Valve has allowed any games with legal content to be published on Steam
Valve has announced the rejection of censorship in games released on the Steam platform. The company said that they do not want to decide for gamers which games they should or should not play. Therefore, Valve allows you to publish titles on Steam with any legitimate content, with the exception of projects created for the sake of outright trolling.
The company announced this on the official Steam forum. Valve representatives noted that there are a lot of opinions in the world about what topics can and cannot be considered acceptable in video games. This applies not only to violence and other content for an adult audience, but also issues such as gender, race, nationality, political views and other points, the presentation of which in games can hurt someone’s feelings.
“We have returned to one of the main principles underlying the Steam store and the Steam Direct program. Valve should not choose which content a player can or cannot buy, and Valve should not specify which content a developer can create. This choice is made by you, and our role is to give you the tools and help you get what you want conveniently and quickly,” the company said in a statement.
At the same time, Valve stressed that the free policy of the store does not mean that the company supports and shares the ideas of the authors of games that offend other people.
Valve announced a revision of the publishing policy on Steam immediately after it removed the scandalous Active Shooter game dedicated to mass killings in American schools from the store. An online petition to Valve demanding to ban the publication of this game has gained almost 300 thousand votes.
Following Active Shooter, the company withdrew from sale more than a dozen games, among which were such titles as Suicide Simulator, AIDS Simulator, Glitch Simulator, ISIS Simulator and other projects created for the sake of jokes and trolling.
Along with this, Valve refused to make claims against the authors of erotic visual novels, although back in mid-May of this year it demanded that the creators of games in this genre remove them from Steam under threat of account blocking. In response, the developers of the novels began to switch to the GOG platform, where there is no such strict censorship.
Reaction to Valve’s statement
In the gaming industry, Valve’s new policy was met ambiguously. Founder of an online indie games store Itch.io Leaf Corcoran called Valve’s position absurd and harmful.
“When the platform allows you to host everything except illegal content and explicit trolling, it’s ridiculous. Please keep your malicious, belittling, discriminating, bullying, insulting and humiliating games away from Iitch.io . We keep the ban button ready,” Corcoran told Games Industry.
Adam Rosenberg, the author of Mashable web edition, spoke in a similar spirit regarding Valve.
“Although Apple has turned its App Store into a “fenced garden,” but it greatly prevents racists, homophobes and other hate merchants from making money on their product. It’s a pity that we can’t also say about Steam,” he wrote.
Forbes magazine journalist Erik Kain also criticized Valve’s decision, but for a different reason. He is not against controversial games from the point of view of morality and ethics, but Kane is concerned about the abundance of low-quality content that Steam is already overflowing with. He compared the platform to a bookstore that sells unfinished editions and books without half the pages. According to Eric, with the new Valve policy, there will be even more gaming garbage on Steam.
Game designer and BAFTA Award winner in the field of video games Brenda Romero, on the contrary, supported Valve on Twitter, writing that she opposes any form of censorship.
I am against any form of censorship, and support Valve in having an open platform. https://t.co/hTbCbCNUX3
— Brenda Romero (@br) June 7, 2018
