bigoted reviews posted on games’ Steam pages, which can hugely affect sales for their developers; and Steam curators (self-appointed taste-makers on the platform) directing campaigns against games they perceive to lean left or pursue inclusion.

This fucking shit again. Reviews affect sales? Well, good. You don't get to carefully select a few most-read outlets who'll give you the thumb up. Also, chud curators are "directing" only those who follow them. This argument is about a failing industry that'd like to control what can be said about their products. Make no mistake, Steam's openness in this regard is, for me as a customer at least, added value.

Steam has a serious problem with a lack of moderation, which has made it a very attractive platform for fascists. Gamergate never ended, and remember that began with Steve Bannon realizing he could exploit gamer outrage to push propaganda. They keep inventing new scandals to repeat their past success.

One of my favorite games had a very minor patch to revise some cringier elements from early in the game's lifespan. Years later, the forum is still unusuable because it's been colonized by right-wing weirdos with 0.3 hours on record who have dedicated their lives to crying about a game they never cared about pre-patch, because they saw it as an opportunity to push their propaganda.

Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums. The only forums I actually see moderated are the Steam specific ones (like the support board). Game specific ones are hit or miss. Most devs just seem to ignore that they even exist.

The main reason Valve doesn’t step in on these is they have a firm philosophy of giving the community the tools to form their own outcomes, rather than directing them in every issue. So they might be dissatisfied with people writing “Woke TRASH!” braindead reviews, but also not want to take action on them.

The least they’ve done is remove the clown award so people have less incentive to troll. But I’d also like them to implement community blocklists; If you nag a game for “Having/not having LGBT representation”, you go on a blocklist 90% of the community is using.

It does get tiresome going to steam threads and seeing the same copy pasted "don't ruin the game with woke shit" post up voted to the top.

There's a pencil thin line between farming clown emoji and overt bigotry getting pumped to the top of the reviews section by bad faith actors.

For anybody saying "it's not a problem, just moderate it yourself", look at Relooted's steam forum. There are more than 700 threads there and most of them are really not kind. Tell me how you're going to moderate that.

Just put yourself in the shoes of game publishers or studios that make a game which goes against the grind and gets attacked like Relooted is being attacked. Would you want to employ somebody just to moderate the forums? Should the onus be on the forum owners or should it be on the forum providers (Valve)? Do you think this has no effect on the types of games being released?

I mean, look at this game Tyrone vs Cops 2. Is this OK? What do you think the forum discussions look like. Are they OK? If it's only devs that should moderate their forums, that means the KKK could make game about water lillies and then have their forums be the meeting ground for white power discussions. They won't be offended after-all. That's OK?

for a more recent example, the negative reviews under Relooted are fucking sickening. one of the top ones is a joke making fun of George Floyd’s death.

what does steam do? nothing. valve is one of the most profitable companies per employee out there, and they have no pressure from investors to botch their work, they could absolutely moderate.

they actively choose not to, because despite what bootlickers on lemmy would have you believe, gabe newell is a libertarian dipshit who values "free speech" over the safety of marginalized people.

Reminder that The Guardian is a dogshit paper that pretty much systematically misgender trans people and keeps tripling down on backing up TERFs. You don't get to talk shit about the bigots when you're among them.

I've tried contacting gaming press about this. I contacted Valve (several times) citing their own rules, screenshots of blatant transgressions and they repeatedly closed my ticket and ignored me. I avoid buying games directly from Steam now. If I can find the screenshots later I'll update my post.

Edit: So here is the ticket I opened (this was -months- after repeatedly reporting someone spamming the N-word in the Official Steam Deck group chat for weeks).

Breaking News: Bigots increasingly comfortable, some mods bigots too.

It’s a shame there isn’t real moderation when people feel harassed, but I no longer care about those reviews as a consumer anyway. A negative review by some loser probably means I’ll like it more.

And I continue to support challengers to monopolies. Hope Steam gets a real competitor someday so I can take my money elsewhere.

and we don’t try to moderate reviews based on accuracy

Than, it's not a review, it's a social media feed. Calling that a review would imply that it must have passed some check. If there is none, it's a post, on a social media. Even than they'd try to moderate that if they cared.

Removing reviews, the response claimed, could be seen as “censorship”.

Fact checkig and moderation isn't censorship, it's moderation.

Recourse for developers is limited. Some are looking into their own security, shoring up protections for developers on their team against being doxxed or hacked by trolls. Or, in the case of the developers of Caves of Qud, paying their own moderators to handle forums and the hate that spills out of Steam

Which is guess for small teams or single devs is less feasable the less resources they have. That is to say, you're alone out there.

Part of the reason I don't play many multi-player games is the idiocy and racism

I agree valves platform moderation is terrible but getting upset over some negative reviews from "charlietweet" and "toowoke" is bubblewrap levels of soft.