that sort of thing.
I’d much rather devs weren’t allowed to delete reviews. I don’t care if they respond to them horribly – if anything that strengthens the negative review. But they shouldn’t be allowed to hide negative reviews from other customers.
Your suggestion that they should be able to report them to Valve and allow them to make a decision has merit. If a review is negative but reasonable Valve should let it stay. If the review is meritless (just a person who hates the dev and wants to affect their sales) then fine, Valve can remove the review.
Yep, I agree. While I understand than many bemoan that you can’t simple look at Steam and find good games anymore I don’t think that should be the responsibility of Steam as a marketplace and opening up to almost anything, but with stronger search tools is a good way to address the issue (yes, the search tools have issues, but I still think this is the right way to go).
Besides, aside from a few of the old guard, does anyone actually use steam to discover games? I mean I’ve found a few through those little recommended game streams they incentivise with card drops during sales, but does anyone really go to the front page to find games they haven’t heard of?
I check out the front page once a month or so, and I do find some new titles to check out sometimes. It could definitely be better at that, and something people broadly want to check out to find new things, if they improve the discovery algorithms and especially deliver the settings to control that discovery into the hands of the community.
I think ‘discovery presets’ or along those lines would be awesome. People could share and rate them, and you’d be able to just choose which preset applies to your front page through a dropdown in settings or something. Have it so you subscribe to them like you do with workshop items. Hell, even have it as tabs along the top of the UI so you can switch between multiple presets that you’ve subscribed to, to get different views on the ecosystem.
I do all the time.
It’s very slow annoying and time consuming.
How else do you discover things?
The media only really covers big name releases, unless you have money behind you it’s hard to get promotion.
It’s like when I was growing up, you went to your game store and browsed over the shelves.
Depends on the media you follow really, but I don’t tend to play new titles all that often (it’s cheaper not to, I’m less likely to be disappointed, there’s more time for natural fanbases based on the game itself, rather than the marketing to, develop – fanbases that will often let me know about an interesting title) so the op-eds about an obscure / old / under appreciated game you see quite often is one good way, word of mouth generated after its release (see all the cult games), looking at subreddits discussing game design etc. There’s a whole bunch of ways, but looking at the steam storefront just doesn’t make sense for me.
It’s certainly true that volume of reportage is always higher for games with money behind them, but I find I can pick up on the sorts of ‘I’m doing an article because I’m following a trend’ and ‘I’m doing an article because I really care about this game’ vibes that different articles give off and there’s enough of the latter that it’s pretty easy to find interesting games. Just this year there was a little australian indie roundup and I signed up to the mailing list of the devs of Necrobarista from that article – I think people just don’t click on the articles that do discuss the smaller games, but they’re definitely out there, and I sure as hell wouldn’t expect to see them on Steam’s front page.
I tend to do the same, for basically the same reasons you listed. The only problem I have is a lot of games these days hinge on online play, and particularly large active communities (joy of online multiplayer). I’ve found a few games that sounded interesting have literally died before I got around to playing them because the online community has had their fun and moved on.
While you could argue that if the game community doesn’t last that the game isn’t worth playing. But that’s not always the case, it could still be fun to play for a few months and you’d get your monies worth in that time.
So yeah, I’ve been caught out a couple times buying a game late in it’s life cycle because it’s gotten really cheap but I’ve read reviews that are six months old and not realized people have abandoned it already 🙁
That’s true, although I never really play any multiplayer games apart from TF2 I did miss out on Hawken (pretty cool even when it was nearly dead, since I believe it is quite literally dead) and Tribes: Ascend (Got really into it for one match, couldn’t play it for a while and then it was totally dead a month later when I came back to it) so that is definitely an issue.
This Isn’t a censorship issue though, It’s a ” We’re a business that doesn’t want to have responsibility or provide due care of service like every other store in the world because money” There needs to be standards.
Whose standards though? Yours, mine, someone’s 70 year old mum, a 10 year old?
Everyone has different likes and dislikes, opinions on what’s offensive or not, fun or not and so on. I’d much rather NOT have some random person be the arbitrary rulers over what I can and cannot play. Publishing it all and letting us decide is a much better approach.
Aid’s Simulator, Should that be allowed? If EA published Aid’s simulator, You’d have a problem with that as a decent person right but you want Steam to sell that? Steam is a business like any other except they have no standards at all, Racist, Homophobic games should be a obvious standard.
*shrugs* I wouldn’t buy it but I wouldn’t care if they sold it. They can sell that school shooter thing too, or outright porn games. As long as it’s not illegal have at it. I don’t like it, I don’t buy it.
I find home reno TV shows and singing/talent shows and other reality tv horribly offensive. But just because I don’t like them doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be able to watch them.
I gotta give Grayson some credit here, given how he’s reacted on twitter.
This is straight up news, no snarky opinion or bias to be seen at all.
Anyway, this is nothing but good news. Places like twitter and Polygon would have you think that this is the final straw, that Steam allowing adult games with adult themes (for adults) is literally Hitler, but there’s nothing wrong with this.
As long as the illegal stuff does get filtered out from the store (preferably from getting onto the store in the first place) then this is good. Honestly, it’s something that should’ve been done years ago.
Ahhh, it was only a matter of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
One of the big points of the video game crash wasn’t just the over saturation of games, it was the over saturation of systems and how quickly the were being discontinued and new systems arriving on the market, people were buying consoles to find they were unsupported 6 months later as a new model had been released.
We have 4 big players these days PC, Xbox, PS4 and Nintendo they are long term 5+ year release cycles, Not the over 50 that came and went at random that there was during the crash.
This move by steam isn’t going to suddenly make hundreds of times more games across every platform and make new platforms suddenly appear out of nowhere.
One of the biggest factors was physical oversupply. New publishers popped up, oversupplied the titles they had, then couldn’t refund retailers when they went to return unused stock and so the publishers went under. That issue is basically non-existent in digital distribution.
That’s something I didn’t consider, but yeah you can’t over supply a digital product.
Although companies do try the opposite and raise prices for “rarity”
*looks at digital comic book retailets*
Still needs to have better age restriction and parental controls, cause even a 8 year old can figure out 2018 – 18 = 2000.
While thats fine as a content curation stand point that they have no right to decide the subject or art style of a game cause thats critique, quality assurance and custoner service should still be paramount podition as a store front and sales partner to the games industry and for that they really do need to do better about Steam Direct, to reinstall customer faith in purchasing games.
Even as someone who isn’t into sexual games, I don’t see the issue with them on steam. I justwish we could filter out all the asset flips and low effort games that have nothing to offer.
There really should be a tag for that so we can run a filter…. doesnt need to be as bad as “aset flip” but just a tag to say it was madefrom rpgmaker, unity asset store, etc.
That way if you dont want to wade through games that are store asset made u can filter those
Do you think they wouod get upset if the tag was “low effort”? 😛
Who tags it though?
The user created tags were kind of a failure at times as people would tag games the didn’t like in negative ways.
If you let the dev/pub tag it, well then they wouldn’t put certain tags on it, like rpgmaker knowing that people would avoid it.
Maybe there needs to be some assessment of the users and only responsible ones are allowed to tag games? Not sure how you’d vet the users to decide which ones to grant that privilege but there’s gotta be a way.
I think there is a tag for RPGMaker. If not, there certainly used to be.
As long as they keep shitty asset flips off of the front pages then i’m fine with this approach.
EDIT: after doing a bit more looking into what they are doing, this is incredibly bad and i honestly can see this leading to issues in australia if they allow content to go through un-curated that would be RC’ed here.
Australian Classification’s an interesting point, but I’m pretty sure that’s the developer’s problem, not Valve’s. The developer is the one who has to apply for classification and if it’s denied in Australia, they won’t be able to show up on the Oz Steam. Not sure how the logistics on that work, though. Like, does Valve say, “OK, you’ve ticked the box for global, please provide the documentation of ratings approval for the following countries and we’ll enable it, otherwise please advise us of exceptions?”
It is 100% on the store to stop these things being sold, not the developer or the ratings board. When a game is RC’ed, if a retailer sells that game in Australia they are the one breaking the law, not the developer.
You can’t just go “well i let everyone post whatever they want on my service, it’s not my fault it contained something illegal” it’s how people like the creator of MEGA downloads was arrested for, you have a duty of care for what is on your site, ESPECIALLY if you are making money off of that content.
However, if i recall correctly, online content doesn’t need to be rated, so they can get away with it, but if Steam suddenly has an influx of games that promote drugs and sexual violence, since they’ve already pissed off our government i can see them getting angrier at them.
i’m okay with porn and more adult games being on the store, but not with seemingly non-existent curation.
It’s 100% on the developer to apply for classification, though. So all Valve needs to do is say: “OK, show us a copy of your classification approval if you want to be sold in the regions that require it.” That’s not curation, that’s just satisfying legal requirements, just like you’d ask for licencing info, ceritificates etc before approving pulling the trigger on going live.
And again… That’s not ‘curation’. That’s legals. And they specifically said: no illegal games.
Curation’s about deciding whether to put it up when it’s technically legal, but you need to make an approval decision based on quality/morality.
This is just them saying they wont curate their games anymore
If anything it just means more asset flips on steam clogging up the system and drowning out the real hidden gems
What steam really needs to do is improve it’s rating system. It’s geared at the moment so even average as fook games with 60% good and 40% bad show up as “Mostly Positive”.
Are you sure it’s 60%? I did a quick check just now and saw this showing ‘mixed’ at 65%.
I found a Gamasutra article from a few years ago that listed the brackets as this:
95-99%: Overwhelmingly positive
80-94%: Very positive
80-99% (few reviews): Positive
70-79%: Mostly positive
40-69%: Mixed
20-39%: Mostly negative
0-39% (few reviews): Negative
0-19%: Very negative
0-19% (many reviews): Overwhelmingly negative
These seem reasonable, if correct.
Prepare for an even greater flood of fucking garbage games that dont even work or are missing exe files now
Prepare for the new releases page to be a fucking flood of shitty asset flips and the 6 billionth version of unit Z getting pirated and copied onto the store
Just relying on algorithms means even less quality control than it already has and its got next to fucking nothing right now
So prepare for more shitty asset flips and garbage meme games with no content, or edgelord bullshit like that asset flip school shooting game that looks like a fucking 8 year old designed it and just added a school shooting angle to get the edgelords to buy it
Games shouldnt be policed based on content BUT THEY SHOULD BE FUCKING POLICED BASED ON QUALITY!
enough with the 20 versions of the same unity demo being sold as a full game, enough of these fucks releasing just utter unplayable garbage
Steam kicked off digital homocide for releasing garbage games and threatening to sue steam users but they stopped there when there are hundreds of “developers” just as shitty as them
Take into account that this is all about the developers getting tools to stop harassment this is a joke, In every instance the developer gets all hurt and upset over legitimate criticism Bethesda will out right ban you from CreationClub for calling out their shananigans and Overkill studios do aswell.
So we’ll be stuck with an even worse market that dumps on the consumer all while steam collects their %30…
NO-Steam for all my games + GOG for purchases,.,..,.,.,. Steam is Dead