Valve Says It Will Now Allow Everything on Steam Unless It's Illegal or "Straight-up Trolling"

[JEMC]

rolltide101x said:

JEMC said:

But you are. Shovelware is some kind of content, like it or not, so getting rid of any kind of active curation (they'll review a game after a complaint has been filled) will only make it easier for this kind of content to appear on the store, making it worse.

Consoles wade through (nice expression that I didn't know! Thanks :) ) shitty games because they do curate the games for their consoles. Devs/publishers ask for permission to release their games and Nintendo, Sony and MSoft decide, after inspecting it, if they give the green light or not. But that curating is what Valve will get rid of, so as long as someone pays the $100 needed to publish a game on Steam, they'll be able to launch their games on the platform.

That's why being happy with this change and asking for no shovelware are almost mutually exclusive, it's impossible to have both things at the same time.

It is not, if Steam did like the console makers (but somewhat more open about content, as Sony, MS, and Nintendo are all pretty against explicit sex in games) and inspected all of the games for a certain quality then the issue of shovelware would be eliminated. The type of content should not be block (sexual, extreme violence etc.) but garbage shovelware games should be blocked. But why should Valve do any of this? It would be very difficult for them to implement all of this and Valve rakes it in hand over fist with Steam. PC gamers have allowed Valve to do and get away with whatever they want for to long.

But to do that you need to curate the games, which is what Valve will stop doing.

From the blog post:

"So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn't be the ones deciding this. If you're a player, we shouldn't be choosing for you what content you can or can't buy. If you're a developer, we shouldn't be choosing what content you're allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our 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.

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."

That means that devs will be able to develop whatever they want (minus illegal or trolling) with no consequences. And, until they make another statement clarifying this, that also includes shovelware.