PC Gamer criticizes Steam's 'Anything Goes' plolicy:
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Thanks henriquejr!Steam's new 'anything goes' policy is doomed from the start
Valve is responsible for the games published on Steam, even if it says it isn't.
Valve says it's not going to police what games are on Steam, except for those that are illegal, constitute "trolling," or don't meet technical quality standards that I wasn't aware Steam had until now. Today's blog post announcing the change demonstrates welcome transparency from Valve. It's also a mess of an explanation, 1,000 words detailing a policy that looks impossible to implement.
As the largest PC games distributor, Valve has a responsibility regarding what it chooses to sell, and what it chooses not to. We already knew Valve's stance on that responsibility. Ever since Greenlight was proposed, Valve has been saying that it does not want to decide which games get a chance at success on Steam and which don't. After Valve removed Hatred from Steam Greenlight, for instance, it returned it in short order and Gabe Newell wrote an apology to the developers. "Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers," he said, displaying a dispassionate view of what Steam is and does.
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But the solution is not to have no standards whatsoever, to pretend that nothing is 'bad' or 'good,' but that it's all simply 'controversial content.' No! Some things are bad! Even if I don't trust Valve to decide what is or isn't bad (and even less after this decision), I really don't trust anyone who refuses to make any distinction in the first place, and takes no responsibility for the things it promotes.
As Rock, Paper, Shotgun editor Graham Smith commented on Twitter: "Steam isn't just a store, it's a community of hundreds of millions of people, many of them young and impressionable. Analogies to smaller digital stores, bookshops, etc. don't work because those don't have teenagers hanging out on or in them all day."
This policy proposal suggests that Valve really, really doesn't want to run this community, even though it's the only one who can, because it owns it. Valve wants Steam to be viewed as a public utility while still privately owning and profiting from it. That is simply not possible.
To put down a doormat for the worst grifters, spammers, asset-flippers, sexists, and racists is irresponsible, and if Valve follows through with this half-baked plan instead of doing even the bare minimum of ideological and financial legwork to set basic standards, it will end up implicitly endorsing the worst in our culture (as it is already starting to). And to make sure the dreck is invisible to those who don't want to see it, Valve risks hiding things they do want to see. It's a bad proposal that I don't think will actually come to fruition as described (Valve will apply the term "trolling" liberally to remove games that cross the line), and we deserve better from the leader in PC games distribution than offloading all responsibility to customers.
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