[Steam Blog] Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store?

Just saw the news.
PS: I like it this way ... many will not :)).

or straight up trolling

"trolling", one of the most used excuse for actually censoring someone

I agree with the fact that GOG has a better quality control. For example there have been years between the time Project Zomboid was available on steam and GOG. The game was really playable and maybe less buggy than final releases of many games but GOG kept saying "No. It's still not good enough."

Steam started with Valve curating it, which basically meant them picking and choosing the winners. Were those always the best games? I highly doubt. Then the trickle started with publishers being able to pass this process. And greenlight followed, then direct access and now we are here.

I don't believe that there is any going back anymore. And no one can argue that latest changes haven't brought truly deserving genres on Steam.

This is corporate bullshite ;p There is no quality control on Steam ;p After all Valve did allow games on Steam without even executable files, if they cannot even verify if game they are selling contains said game in the first place what quality control are we even talking about? ;p

We've been under that impression since the early days of Greenlight, Certain elements of how Direct was presented pretty much confirmed it outright. Guess it's official, then- though as with the rest of the blog post, it's just confirming things we all understood to be true to begin with. :P

I dare say a significant portion of those developers are not trying to express anything other than how foolish Valve and its customers can be.

It seems that it's just a hobby of many to complain about Valve, no matter what their decision.

If they had banned 'naked games' - rage.
They allow everything legal - "Steam simply doesn't care enough about quality!".

Often followed by suggestions that GOG is the only true place to be, while those chaps were responsible for several blunders too, like when they rejected Thomas Was Alone. Or several other splendid games.

It's absolutely possible to run a store that is as open as possible, while also making it easy to find great games. Steam isn't responsible for people throwing their money at "developers" who don't deserve it.

I agree and can't understand the buzz with too much crap , well the majority of AAA now are shit , Battlefront anyone , the quality is subjective for each of us excluding technical problems :D.

+1, I don't know why so many people seem to think Steam should be censoring all the games that don't pass their personal quality threshold while any another store is "allowed" to list whatever crap they want.
Noone is forcing anyone to buy the whole Steam catalog, so I don't see any issue with it containing 1 billion crapware instead of just 1 thousand AAA games

Yep.
Now if Only itch.io would just do away with the infinitely scrollable pages...they make it impossible to systematically look through all the games available on the store (without crashing your browser) to find the hidden gems.

Dang. If Bethesda leaves Steam, I doubt I will be buying any more of their games. I have Uplay and Steam. I don't want any more platforms, and I have no interest in Battlenet or Origin. I'm not sure if there are any Activision games that would interest me, but it is a shame for others that are fans of theirs.

Are they building their own platform, or are they going to Uplay, Origin, or Battlenet?

I honestly can't tell how much is classic Valve laziness and greed (and certainly, that's a major factor regardless) and how much is their team outright lacking the morality and ethics necessary to give more serious topics the weight they deserve.

Of course it has. Rather, it's notable that they've stopped pretending it's anything else, as they have been up till now.

To be fair, there are still AAA games being released on Steam that are sold broken and never fixed. I'll take a couple of "intentionally bad games" over an overpriced, broken AAA game any day of the week.

That's a lot of fluff anf spin, just to say " We really do give zero fucks, unless someone stirs up enough of a controversy that bigger news outlets start picking up on it"

Yep. Basically a wall of text about nothing.

TL;DR Version:

We realize we've plenty of things on Steam that have violated our content policies, including outright hatespeech propaganda, but we're now officially stating that we just don't give a fuck about it.

Their discontinuation of the recent visual novel aggro is favorable (given the implications their vague approach had for the entire genre) but, nonsensical as that presentation was, it was also the only display of quality control we'd ever seen from Valve. At this point, they've just officially confirmed their lack of oversight and seem to be implying they're okay with more extreme sexual content entering the store, which seems a rather sudden about-face from trying to get softcore elements removed from the store.

I'm saying that how Valve removes visual novels for sexual content is not the reason for discussion, but the methodology of removing games with sexual content, regardless of genre, as Valve's own discretion is inconsistent and with seemingly prejudice to a specific genre while other video game genres with sexual content have not been afflicted yet or as much. I may seem to support visual novels from what I stated, but I do not have a taste for visual novels and keep anime out of my video games.

Valve received harsh flak from keeping visual novel games or removing them; a damn-if-you-do-damn-if-you-don't situation. No one cannot say Valve's public image has been injured because from the Steam blog post linked above:

Unfortunately, our struggling has resulted in a bunch of confusion among our customers, developer partners, and even our own employees.

Visual novel developers received inconsistent emails about their games relating to adult content. In the case of the HuniePop developer, he or she initially received a letter from Valve regarded that HuniePop violated Steam's rules and guidelines on adult content, but shortly thereafter the developer received another letter to disregard the previous letter Valve had sent.. Confusing for the HuniePop creator and the fans. Add more uncertainty when Valve delisted a non-adulterated visual novel called A Kiss for the Petals - Maidens of Michael on the basis of a false user report which claimed the game had adult content contrarily. No word from Valve nor is the game back on Steam as of 6 June 2018. Thus, summarized from Kotaku's article name, Valve's Inconsistent Rules On Sexy Steam Games Continue To Baffle Devs which has led visual novel developers to seek elsewhere for business other than Steam - lost business is not great for a company of course.

I infer some sort of action(s) has to be done quickly so that Valve does not end up in a similar situation as the company was in for the case of visual novels. The news about a now-removed school shooting game on Steam catalyzed the need for immediate response, hence the Steam blog as the main topic of this thread announced a new step to curation which Valve will provide tools for a larger curation role to its players and will only partake in the more - lack of better word - controversial games that come to the Steam store.

Valve has yet to retroactively remove games based on their new policies to game curation announced today. The games you pointed out may or may not come to Valve's attention in the future. Reading the new Valve blog post, more of a chance now the games you mentioned can be removed if Steam users attract Valve's attention to both games rather than wait for Valve to remove them.

Looks like they heard you. Publisher banned.

It's their loss actually. And a bad move in my opinion.
I do not own a console and never will. I do not agree with the practice of exclusive games. To me they should either release to every platform or not at all.

Valve having minimal quality control = good

Pretty good demonstration of no-brain people's logic there man, missing the point in both cases.

Is important the difference about content and quality, the first is a simple thing that can be solved with proper filtering without fall in the censorship, but the quality is only they responsibility, greenlight and steam direct shows that they need do a better curatorship of the games in the store.

Stop it man, the will not get it , the majority are lazy to even research a game they need them in their face or else VALVE is bad :)).

It's funny how many people don't understand the difference between content-filtering ("game has boobs = no steam") and quality-filtering ("game doesn't have exe file = no steam").

AnaRChY