Valve has faced a few sticky situations over the past few weeks regarding the content available on their online store. First, Valve removed a number of visual novels from their store, citing “sexual content” as the reason for doing so. Valve later walked this back, but maintained their stance on uncensored patches created for the games. Valve also removed the game House Party from their store due to the uncensored nudity present, but also walked that back when the developers applied censored mode by default.
Adult situations aren’t the only games Valve has had to deal with recently. Active Shooter, a school shooting simulator, was recently released to the Steam store and subsequently removed the title. In a statement, Valve said, “Ata [Berdiyev, the game’s creator] is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation.”
The Statement
Today, Valve issued a statement in response to these situations. In it, they mention their recent past, and mention what they feel is the best response to this situation:
“So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn't be the ones deciding this. If you're a player, we shouldn't be choosing for you what content you can or can't buy. If you're a developer, we shouldn't be choosing what content you're allowed to create. 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.
With that principle in mind, 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. 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. We already have some tools, but they're too hidden and not nearly comprehensive enough. We are going to enable you to override our recommendation algorithms and hide games containing the topics you're not interested in. So if you don't want to see anime games on your Store, you'll be able to make that choice. If you want more options to control exactly what kinds of games your kids see when they browse the Store, you'll be able to do that. And it's not just players that need better tools either - developers who build controversial content shouldn't have to deal with harassment because their game exists, and we'll be building tools and options to support them too.”
You can read the entire statement here.
If this statement is any indication, Valve seems to be serious about allowing games that some may consider offensive to live on their store. They also seem to help make the store a safer place for all users by introducing a more comprehensive content control system. This compromise should do well to ensure the safety of users who might not want to see offensive games and protect the free speech of individuals who wish to create games that will undoubtedly stir up controversy. It remains to be seen how Valve will handle users who intentionally bypass these systems, but that’s sure to be a topic of conversation for Valve internally.
We know this story was a little heavy. Lighten the mood by checking out the story of one gentleman who thought he was playing Grand Theft Auto V with his personal vehicle!
