I honestly think that Steam doesn't care about forums. How are Blizzard's forums? More and more it seems social media is the preferred way to engage with customers, at least in the gaming space. Company forums are just a pain in the butt to deal with these days, in terms of ROI.
They can't afford to actually kill the forums, because that's the only way to discover fixes for hundreds of their titles that would otherwise be broken. Especially games right at launch, and legacy stuff.
Those forums most definitely mitigate some potential refunds due to incompatibility.
There is a lot of shit Steam does that I dislike, and I prefer GOG when possible. Most of the article is on-point. But review-bombing is certainly not a problem.
Campo Santo was totally ethically/legally justified in revoking PewDiePie's right to use their content in Let's Play format. They took a brave and correct stance. But surely endorsement (reviews) are subject to the same justification? You can dis-endorse a product for any reason. This is a core mechanism of creating change in corporations/society, and I can't see why you'd criticize its use. Even if the stance being presented in the review is ethically/legally incorrect, the tool itself is not the problem.
It was only a few months ago that negative reviews posted on GTA V contributed to Take Two walking back their stance on mods.
That's not to say Steam should be un-moderated. Having looked at the recent Firewatch reviews, many are outright racist or abusive and should be removed. But some are just saying "I don't agree that the DMCA should be used this way". Some of those people may be coming from a "PewDiePie should be able to be racist without consequence and therefore Campo Santo is bad" place, and some may be coming from a "Let's Plays should be a protected medium" place, but you can't tell the difference so you can't moderate it away.
*edit* Maybe Valve should just blanket stop all reviews during something like this, when so much of it is clearly vile. I might not be against that.
That's... terrible arguing here.
I mean, just saying "it's shit" is like... wow.
Tell me how Workshop is shit.
How Family Sharing is shit.
How in-home streaming is shit.
You'd have a point if you did with actual arguments. But not this way.
What percentage of Steam forums and posts are problematic as compared to the total number of forums and posts?
For most businesses, there is a tipping point for these issues and ROI. If it's not a big enough problem in terms of PR, lost sales, etc. and the ROI can't be justified - it won't get attention.
I love Steam as a platform and what it's done for PC gaming, but yeah, I tend to steer clear of any social or community feature tbh. Steam really embodies laissez-faire apathy towards assholes.
People using "They are too big" excuse for steam, Facebook, Twitter, etc are sad. They are a multinational, billion dollar company they can put in SOME effort. I mean even in clear examples like firewatch and the lizard game/jontron they do nothing. Not even a token effort.
He'll make concessions for staying with Amazon/Google/Apple/MS even though those platforms also have similar problems. He just doesn't go looking for them.
Considering Steam is literally the company that gives the absolute most advantages to developers for that 30%, good luck with that. There is no better deal out there.
That's... terrible arguing here.
I mean, just saying "it's shit" is like... wow.
Tell me how Workshop is shit.
How Family Sharing is shit.
How in-home streaming is shit.
You'd have a point if you did with actual arguments. But not this way.
Another question is. I am using my Steam-account for over 13 years now. I never accidentaly saw a NeoNazi or altright group, neither recommended by my Steam friends or by stumbling on it.
Also my Steam Main storepage doesnt have Isis Simulator and stuff like that. It is showing me mostly anime-games, because thats what I played lately and well sold games.
It actually seemed more like the author was looking for that. Out of over 12000 games finding an educational slave game and some questionable ISIS games. Going into a game forum of a developer who did something questionable lately.
Exactly. There's nothing but vile racism and hatred behind both the forum raiding and review bombing. That's 100% grounds for a community-wide ban based off of Valve's own ToS. They just don't want to lift their fingers to actually punish people anymore. There are even examples of people writing positive reviews that got the comments sections bombed - people who may otherwise not even know that this raid is going on in the first place - with personal attacks by the very same people.
And no, review bombing because the dev took appropriate legal action against a racist using their game to make money for themselves is not equivalent to any example you can possibly give. I have favored almost every other instance of review-bombing for actual reasons that affect the game, such as devs going back on very important promises made to their playerbase. When a publisher or developer does something actually scummy, that deserves to be called out so people can be aware of what they're buying. This has zero bearing on the game itself and is just drama attempting to deface a game's reputation. Big difference!
And don't forget about regional prices, maybe not for all games but still fantastic for poor countries, glad they care about us. I really want to support GoG but price differences is huge, plus no other systems like you said.
Also i bought so much game thanks to trading card system and salable items.
Steam is not perfect for sure but i'm happy with it.
This isn't the only buck-pass Valve does about questionable content on its platform...
The online game storefront Steam, for example, claimed via e-mail that it has neither a department nor an employee whose job it is to "handle abuse or user safety."
He'll make concessions for staying with Amazon/Google/Apple/MS even though those platforms also have similar problems. He just doesn't go looking for them.
Doesn't this image showcase how inhumane the slave trade was?
PDP just put up another multi million view video where he cites the Firewatch dev's tweet. So I'm sure there will be another wave of attacks on those devs.
Considering Steam is literally the company that gives the absolute most advantages to developers for that 30%, good luck with that. There is no better deal out there.
He has no arguments, that much was clear from the first post.
"Suck it up buttercup" is never an acceptable answer
The worship of steam is the weirdest thing i seen in gaming. A golden calf you literally shove money into, I wonder if there are people out there that make Walmart and Whole Foods fan art?
I am not saying these things are not on STEAM as I am sure they are everywhere if you look for them, but I have been on STEAM almost every day for 11 years and I have never once seen a Nazi or any hate group on STEAM. I mean who would scroll through "general" forums on steam? Why would you ever need to?
Another question is. I am using my Steam-account for over 13 years now. I never accidentaly saw a NeoNazi or altright group, neither recommended by my Steam friends or by stumbling on it.
Also my Steam Main storepage doesnt have Isis Simulator and stuff like that. It is showing me mostly anime-games, because thats what I played lately and well sold games.
It actually seemed more like the author was looking for that. Out of over 12000 games finding an educational slave game and some questionable ISIS games. Going into a game forum of a developer who did something questionable lately.
"Suck it up buttercup" is never an acceptable answer
The worship of steam is the weirdest thing i seen in gaming. A golden calf you literally shove money into, I wonder if there are people out there that make Walmart and Whole Foods fan art?
I mean, there's worship of Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo. We litterally have memes about Hirai, Kimishima or Spencer and threads that celebrates them. Doesn't mean it's okay, but it's litterally a thing about gaming since the late 80s.
You have to be kidding. You need a game to tell you that being sold like property and chained to the hull of a ship for a 2+ month journey is inhumane?
"Suck it up buttercup" is never an acceptable answer
The worship of steam is the weirdest thing i seen in gaming. A golden calf you literally shove money into, I wonder if there are people out there that make Walmart and Whole Foods fan art?
So my Steam account is gone, or presumably will be once Steam Support gets around to fulfilling my request. While I would encourage everyone reading this to consider whether Steam is a community they want to associate themselves with, I have to acknowledge this is not a huge sacrifice for me. I'm losing access to dozens of games and a backlog of purchased-but-unplayed titles, but I'm not primarily a PC gamer.
I dont associate myself with the community, and especially not that part of the community.
I'm using a customer of certain developers on the platform, and I don't feel that the battle to keep the parts of of Steam I'm not even close to clean is my responsibility.
The author of the article can come back and place himself on the high horse when it's about a service that he as a gamer is actually reliant on, and show the same actions then.
Doesn't mean Steam can't do better, in fact Steam and Devs should always be pushing to improve the platform. But customer service seems to be handle by the Half Life 3 development team
This stuff wouldn't fly on consoles. It's a shame Valve doesn't do better. I pretty much use Steam just to launch games though and don't use any of the other features.
"Let's not police the place until the police are needed to... police." is not really a great policy. Stop it before it even gets to that point. Or do you consider the actual police to be 'nanny' as well?
Doesn't mean Steam can't do better, in fact Steam and Devs should always be pushing to improve the platform. But customer service seems to be handle by the Half Life 3 development team
Review Bombing reads as an Entitlement Generation temper-tantrum, imo.
Wish I could say I'm surprised by it, but in a post-Trump world that normalized anti-intellectualism and selfish narcissism, it only makes perfect sense.
Exactly. There's nothing but vile racism and hatred behind both the forum raiding and review bombing. That's 100% grounds for a community-wide ban based off of Valve's own ToS. They just don't want to lift their fingers to actually punish people anymore. There are even examples of people writing positive reviews that got the comments sections bombed - people who may otherwise not even know that this raid is going on in the first place - with personal attacks by the very same people.
And no, review bombing because the dev took appropriate legal action against a racist using their game to make money for themselves is not equivalent to any example you can possibly give. I have favored almost every other instance of review-bombing for actual reasons that affect the game, such as devs going back on very important promises made to their playerbase. When a publisher or developer does something actually scummy, that deserves to be called out so people can be aware of what they're buying. This has zero bearing on the game itself and is just drama attempting to deface a game's reputation. Big difference!
I guess the question is the motivation. A DMCA takedown request is made to prevent someone from infringing on your copyrighted work. Why did they allow him to do that for so long, and only now remove it? Well they admit it is because of his racist actions. So does that mean they are ok with non-racists infringing on their copyrights?
While I think they are within their rights to do this, as you can make a good argument that let's plays don't fall into fair use, it seems slightly hypocritical to allow lets plays to infringe on your copyrighted work unless you don't like the person doing the lets play.
Now if they had explicitly granted PDP license to do the let's play, and decided to revoke it, then common sense would say they would contact him and inform him that the license was revoked and to remove the videos within a reasonable timeline, and if he does not they will DMCA them down. If they had an existing agreement it wouldn't make sense to jump straight to DMCA without informing him first. Again, this only applies if they did have some sort of agreement with him in place.
I am not making a big deal out of this, they were within their rights to do it. But it did seem to go against the intention of the DMCA and slightly hypocritical.
Funny how unless you let someplace devolve into Stormfront or Coontown you are "Censuring". That imply the resting state of the boards are bigoted spam full shit holes. In that case why even have them?
Honestly what do you expect they have 10000 games on steam there's no way to moderate everything, and pay people to do all of that. It would require insane amounts of cash.
Notice the headline of the article isn't 'Why you should delete your steam account'?
Maybe try reading the article?
The article isn't about staging some giant boycott of Steam and getting everyone to delete accounts. It's about bringing attention to the things that Valve allows to continue on their platform. Asking for some basic moderation to prevent user and developer harassment isn't too much to ask is it?
Are you for real? Firewatch devs did nothing wrong, and now it has a flood of negative reviews, most of them one-liners complaining about SJWs, and each of them have thousands of upvotes (the most popular positive reviews have upvotes typically in the hundreds, in line with most other games of this scope)
This was a dedicated group effort, and for the pettiest fucking shit. He took down a video made by a racist fuckhead, and this is what drove thousands of people to gather in a mob? Absolutely fucking pathetic.
It's the only real method left of disagreeing with something that one has if they don't want to delve into the argument cesspool.
I guess the question is the motivation. A DMCA takedown request is made to prevent someone from infringing on your copyrighted work. Why did they allow him to do that for so long, and only now remove it? Well they admit it is because of his racist actions. So does that mean they are ok with non-racists infringing on their copyrights?
While I think they are within their rights to do this, as you can make a good argument that let's plays don't fall into fair use, it seems slightly hypocritical to allow lets plays to infringe on your copyrighted work unless you don't like the person doing the lets play.
Now if they had explicitly granted PDP license to do the let's play, and decided to revoke it, then commence sense would say they would contact him and inform him that the license was revoked and to remove the videos within a reasonable timeline, and if he does not they will DMCA them down. If they had an existing agreement it wouldn't make sense to jump straight to DMCA without informing him first. Again, this only applies if they did have some sort of agreement with him in place.
I am not making a big deal out of this, they were within their rights to do it. But it did seem to go against the intention of the DMCA and slightly hypocritical.
There's nothing hypocritical about it. They don't like him because he is a terrible subhuman. They are 100% within their legal rights to terminate his ability to make money off of their game for this reason, which has no bearing on the hundreds of others who aren't (yet) known to be the same as PDP. Not even close to comparable.
Doesn't mean Steam can't do better, in fact Steam and Devs should always be pushing to improve the platform. But customer service seems to be handle by the Half Life 3 development team
Customer service is already the biggest department at Valve
Not a single competitor even offers free individual game forums
Devs already have full control of their community forums and pages and can ban whoever they want. In addition to that, Valve community moderators are also assigned to game forums.
And again, i don't think devs are particularly interested in "pushing for improvements". They get a lot more than they do on Google Play, PSN, XBL, Amazon, GOG, etc.
Review Bombing reads as an Entitlement Generation temper-tantrum, imo.
Wish I could say I'm surprised by it, but in a post-Trump world that normalized anti-intellectualism and selfish narcissism, it only makes perfect sense.
No, no videogame will ever "showcase how inhumane the slave trade was". Even a "tasteful" videogame couldn't do that. It's the same reason why I argue against VR games of the holocaust.
Review Bombing reads as an Entitlement Generation temper-tantrum, imo.
Wish I could say I'm surprised by it, but in a post-Trump world that normalized anti-intellectualism and selfish narcissism, it only makes perfect sense.
I can totally agree with the lack of moderation regarding the forums and groups
But...
Right now you can find Hatred, Playing History 2 - Slave Trade, and House Party on the storefront, showing that Valve has no problem with the glorification of mass shootings, the trivialization of atrocities, or the gamification of rape. We can give them some points for consistency though, as the availability of Paranautical Activity suggests Valve is unwilling to take a stand even against death threats to its own found
I kinda disagree with this, for the most part. Particularly Hatred, as much as it's in poor taste I think it's completely fine for it to be sold on Steam.
