Alternate title: “Boobs and shotguns for everyone!”
In a reversal from recent moves that were since walked back, Steam has announced that they plan to let just about anything sell on Steam. Valve long since gave up on curating, instead welcoming increasing masses of shovelware. This seems like the next logical step: no curation at all.
Our friend Wilhelm is not pleased. Myself, I figure we already walked off that ledge. This is acknowledging it, not changing it. One absolutely could go with Steam’s origin vision of highly curated content. I do not know if there is a market for it right now, but you could do that. Steam tries for the best of both worlds by both offering everything and having explicit curators. Pick your own experience.
I will probably be unhappy if I open Steam and it looks like the red light district, or the bad actually drives out the good, not just makes an attempt at drowning it. But I am more offended by low quality games than by purportedly offensive content, so the shovelware already hit me where Murder Simulator 5000 or Naked Anime Boobies S will not. And we are online right now, so you have access to all the murder and boobies you want.
I will count myself as having underestimated the problem if we start getting frequent pop-up advertisements for Midweek Madness featuring porn or Holocause Simulator. I will count the problem as vastly overblown if Valve goes on to release better filtering and moderation tools, like the ability to suppress large swaths of crap content.
: Zubon
I probably would have been less annoyed if Valve had said they were simply not going to curate and left it at that rather than indulging in an attempt to cast themselves in a more favorable light by assuring us that somebody there will be as against any given offensive title as the average customer. And since I wrote that first piece we’ve discovered that “trolling” is going to be their excuse to bounce out anything they really don’t like, which makes me wondered why they bothered stirring up this whole thing in the first place.