Valve Responds to the Possibility of Banning "Adult" Games

[ARikozuM]

 

Response on the Steam Community

 

 

Let's remain civil and keep "weeb" comments to a minimum. 

Spoiler

And by "minimum" I mean "I expect the first three comments to say 'weeb trash'".

 

I've long been a fan of visual novels and have purchased many through Steam with less of them on ITCH.IO. This ordeal has been concerning to many fans of this genre, especially to those that enjoy the unaltered direction developers intended, and Valve stayed silent to the community while they discussed among themselves. 

 

Quote

Contrary to many assumptions, this isn't a space we've automated - humans at Valve are very involved, with groups of people looking at the contents of every controversial title submitted to us. Similarly, people have falsely assumed these decisions are heavily affected by our payment processors, or outside interest groups. Nope, it's just us grappling with a really hard problem.

They've addressed many of the community's concerns about larger AAA titles remaining active despite including "adult content", which may or may not have included a unicorn (+5 if you get the reference). Users have also expressed concern over PayPal's possible dislike of purchasing adult goods with their service, though I call bullshit since there's no reason for PayPal to deny a purchaser from using their money as they would like. Valve is also stating that any submissions are vetted by humans and not robots as we've all likely assumed. 

 

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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.

This is exactly the response I was hoping Valve would give us. Let the wallets of the masses do the talking. Let the users downvote and report content. Give the decision of support to the players. If someone is willing to pay for a game, as long as it doesn't infringe on the safety of others, it should be supported as they would like to. If you purchased HuniePop for dem ___, but stayed for the atrociously addictive puzzles, it was always your decision. Unless you woke up and just predicted "Aiko is best gurl" and purchased the game (kudos on being clairvoyant AND correct). 

 

Valve will be expanding a few tools for users to gain better control over their recommendations:

The ability to lock certain tags from your view (though I hope they expand it to "mild", "medium", and "hot" "extreme") NOTE: this is already possible but Valve is presumably going to make it stand out a bit more. 

Developers will have a better tagging and submission system so that they can be transparent about the content of their creations. 

 

Lastly:

Spoiler

To be explicit about that - if we allow your game onto the Store, it does not mean we approve or agree with anything you're trying to say with it. If you're a developer of offensive games, this isn't us siding with you against all the people you're offending. 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. 

Valve is taking the position of "don't be a dick". They'll allow your project on the platform, but if you piss everyone off you will be left alone. 

 

I'm glad it didn't cost us the potential for having these games in one location, though we should purchase directly whenever possible. 

[ItsMitch]

retoast my dude?

[ARikozuM]

I must have missed the thread on the first two pages.