Steam's content policy is both arrogant and cowardly
Yesterday, in response to a couple of recent controversies, Valve announced that it would abandon its (few, vestigial) efforts to curate the content of games on its ubiquitous PC gaming platform, Steam. "We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store," Valve's Erik Johnson said in a blog post, "except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."
The company's argument was constructed to appear principled: there is no such thing as consensus on what is offensive, Johnson argued, even within Valve itself; it is not Valve's place to be a moral arbiter or to decide what is permissible; players and game creators should enjoy the right to freedom of speech. But the post also betrayed a confusion born of profound arrogance about where a society's rules end and the responsibilities of members of that society - especially influential members such as Valve - begin. And worse, it showed a cowardly unwillingness to tackle the tough questions that any company in Valve's enormously powerful and lucrative position must face.
In its 15 years of operating Steam, Valve has progressively openend up the platform, starting by actively curating content for quality and suitability, then devolving those roles to the community through Greenlight, and finally throwing the doors open with Steam Direct. Inevitably, the volume of games skyrocketed and the quality nosedived. Valve's efforts to control the ensuing chaos have been half-hearted and inconsistent, as evidenced by the contrast in two recent stories: Steam warned the developers of several anime visual novels that their content was pornographic, although they weren't as explicit as some other games to be found on the platform; days later, it was slow to react to the appearance of a school-shooting game called Active Shooter. Eventually, the warnings were retracted and Active Shooter was removed from the store on a technicality, but Valve had finally been spurred into some soul-searching on the topic - soul-searching that seems to have led to a depressingly predictable retreat.
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