After recent backlash from blocking sexually explicit content, Valve has decided to not just be more lenient with its curation practices on Steam, but rather to just go ahead and remove them all together. In a recent blog post, Valve’s Erik Johnson explains that, “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.”
However, not everything is so clean cut. In recent months Valve issued warnings to publishers of eroge games threatening to take them down unless their content was censored. Eroge games originated in Japan and typically contain what would be considered softcore pornography. However, most of these games are already censored in order to appear on Steam. Valve’s problem seemed to concern the fact that many of these games can be patched to be uncensored, though the files needed to do so lay outside of Steam. While Valve apologized to the developers who received the warnings, they did state that the games were still under review.
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.”
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