LogFAQs > #902732673

darkknight109 posted...

Worth noting that this was the exact situation that led up to the Video Game Crash of '83. Tons of developers flooded the market with poorly made trash that didn't sell; retailers marked it down to bargain-bin prices to try and move what product they could; legitimate developers couldn't get their products seen as they were competing against underpriced trash; consumers quickly lost faith and interest in the system and left.

The system isn't wholly analogous, but the historical precedent for this sort of thing isn't a good one.

The key difference there is that Steam is just one storefront, and developers have other places they can go. This may be Steam's downfall, but I don't see this hurting the industry at large (unless Steam's unwillingness to have any sort of standards for their storefront results in enough public outcry to attract government intervention, since that intervention isn't likely to be limited to Steam). They just aren't the market juggernaut they used to be.

VixYW posted...

Okay, I re-read the blog post and it seems people are misunderstanding some things (either that or I am right now). Their decisions is mostly regarding the content of the games, not exactly the quality. Quality is mentioned there, but just lightly, so I assume no changes are being made on that end. Also, it is mentioned that their process to admit games into the store still exists - which involves contact between devs and Valve, so Valve will be seeing the game and running it at the very least, the only difference is that as long as the devs are clear about what kind of content they have, they won't be rejected FOR THAT REASON alone. This whole thing is more about individual morals than anything else.

Even if they maintain their current quality control standards (and I have higher standards for what I flush down the toilet than Valve has for what they'll sell), this idea of not censoring content anymore is only going to attract more deliberate efforts to be flagrantly offensive, especially until the novelty of "take that SJW's you can't censor me" wears off. Bear in mind that the current content standards didn't prevent this from getting on there:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/875280/AIDS_Simulator/

And it's only going to get worse with this news. Selling bad, offensive games on Steam is rapidly approaching meme status, and Valve just gave that carte blanche to continue at a point when they ought to be cracking down and doing some real quality control.
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