So, Steam's about to get flooded with Nazis, I guess

Valve have issued a statement about the recent confusing nature of their approach to what content is and isn't allowed on their platform, and rather than come up with a consistent, enforceable policy they have instead decided to abdicate their responsibility and welcome the misogynist white supremacists with open arms.

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.

I know that to some people this might look like they're stepping back and letting The Market decide (as all libertarians/centrists/wastes of carbon can agree) but I hope anybody with a pair of braincells to rub together can see this as the clear dogwhistle that it is. The gates are open to anything that can hide behind the slimmest Free Speech defence.

Also note that Valve decides what counts as illegal or trolling, and given that their reasons for implementing this change are that they've been fucking crap at consistently deciding that so far I can't say that I'm holding out any hope.

Valve is happy to provide a platform for shitty people to sell shitty content to other shitty people, so long as they're taking 30%.

Fuck this, and fuck Valve.

That's kind of horrifying, really. Steam's going to be 50% alt-right school shooting simulators and 50% thinly-disguised anime paedophilia.

I wonder how fully they'll go down this route though. I mean there still has to be some degree of human curation, just to pull the front page and the sales together. I wonder if they'll quietly push the questionable stuff out of sight, so it's there if you know to look for it, but regular users won't get exposed to it.

Who knows. I am wondering what anyone at Valve actually does these days, though, given that they don't make games any more and now don't even monitor their own store front.

They're apparently going to push more of this onto their customers, with tools to curate our own feeds and filter out the kind of stuff that we do or don't want to see.

From their statement:

[Valve's] 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.

Which is also horseshit, because that makes it the responsibility of the people targeted by hateful games to flush it out of their feed once it's already there.

Even Google hasn't managed to do this successfully in any of their products - and filtering content for relevance is their entire company's purpose. How Valve hope to accomplish it, I have no idea.

They won't. This is a mess. Their policies already only amount to 'Oh, we'll take action if there's enough bad press about something, otherwise fuck it', so this can only lead to worse things.

It's also highly questionable about ethics. They're not going to stop bad things getting on the service because it's up to users to make a choice and they don't take any side on what should or shouldn't be said/seen, but they're happily going to continue to take their 30% of all income from anything sold? If you're profiting from the sale of something, then you're endorsing it. That's it. No argument. It's fucking disgusting.

Given that the majority of PC gamers are cunts who clearly think they're better than everyone else (it's true, you know they are), this is only going to go badly. And will it change anything? Of course not. Compared to Steam, every other PC-selling outlet is a drop in the lake - Valve will always continue to have the controlling stake and everyone will continue using it. Hell, it's been the leader for too long now… what, you think people will just dispose of massive Steam libraries full of games because the people controlling it turned out to be the bad guys? Hasn't stopped people eating Nestle chocolate (the CEO thinks water isn't a human right), buying from Amazon (terrible worker ethic, treats staff like dirt for profit) or voting Conservative. So… yeah.

Hasn't stopped people eating Nestle chocolate (the CEO thinks water isn't a human right), buying from Amazon (terrible worker ethic, treats staff like dirt for profit) or voting Conservative

…or using Windows/Microsoft in general, Google, smartphones, Sony, Uber, Facebook, Apple…

I still use Google in a very limited and restricted way. I still have an active Facebook account that I only access through a sandboxed, closed-off browser that I use for nothing else. I have a single cheap smartphone that I don't even use as a mobile device, instead using it like a pocket tablet that just accesses the internet through wifi, with no mobile carrier (and I would love to root the damn thing and dump most, if not all, the Google garbage, but apparently there has been no way found to do so on this thing). I refuse to touch anything Apple has ever made, as well as Sony and Microsoft. And I will never, ever, use uber.

And I still use Steam, and the primary reason I do so is because I can walk into a retail shop, buy a Steam card with cash, and redeem it on my Steam account. I don't deal with credit or any other sketchy substitutes, and no other online gaming store has anything like this. I would like GOG to, but every alternative there is either insanely sketchy or not available where I am (or straight up requires a credit card). So I'm sort of stuck there.

But I would love to rid myself of these things. Facebook is probably easiest, but it's basically the way I keep up communication with my brother who refuses to use anything else, so I sort of resist there. I've actually told Google on two separate instances to go fuck itself and closed myself off from everything Google touches as best I can, but each time, I've crawled back. And I really like to have something portable to use as a computing device that I can stick in my pocket, without the whole internet thing which I really don't need on the go as everyone else on this planet seems to. My idea of mobile technology is rooted in the idea of the Palm Pilot from some years ago, which I owned and adored – give me something small and portable that can hold some information and run some programs but isn't some all-seeing, internet-connected beast. So I've kept that around as well.

It's hard sometimes to abandon something even if you're very against the concept of that thing. But I've tried over the years, and there are days where I almost convince myself that I need to try again. Most of the time, that feeling passes. But when it lingers, it's really tempting to cast off all the horrible technology "advances" that only serve to hold us back.

It's kinda telling that they use the word "hate" so much in their statement. Like, that should be raising red flags all over the show.

The way I see it is if you're selling something on your platform and making money from it you ARE endorsing and supporting it, including whatever statements the product and its producers are making.

Just had a fun chat with my eldest (now fourteen) about this. We have reached a compromise where he is going to keep using Steam but he isn't going to give them any money for "a year or two".

John Walker's piece ar RPS has some pretty interesting points to make.

[Valve] says that in order to enforce this regarding the complexity of varying regional laws, they will more stringently require developers to "further disclose any potentially problematic content in their games during the submission process, and cease doing business with any of them that refuse to do so honestly." Which, well, let’s think this through…

What’s legal in your country might be illegal in another, and by suggesting they will support legality they suggest they will support the law of any nation when selling within it. And since there are rather a few countries where just being alive for some people is illegal, that’s perhaps quite the heavy lean toward supporting the censorship they’re purporting to be against.

It is punishable by death to be gay in Pakistan (89.4), Afghanistan (13.4), Qatar (86.3), Saudi Arabia (473.1), Yemen (246.4), Mauritania (163.2), and UAE (447.9). Those numbers in parenthesise are the numbers of terabytes of data downloaded in each country from Steam in the last seven days, at the time of writing. And this doesn’t begin to include the countries where it is illegal to “propagandise” homosexuality, including, of course, Russia, responsible for 21 petabytes of Steam’s traffic last week. So… are they going to adhere to these laws, and refuse to sell queer games, or games with homosexual content, into those markets?

Buy from Humble, maybe? Then you'd get a Steam key, but the cash goes to Humble and the dev, not Valve. Unless there's some agreement where Humble pays Valve that I'm missing.

To the best of my knowledge - I never dealt with Steam directly during YoYo's Humble Bundles - anybody with a product on Steam can just generate keys for it (devs used to have to ask Valve to do it, but afaik they added the ability to do it yourself), with no money going to Valve/Steam - but of course you've got to be selling through Steam anyway, so by handing out Steam keys you're promoting the fact that your product is available for purchase on Steam.

This feels like it needs "respectable" developers to publicly reject Steam as a distribution platform, at least until Valve commit to taking some fucking responsibility for what they sell. It's unfortunate that Steam has such a monopoly and has just become a banner for libertarian weeabo edgelords to rally behind, because that now means that unless you've got deep pockets and a robust community management team, there is a torrent of shit (and very few sales) coming your way, either of which could annihilate a smaller developer..

To the best of my knowledge - I never dealt with Steam directly during YoYo's Humble Bundles - anybody with a product on Steam can just generate keys for it (devs used to have to ask Valve to do it, but afaik they added the ability to do it yourself), with no money going to Valve/Steam - but of course you've got to be selling through Steam anyway, so by handing out Steam keys you're promoting the fact that your product is available for purchase on Steam.

Yep, exactly. But I'm not sure what Humble's agreement for selling Steam keys is… I mean, do they have to give Valve a percentage of the income received from Steam keys to have distribution rights? Otherwise, what would stop everyone from selling Steam keys? What would stop devs getting onto Steam for ease of distribution, then requesting the keys and selling them directly themselves?

Actually, scratch that… we do that ourselves at events and get 100% of the revenue. Hmm.

This feels like it needs "respectable" developers to publicly reject Steam as a distribution platform, at least until Valve commit to taking some fucking responsibility for what they sell. It's unfortunate that Steam has such a monopoly and has just become a banner for libertarian weeabo edgelords to rally behind, because that now means that unless you've got deep pockets and a robust community management team, there is a torrent of shit (and very few sales) coming your way, either of which could annihilate a smaller developer.

Exactly again. The big guys aren't going to do that, because they don't care - no-one's going to associate their games with the mire of shit that clogs up Steam. That's like blaming Coke or Walkers for those atrocious limited edition slices that Greggs comes up with every now and then. So nothing will change and the wankers will win. Every time. :(

Yep, exactly. But I'm not sure what Humble's agreement for selling Steam keys is… I mean, do they have to give Valve a percentage of the income received from Steam keys to have distribution rights?

Steam keys are provided to Humble by the developers; as far as I know, Steam don't care what you're doing with keys once you generate them (which honestly fits with their general no-fucks attitude).

Hasn't stopped people eating Nestle chocolate (the CEO thinks water isn't a human right), buying from Amazon (terrible worker ethic, treats staff like dirt for profit) or voting Conservative. So… yeah.

Oh Sonic, you so communist.

I'm on year #30 of my Nestle boycott BUT I take Sonic's point. You can only really target the most egregious wankers. I'm just pleased that junking my Steam account basically means that I can't play Civ5 any longer.