This week, Valve announced they would permit any game to be hosted on its market-leading platform, Steam, as long as it did not contain illegal content and is not what can be classified as a “trolling game”. This met with praise from people who criticise what they perceive as any form of censorship, but also with a lot of annoyance and anger from people who felt that Valve was washing its hands of its responsibility to reduce hostility on the Steam marketplace.
A little bit of the background leading up to this decision — Steam has seen a spate of games recently (and perhaps not so recently, if you count examples such as Shower With Your Dad Simulator and Hatred) that could be said to have no artistic merit and are instead aimed solely at enraging people. It also faced recent controversy after cracking down on games with erotic content, a policy that disproportionately ended up affecting LGBTQA+ and erotic visual novel content. Valve later apologised, looked at its decision to issue take-down notices again, trotted off with its tail between its legs and duly sat down to consider how it was going to respond to the changing landscape of content people put up for sale on Steam.
I was seeing a lot of ire directed specifically at Valve, and I do believe that they have misstepped in their new policy (which has already displayed potential for confusion). However, I’m not sure it’s that helpful to look just at Valve. It seems as though a lot of the potential fixes for Valve’s laissez-faire approach are hindered by just how out of touch moderation and classification of games is as a whole. Instead, it feels as though we should be looking into why Valve have reacted the way they did and look to changing the entire system behind approving games for sale. I really look forward to hearing your opinions on Valve’s reaction in the comments, since I know mine might not be shared by everyone!
Source: Destructoid Valve’s hands-off approach to moderation is part of a larger problem with game classification