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Valve’s recent brush with obscene and harmful content is the latest incident that exposes one of Steam’s key weaknesses. Abdicating its responsibility as a content host has led the market leader to alienate developers and damage its own brand.
Steam’s content policy has been a regular source of confusion, coming to a boil in mid-2018. The company issued delisting warnings to developers of visual novels aimed at an adult audience and featuring nudity.
The storefront ultimately relaxed its warnings, but had already tipped off a series of questions about its ambiguous definitions of what is acceptable on Steam. The result was a reaffirmation that Valve is willing to take money from almost any developer, provided the content isn’t deemed by Valve to be “illegal or straight up trolling.”
A few months later, Steam permitted the first uncensored adult game, leaning on filters to weed out sexual content. While PIN-protected family accounts might safeguard minors, they don’t shield developers who are caught in the blast zone when Steam lets a game like Hatredor the recently removed sexual violence fantasy Rape Day from developer Desk Plant come anywhere near its store.
https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/18/18271380/valve-steam-content-policy-rape-day-report
Whether one wants to come at this from a free speech angle or vote with your dollar angle and let that sort it out... I can't disagree with much of what this article has to say.
Now, despite Epics Games Store picking up a few high profile exclusives as of late and offering a very alluring business proposition for many developers, Steam is here to stay at least for now, it is a more complete package in terms of features and Epic continues to make certain decisions and people have found dodgy things the program has done that has created privacy concerns.
But from a pure business angle Valve is ****ing up here, big time, forget about controversy about Rape Day or School Shooter Simulator... There is some content that has launched without even an executable file that I have seen, if that's the level of nonchalant care they take in ensuring product integrity that goes on their storefront... I dunno what to tell them and that doesn't even begin to cover the myriad of broken asset flips that are barely playable that have proliferated throughout the store.
But Valves approach to this entire situation is asking for trouble, they are asking to be continually pulled into an entirely avoidable situation that is baffling because there isn't really any need for it, I don't see what you're really getting out of it to allow things like this to happen in the first place.
But what do you think?