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.
Well said.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
