All he wanted was to not have to pay for employees to do moderation. I love Gave, but let’s not pretend this was altruistic.
Holy based.
I thought this was going to be about the blatant Nazi posting, both in the community forums and and in asset flip/game spam in the store. Apparently the lawyer in question was bringing up accepting more censorship in the lead up to more pornographic content becoming available on Steam.
I don’t typically care for Gabe, but yeah, I would have said the same thing. Probably not for the same reason tbf. But even if you don’t have any political concerns outside of making money for your yacht collection… Hate speech isn’t currently costing Valve money. Porn bans are directly effecting a market they have invested into. Why would you pay a legal expert to be so spineless?
outside of making money for your yacht collection
Interesting tidbit I just learned: apparently he’s really into marine biology and most of those are research vessels
Well, at the risk of repeating the obvious, what do you pay a legal expert for? As in, what did you hire them to do?
If you hired them to do research on current laws and regulations to see what you must abide by / can get away with, then you’ve paid them for information, even if its information you don’t want to hear.
If you hired them to represent your interests, to argue your case in court for you as their client, then yeah you can’t really have a lawyer that’s wishy washy on your position. As stupid as they sound, that’s what Trump’s DOJ is doing at great risk to their own careers. Which is why more and more of them are resigning.
Historically, Valve has hired lawyers to weasle out of legal responsibilities around the world, to limited success. They repeatedly tried to get out of legally mandated refunds for digital goods in several western nations, and now people think that Valve is the good guys for eventually capitulating like it was their idea in the first place.
I cannot imagine a scenario where Gabe Newell would hire a lawyer just to have him say “comply with the new laws instead of fighting back”.
EDIT: Just cause I felt like it made for more present context, Valves legal team clearly isn’t going to take the “maybe we should ban loot boxes as a form of online gambling targeted towards children” debate lying down. You mess with Valve’s sources of revenue, they will pull out every possible slime ball argument to say they are legally allowed to piss over any and all consumer rights. Gabe’s not about to allow porn to be banned on his store of “digital game license’s where you don’t own anything actually”. Not until the legal situation gets so dire that porn isn’t worth attempting to profit off anymore. He has fought far more tasteless battles in his career.
People probably think Valve is the “good guy” in the case of refunds because they made it a worldwide policy after the Australia case. Other game platforms have only offered refunds explicitly where required. Hell, PlayStation gets away with no refunds almost anywhere if you’ve downloaded the game.
Good. Lawyers for companies are too quick to demand that you get rid of things that might make anyone slightly upset, and it ruins online places. It’s why NSFW games went away, and why everything needs a thousand warnings. It’s why companies are so happy to add age verification, because it "CYA"s them.
Good on Gabe there. That’s your job, to protect the company if they get sued, not make content decisions
To be fair, their job is also to recommend the course of action least likely to get Valve sued.
Least likely to
get Valve suedlose Valve money in a lawsuit*Frivolous lawsuits happen all the time. You’re never going to avoid all of them, and shouldn’t be trying to. The lawyer’s job is to make sure that all their ducks are in a row for WHEN they get sued so that the judge can review all the information and throw the lawsuit out.
No. Their job is to find the legal gray area to operate in so that if they get sued they’re not instantly guaranteed to lose. Do you think Meta hires lawyers who tell them “maybe don’t spy on people” instead of lawyers who will fight all the fines EU throws at their way? Companies don’t hire lawyers just so they could say something can’t be done, they’re hired to find a way to get it done or find an irrefutable point why it can’t be done. The fact that Valve did go ahead with the hands-off approach shows that the lawyer didn’t do their job properly when they presented their opinion.
Only if they ask for that advice, presumably
Dont be too hard on this lawyer, though, as his advice has saved Valve big time in the past.
(If you’re not familiar, there is a small amount of info about it in the article.)
Have you seen what Steam’s forums look like? They NEED better moderation. They need to put an end to all the racism and other hateful shit on there. It’s a fucking disaster.
Article is talking about what games they have on the platform. Separate moderation issues.
they need to do better there too. there have been multiple explicitly racist games on steam, and valve has done nothing.
Okie-dokie, still not the conversation they were having in this article.
why do you care if there is bigoted games on steam? i have never been advertised such games on steam. the only place i learn about it is when there is some news story, let them die on the vine. they may get positive reviews, but only because the people who seek these games out buy them and get to leave a review, they are not popular.
you start trying to police that stuff, and it gets worse. and then stream starts having to decide where the line is, and what is parody, and there is no decision you can make that will be free from negative consequences
This is regarding the porn games, chucklenuts. They already removed Hatred and the like.
https://steamdb.info/app/4495510/
They allowed this game on their platform for two weeks and only removed it because the developer requested the removal lol
Plantation Simulator is a simple farming simulator where you motivate friends with kisses to pick your crops! Maintain a beautiful farm by repairing fences to keep friends focused. Choose multiple crops to grow and enhance upgrades to maximize your success!
Slavery simulator is an allowed genre on Steam.
Slavery simulator is an allowed genre on Steam.
This has always been the case. Here’s an incredibly popular game that allows slavery.
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Slavery
Rimworld also includes forced organ harvesting and a host of other war crimes
They also allow murder simulators, drug dealing simulators, genocide simulators, etc
As far as games go, a game that dresses up slavery with a bunch of innuendo is incredibly mild.
I don’t think I need to go into detail how those two games differ, right?
It’s just about the same difference as between the games “Prison Architect” and “KZ Manager”.
But surely KZ Manager just dresses up systemic mass murder with a bunch of innuendo. It’s just some silly satire!
It’s crazy that people are genuinely offended by low effort ragebait shovelware.
it’s not even the only one. a few years ago People Make Games made a video on valve, mentioning among other things the game “tyrone vs cops” which is a blatantly racist “satirical” game, which was allowed on steam. i checked recently, to see if the game had been removed since.
not only is it still there, it’s gotten multiple sequels, and is officially rated as playable on steam deck. valve does not give a shit about racism on their platform.
a horrifically misogynistic rape simulator was left there untouched until a group of anti-porn puritans got the payment processors involved, which is what got us into this whole mess with nsfw games. had valve given a shit about moderating hate on their platform this likely wouldn’t have happened.
As long as it’s not illegal content like csam, they should allow it. Why not let the racist shitheads out themselves? It’s not like valve would be forcing anyone to buy them, and don’t need to promote it.
Besides, when you get into the area of banning simply “distasteful” content, then you get people asking to whitewash everything, including history. I don’t want a historically accurate game to get censored. I don’t want content to be arbitrarily censored by lawyers and credit card companies, or any dumbass individuals’ sensitivities, for that matter.
I’m not asking for Steam to have to allow such content, either. If there’s a game that’s just celebrating being vile trash, I’m also fine with Steam telling them to fuck off the platform.
As is usual in the real world, the correct answer is no extreme.
that is different kind of moderation
Steam provides publishers/developers tools to moderate their forums.
I personally encourage you to learn more about which you speak before forming such passionate stances. There’s merit to what you say, but it’s not relevant to the context of the discussion you responded to.
That ain’t what the topic is about. Though for your topic specifically, Valve did remove gaining points from community awards. This was in direct response to people posting intentionally controversial stuff in order to farm clown/saucy awards.
A big part of legally protecting a company is being proactive about things that will get you sued. The lawyers were correctly operating in our bad criminal Justice system.
we got an anecdote from an anonymous former Valve employee of a time when Newell downright bit the head off Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush
Quackenbush is a wild name.
He should at least have a proper American given name like Bront or Firehose.
I’m definitely writing that down for my next super scrabble with proper nouns at grandma’s.
Billionaires should be extinct. Even GabeN.
So what are you doing about steam?
- Are you contributing to wine? Probably not
- Are you helping develop good gaming hardware… nope
- Are you writing an alternative store? Nope
- Are you providing gaming libraries… Nope
- Are you lobbying to defend gamers rights? Nope
- Are you testing games for Wine to maintain the AppDB? Probably nope
- Are you making it easy to distribute games on multiple platforms? Nope
- Are you helping small gaming developers add major features to their app with a few lines of code (such as multiplayer)? Nope
The reality is, Linux mainly at this time on the desktop is only succeeding still thanks to steam. If any other store were in charge (including GOG), we’d be still stuck in windows, or worse (a console like nintendo). If Steam wasn’t available, I wouldn’t feel comfortable using Linux for my main desktop (even though, I play all my games on a rog ally X)
Those of us who played games on Linux before Steam was available will tell you how painful it was. Steam changed things completely, and offered an experience that just works ™. Steam will also no doubt be one of the single biggest driving forces to get ARM on Linux up to snuff (thanks to Steam Frame) with X86 compatibility, in particular performance
Even for those who have been on steam for a decade or longer, old games are STILL working, because they’ve maintained runtime libraries and such to assist with that.
Gabe didn’t get to where he was by dodgy tactics. He got there by providing a service gamers want, and by running a tight ship. He also stays out of politics and from my understanding, is actually known for being a good guy too and is transparent (other than about HL3). Unlike other billionaires, he’s also not booking out whole islands intrusively either for a wedding, to flaunt their money.
He’s a billionaire sure… but, the average pay at Steam is also far above average, so its not like he’s exploiting labor. And unlike companies like Oracle, the working conditions seem to be far better too. And unlike modern Apple, Steam is about creating products which are good, not simply seem good (which I respect a lot).
Also, i’d add ironically, unless he blatantly gave away his money, the other option realistically would be to hire lots of developers to write games… Which, would simply generate more income and turn them into a bigger monopoly…
Steam Forums are slowly devolving into one of the worst right-wing incubators because they refuse to proactively moderate. Any time a game gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd, the boards become flooded with propaganda, and Valve does not care.
Something I want Valve to work on is a “blocklist” feature like Bluesky.
Valve themselves are libertarian and don’t want to quash any voices they don’t need to, including negative ones. However, community members could decide “We are tired of anti-woke trolls whining about inclusion, and creating their own enemies for rage farming”; and then write a blocklist of said trolls, that many players choose to subscribe to, making those posts invisible.
Could even configure a blocklist to remove any players with a Steam level of 1, just to remove factory-made bot accounts.
The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don’t want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.
Maybe they’re supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I’d guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I’ve ever looked at has just piles of threads asking “Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???” or “PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!” as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I’m the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.
There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying “devs should do it” is just passing the buck.
There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying “devs should do it” is just passing the buck.
Do devs have the ability to turn forums/communities off? If so, I feel like that’s the best option if they don’t want to moderate it.
They don’t. I know one indie developer once privately told me they wished they could.
Yeah, that really should be an option. I don’t think it’s infeasible for Valve to employ their own moderators and ensure the communities are less toxic. Short of that though, letting developers/publishers disable them is the bare minimum they can do.
I was close to saying infeasible was not a word but then I looked it up. My bad
award farming shitposts
Valve did respond to this by removing points from community awards a while ago. It won’t clean up the posts already there, because that’s the game’s developer’s job, but it’s no longer a viable point farming strategy to just make a big thread on a new game calling it woke to generate a bunch of clown awards.
Pretty sure they can’t close the forums, actually. I’ve never seen a Steam forum be outright disabled, despite seeing many devs/publishers who would absolutely close that down as a place of critique. I haven’t even seen delisted but viewable games close down their forums from new posts. Are you sure Valve doesn’t have an agreement with publishers that they are required to keep the forum open for their games?
The discussion I have seen from publishers is that the automated moderation on Steam is literally nonexistent from their end, and the global automation is far too lax. So they push their player base to platforms that are actually capable of dealing with problematic behavior.
The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don’t opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.
Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don’t have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don’t.
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This isn’t about this type of moderation, it’s about NSFW censorship from payment processors.
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely agree with you, but Steam is not the only place with this problem and Steam isn’t the only one with lackluster moderation for it. We literally wouldn’t be in the global political situations were in right now if it wasn’t for propaganda flooding every facet of the internet. Gamers are a minority internationally and most actual gamers think the steam forums are not even worth looking at.
I’m just saying don’t blame only blame Steam. There’s an issue with this type of shit literally everywhere and nobody in charge gives a shit.
I never said Steam was the only website on the internet with problems. But I’m replying to a thread specifically about Steam.
And the only solution anyone will have an appetite for in the coming years is applying automated AI agents to do the work.
It’s otherwise really expensive and labor intensive to do proper moderation.
They shouldn’t enable these forums by default IMO.
did gabe save your dog from a burning building? this is weird
Right, it’s just that otherwise ostensibly “liberal” or “leftist” people still jerk off Valve and Newell specifically despite them having a lot of the same issues as other corporations that people dislike other corporations for.
It’s complicated I guess. People often use the “Nazi bar” analogy and I kinda get it. But I am also conflicted. Yes I disagree with their opinions and wish they will stop having those opinions. But on the other hand moderating them will just make them move to somewhere else, and they will still be having those opinions, and arguably in a worse environment. Because it would be more of a bubble with nobody countering them.
Forcing the most radical extremists underground won’t deprogram them, but it will make it significantly more difficult for them to spread propaganda. The point of deplatforming is to shut down the pipeline so that fewer people get radicalized.
I mean, 4chan isn’t that hard to find. IMO instead of trying to shield people from these “dangerous ideas” so they don’t get radicalized, why don’t we try teach more people critical thinking skills? Quarantine vs vaccination, I guess.
Steam has far greater reach than 4chan. 4chan is the quarantine in your analogy, everyone else left that Nazi Bar after /pol/ happened.
If you think you can teach the average Steam user critical thinking skills, I welcome you to go ahead and try. Have fun.
that’s a bit defeatist, isn’t it. and you are underestimating 4chan, it has 86 million monthly active users, while steam has 132 million.
“dangerous ideas”
🙄
Valve being Valve… So they keep winning, Thank you Valve. Fuck everyone who wants to stop them when they do the right thing. Content moderation anywhere on the internet just feel like straight up censoring nowadays.
Because it is. It’s social engineering.
I’m glad this was over what sort of games Steam sells and pushing back against payment processors, but the flipside to this is how Steam has far too lax moderation of its community forums as well (which is explicitly part of Gaben’s position here). Billionaires aren’t your friends, Gabe is politically a weird libertarian that people just happen to like, and Steam’s community is one of its most toxic features.
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My brother or sister or enby in Christ, it’s 2026 and this is Lemmy. Stop using political compasses like a 4chan poster. Talking about “the axes” is so childish and unserious I actually read your comment as satire at first.
There is more to political ideology than a 2-axis compass. To explain the differences between Libertarianism and Anarchism to another adult involves talking about the ideas and history, not a chart you saw on 4chan.
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you can’t be an anarchist and a billionaire honey.
You can be an anarcho-capitalist though. Don’t think Gabe falls into this category though.
Sure you can. Anarchy is not a system of economics. Its just a political philosophy It can entirely coexist with a economic system that also would allow for billionaires to exist.
Market oriented mutualism and individualistic anarchism. Both support the existence of billionaires and are some of the more likely forms of anarchism to exist in a long term stable form.
So yeah… You may want to actually stop while your ahead. “Honey”.
Thats a lot of words just to claim something so wrong.
Anarchy is not a system of economics.
Anarchy / Anarchism actually touches all parts of live as its opposition to domination can be applied in nearly all imaginable contexts. Also historically anarchisms main focus was economic, being extremely anticapitalist, as it spread alongside the rise of capitalism. Many early anarchists focused on tactics such as strikes and workers organizations such as unions. Your statement here is absolutely wrong. Also, if anyone is interested in how a potential anarchist economy could look, here is a link.
Market oriented mutualism and individualistic anarchism. Both support the existence of billionaires and are some of the more likely forms of anarchism to exist in a long term stable form.
Mutalism is about workers owing their places of work and trying build economic power to reach a world where every workplace is owned by the workers that work there. It also focuses on fair business practices and being in solidarity with other workers. All this hinders the concentration of wealth into the hand of a few and tbh, being a billionaire feels pretty anti ethical to Mutalism when you actually engage with that ideology in good faith.
And I also think that is an extremely uncharitable reading of “Individualistic anarchism”. I dont know of any popular and serious advocate, that wants to have billionaires to exist. For more details, here is a pretty thorough examination on individualist anarchism economics.
They should become a payment processor… I’d have a valve card. Hell, I wouldn’t mind if it even had a relatively high cost at this point, just to say fuck you to visa/mc/amex
Amex hasn’t actually done any censoring so far as I’m aware. Its actually entirely just sorta sat out. Along with diner/discover.
Its just Visa and MasterCard.
Gabe Newell could very very easily afford to pay for more moderation.
This kind of “moderation” (read: censoring adult content) is something he doesn’t want.
The lawyer is an asshole and we won’t be working with him again.
Billionaire heel-turn coming in five… four…
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Just get rid of the forums and let the devs/publishers link to their own: problem solved.
What does that achieve? Devs/publishers can moderate their Steam forums, and it saves them money and time compared to hosting their own.
It puts the burden on the devs/publishers, not steam. Every time someone goes to the steam forums, they think it should be moderated by steam.
Who uses steam forums anyway? I’ve stumbled across threads through search engine results before but I don’t recall a single instance of finding useful information there. Best case scenario it’s a description of a problem and 300 people saying “I have this issue too, did you find a fix?”
