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i guess this will be a problem for beatmasterj real bathroom experience(TM)
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Mar 6, 2019 23:08
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Too Shy Guy posted:The problem is that it doesn't point to anything concrete that made them pull it. They didn't cite any rules it broke, or make up any new ones, they basically just said they didn't like it. It does nothing to stop more games like this getting on to Steam, nothing to address similarly objectionable games already on Steam, and nothing to draw any lines between different forms of objectionable content. Yeah, fair enough. They did the right thing this time, for the right reasons, but they still kicked the can down the road again. Greenlight was flawed, but Steam Direct is just a Bad Idea all around and it's only going to get worse.
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Mar 6, 2019 23:09
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The weird marketspeak language is concerning, and in line with similar stories I've heard out of valve before.
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Mar 7, 2019 01:19
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Yeah, the marketspeak there came off to me as 'This was making us look bad. Try again with something a bit toned down.'
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Mar 7, 2019 02:55
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Too Shy Guy posted:The problem is that it doesn't point to anything concrete that made them pull it. They didn't cite any rules it broke, or make up any new ones, they basically just said they didn't like it. It does nothing to stop more games like this getting on to Steam, nothing to address similarly objectionable games already on Steam, and nothing to draw any lines between different forms of objectionable content. i mean, i kind of feel like they're in a weird position here. no individual part of Rape Day inherently breaks the rules (an outright ban on sexual violence in games would mean they can't sell MGS5 or Outlast 2, which would be... odd). but at the same time, as a whole, the game very very clearly is awful garbage that shouldn't be there. special-casing it makes sense, honestly, because it doesn't set a precedent beyond "don't make things designed specifically to gently caress with our rules."
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Mar 7, 2019 04:17
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they have no incentive to take a harder stance than that. Steam has made it clear that the only "rules" they're willing to follow/implement are the laws of the various countries they're beholden to and even then only reactively good to know that they can occasionally still be shamed into making good decisions though I guess
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Mar 7, 2019 04:26
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:i mean, i kind of feel like they're in a weird position here. no individual part of Rape Day inherently breaks the rules (an outright ban on sexual violence in games would mean they can't sell MGS5 or Outlast 2, which would be... odd). but at the same time, as a whole, the game very very clearly is awful garbage that shouldn't be there. I think the thing is it's one of those "know it when you see it" scenarios where even if you don't define exactly where the line is, it's very obvious that this game is WAY over it. It boils down to focus. Like MGS5 and Outlast 2 might be games that contain sexual violence, but they aren't games that are about sexual violence. Framing is important too. Rape is usually depicted as a bad thing done by bad people, and while it's overused as a plot device in general, it at least tends to be used in a way that says "this is wrong". Rape Day is not sending that message. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 04:31
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I'm not inclined to give Valve the benefit of the doubt here. They've made it clear that they have no desire to regulate Steam and will only do anything when forced to by legislation or media attention.
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Mar 7, 2019 05:13
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sunken fleet posted:they have no incentive to take a harder stance than that. Steam has made it clear that the only "rules" they're willing to follow/implement are the laws of the various countries they're beholden to and even then only reactively Well if the alternative is to pay actual humans to play censor, it’s easy to see why. Nobody wants to hire a room full of people whose job is the opposite of productivity. If you have standards, the user base might start expecting you to enforce them. Either you spend a bunch of money on content cops or you outsource that work to various internet forums and publications, deleting anything they get too noisy about. Makes sense. Companies generally have to make a choice about this sort of thing - either you are actively engaged with customer complaints and social media discussion regarding your product (requiring countless hours of work) or you are not (practically free). And it’s not yet clear that being actively engaged with the public generates additional revenue. Basically, you want your company to make choices about who they interact with. You can think of any time spent on any activity in terms of money, and the cost of actively interacting with the public has a calculable value. But not every customer or potential customer is equal in terms of their value to the company. The most valuable customers are what you might call “brand evangelizers” who actively recruit other customers. Basically anybody who posts in the Steam thread. Interacting with these people and managing their customer impressions is a valuable activity for obvious reasons. The least valuable interactions are those who don’t plan to spend any money with you. These have a negative value, because they soak up resources without giving anything back. The next least valuable interactions are with chronic complainers - the sort of people Facebook has gamified the report button to avoid dealing with - who may in fact be customers but disproportionately soak up resources. So if you are a company like Valve, and you are smart, you would question whether hiring a whole public relations and quality control team to police your storefront is worth the cost. Do you remove broken games, or do you let customers teach each other how to fix them? Do you respond to interview requests about objectionable content on your platform, or do you make it disappear as quietly as possible? And it’s like - one of them costs money and the other does not. Conventional wisdom says Valve needs to get ahead of this and be proactive and hire people to stop vendors from putting objectionable content on their storefront. But they don’t even spend money on advertising, really. Why would they spend money on that? In their position I might try to maintain some sort of system where we spent time/money on interactions with evangelists/customers and almost none on anyone else. Edit: keep in mind that, in the Western world, skilled labor is THE most expensive resource for any company to use, in almost any circumstance. Be Depressive fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 05:25
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Too Shy Guy posted:The problem is that it doesn't point to anything concrete that made them pull it. They didn't cite any rules it broke, or make up any new ones, they basically just said they didn't like it. It does nothing to stop more games like this getting on to Steam, nothing to address similarly objectionable games already on Steam, and nothing to draw any lines between different forms of objectionable content. Yeah like on the down low I'm going to release my excellent game Rape Night and keep it out of the press and Valve probably won't ever touch it. The takeaway here is only examine titles that get media attention which is lazy garbage.
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Mar 7, 2019 08:04
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It goes the other way too, I loosely remember a big fuss when they banned/rejected Ladykiller in a Bind for having explicit sex and a rape scene.
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Mar 7, 2019 08:22
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There's been signs of some sort of perverse ultracapitalism lurking behind the flat office structure at valve. Wish I could find the insider quotes about 'Generating value", but it's late o'clock.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 08:53
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It goes the other way too, I loosely remember a big fuss when they banned/rejected Ladykiller in a Bind for having explicit sex and a rape scene. As far as I know, it never got rejected, although Christine Love did have to personally talk to a Valve representative and make a case for why the game should be on Steam, and Valve staff can be notoriously hard to get in contact with so that's not something that'd be so easy for everyone. She did cut out part of one scene after release, but that's because players overwhelmingly hated it and felt it didn't belong in the game; it was cut from non-Steam releases of the game too.
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Mar 7, 2019 09:47
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Be Depressive posted:Well if the alternative is to pay actual humans to play censor, it’s easy to see why. Nobody wants to hire a room full of people whose job is the opposite of productivity. If you have standards, the user base might start expecting you to enforce them. Either you spend a bunch of money on content cops or you outsource that work to various internet forums and publications, deleting anything they get too noisy about. Makes sense. Mate, this is the equivilant of if best buy and blockbuster had decided that policing their inventory to prevent porn was too much effort and let any regional store manager put whatever they wanted on the shelves. "But think of their bottom line" doesn't cut it.
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Mar 7, 2019 13:03
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I don't question the issues that rise from this system, but I'm not sure about that particular equivalency as these are very different businesses and situations and opt-in content on a digital storefront is ultimately a very different deal from having porn on physical store shelves for a number of reasons.
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Mar 7, 2019 13:21
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Discendo Vox posted:There's been signs of some sort of perverse ultracapitalism lurking behind the flat office structure at valve. Wish I could find the insider quotes about 'Generating value", but it's late o'clock. It's not really a secret. The system they designed hands out bonuses to employees for shipping content that makes profit, and most employees figured out if you make skins for DotA2 and CS:GO (and similar) you make a ton of bonuses. They are absolutely de-incentiviced to ever make a large game like HL3 or improve Steam in any way (aside from getting more games sold on Steam). That's why HL3, Portal 3, TF3, and L4D3 will never happen. Because it will take a few years to develop and in the meantime the team making it will watch all their coworkers who chose to do easier, more lucrative work rolling in the dough month after month. The fact that Artifact failed will probably cement this, if the very public HL3 debacle didn't already. I remember that article too, if anyone has it please post it. Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 13:53
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Be Depressive posted:Well if the alternative is to pay actual humans to play censor, it’s easy to see why. Nobody wants to hire a room full of people whose job is the opposite of productivity. If you have standards, the user base might start expecting you to enforce them. Either you spend a bunch of money on content cops or you outsource that work to various internet forums and publications, deleting anything they get too noisy about. Makes sense. also you get intersectionality and that leads to stuff like this 
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Mar 7, 2019 14:11
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FoolyCharged posted:Mate, this is the equivilant of if best buy and blockbuster had decided that policing their inventory to prevent porn was too much effort and let any regional store manager put whatever they wanted on the shelves. "But think of their bottom line" doesn't cut it. That and labor is never the highest cost for a business so this bluh bluh but they'd have to pay people to do a good job poo poo is exactly the attitude that makes steam and other internet things such cesspools
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Mar 7, 2019 14:26
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SHY NUDIST GRRL posted:That and labor is never the highest cost for a business so this bluh bluh but they'd have to pay people to do a good job poo poo is exactly the attitude that makes steam and other internet things such cesspools Labor is ridiculously expensive if you count the entire cost of finding, employing and training someone who’s not a complete moron to do a decent job, payroll taxes, insurance, and workplace compliance. If you can find a way to run a business that doesn’t employ anyone you will save a lot of money. I’m not saying what Valve is doing is morally or socially correct or anything. I’m just saying it makes a certain kind of sense, because the opposite tactic probably leads to decreased revenue plus increased labor costs. If you are running a massive digital content provider with millions of customers your bottom line depends on automating everything as much as humanly possible. The current conventional wisdom is that companies should socially engage with their customers and actively take on moral leadership roles, but nobody’s ever proven that generates growth. And because of how things are now you really have to always engage all the time or not at all.
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Mar 7, 2019 15:54
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Be Depressive posted:The current conventional wisdom is that companies should socially engage with their customers and actively take on moral leadership roles, but nobody’s ever proven that generates growth. And because of how things are now you really have to always engage all the time or not at all. They dont need to engage with their customers. They need to do the bare minimum job of screening what they're selling because customer dissatisfaction is high and they're one moral panic from being handed the storefront equivalent of an AO rating.
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Mar 7, 2019 16:01
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I've pretty much done a 180 on my initial thought on Valve's response, it was a bad statement that established nothing and leaves the door wide open. They're afraid of offending anyone, and that includes the free-speech absolutists. And that direction leads to 8chan. This article does a good job of summing it up better than I can: GamesIndustry.biz - Steam is in the rape fantasy business This is the business Valve has chosen. If they actually ever want to make games again they really need to spin off the Steam section of their company as a more traditionally-structured company, because the job they've done so far of responding to these issues and building infrastructure for game approval just isn't doing the job. Too bad this lack of curation is also making them money by the truckload, so we'll likely never see a big budget Valve game again, despite those transparent interviews a few Valve employees gave last year pleading with people to believe they're still making things. But we all know where this is going. New EA games are off Steam on Origin now. Epic made the Fortnite client into its own Steam. Ubisoft still releases stuff on Steam, but makes you go through Uplay, and you just KNOW they're raring to cut out the middleman too. Blizzard has had Battle.net for a while. I think GOG has a client too, right? Yes, they're all bad now, but Steam was pretty bad once. A few more scandals like this, some more time and development, and Steam will no longer be the only game in town. Here's some good quotes from an ex-Valve guy in a Twitter thread started by Tim Schafer: https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1103498360206417921 https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1103500976084869120 https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1103504372778991617 https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1103508299603832834 https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1103510456881176576 I don't know if I entirely agree with "thank the gaming gods for Epic" but I am very glad to see SOME sort of real competition to Steam, even if tepidly at this point. Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 17:33
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It goes the other way too, I loosely remember a big fuss when they banned/rejected Ladykiller in a Bind for having explicit sex and a rape scene. Ladykiller in a Bind was part of the drama because it wasn't threatened with removal from Steam when other visual novels with explicit sex were.
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Mar 7, 2019 19:54
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Epic isn't gonna be any kind of real competition though until they stop throwing god knows how much money at exclusives and start throwing some money at their store front to make it actually not suck.
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Mar 7, 2019 20:01
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And abandon that god awful influencer model. Youtubers are already playing a fraction of the games they did, let alone commission for youtubers is an awful idea on its face
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Mar 7, 2019 20:25
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I still shrudder at the fact that neither Origin nor Uplay nor Epis Store have the option to gift your friends games, smh.
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Mar 7, 2019 21:00
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EGS still doesn't have a goddamn search function, even though the one for the UE Marketplace is decently robust.
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Mar 7, 2019 22:02
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Why do you need a search function when all their games fit on a single webpage
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Mar 7, 2019 22:08
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Epic's store is sadly terrible even for the dozen of games it has. If it featured an overall ammount of games that release on Steam every week it would implode. Steam needs competition, sure but if you give Epic an actual spin you quickly realize it's not it, not even close - the ammount of glitches and weird problems I had with it is staggering and its features are extremely barebones. It feels like people read about the Epic store and decided it's an alternative to Steam without actually using it for any real ammount of time. Origin and Uplay are already lightyears ahead of it.
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Mar 7, 2019 23:24
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I think people are mostly banking on the profitability of Fortnite fueling the eventual development of the store as well as Epic's willingness to secure indie games and exclusives. Steam sucked at first too. ...Not that I'm saying it WILL get better, Epic could absolutely drop the ball on that front. But the fact someone is actually trying to complete directly with Steam is a good thing, and Epic has the clout to do it.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:09
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I mean, I feel like “Origin actually looks good now” is a pretty good summary for how far Steam has fallen
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Mar 8, 2019 00:30
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I would NOT go that far. Origin is hot trash and Apex Legends is the only reason people actually have to deal with it now. Steam may be overloaded with garbage but it's at least functional.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:33
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Also those services are courting publishers, not customers. At this point your average PC gamer already has a Steam account with lots of games and is not going to boycott something just because it’s on Steam. Public outcry against YouTube impacts advertising revenue but moral panic over lovely rape games doesn’t blow back on developers at all. Now that Steam has competitors they will need to improve relationships with vendors (developers) but none of it will impact the forward facing parts of the company. You could probably go back thru each successive moral panic over Steam content and compare that with monthly revenue and find no correlation whatsoever. This is just a hypothesis, though. As there’s no way of looking at Valve’s actual numbers.
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Mar 8, 2019 01:23
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Schubalts posted:Ladykiller in a Bind was part of the drama because it wasn't threatened with removal from Steam when other visual novels with explicit sex were. This is what I mean about engagement being a time/labor sink. If you publicly respond to every outcry there will be outcries over there not being an outcry about something else and requisite outcries over your unfair application of the outcry response system and the result is a very, very large amount of work to be done dealing with people who have a low overall value to the company. But if you create the expectation that the company’s higher ups are impenetrable any hit pieces will be like punching water. If there’s no response to respond to, the controversy will go away. Again, I do not think this is the right or ethical way to do things. I am just pointing out from a business perspective a company (whose sole reason for existence is shareholder profit) might adopt this strategy for very well-thought out and observant technocratic reasons. Like, the argument is that nothing of this even matters in terms of the bottom line. Valve hasn’t been proven wrong yet.
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Mar 8, 2019 01:43
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Be Depressive posted:This is what I mean about engagement being a time/labor sink. If you publicly respond to every outcry there will be outcries over there not being an outcry about something else and requisite outcries over your unfair application of the outcry response system and the result is a very, very large amount of work to be done dealing with people who have a low overall value to the company. It's not well thought ought because selling porn to minors sounds like an easy way to get dragged very publicly in to court in a bad way. Especially if your product is ostensibly not porn because the media will eat that stuff up given the chance. At this point so little effort is put into vetting the store front that someone at valve should be sweating buckets about what a liability it has become.
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Mar 8, 2019 02:39
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FoolyCharged posted:It's not well thought ought because selling porn to minors sounds like an easy way to get dragged very publicly in to court in a bad way. Especially if your product is ostensibly not porn because the media will eat that stuff up given the chance. At this point so little effort is put into vetting the store front that someone at valve should be sweating buckets about what a liability it has become. Hey, what if we make them click a box certifying that they were 18 or older? Problem solved.
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Mar 8, 2019 02:42
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We also live in a country where the President Of The United States paid actual porn stars to have sex with him and then paid them to be quiet and the only real argument is over whether he used campaign funds.
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Mar 8, 2019 03:01
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If Valve segregated content into tiers or sections or something so the bottom garbage stuff doesn't drown out the not-quite garbage and indie stuff I don't think I'd give a crap what was on their service, because i'd likely never have to see it. I don't understand what's so loving hard about not having one giant badly organized collection of games.
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Mar 8, 2019 06:13
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The worst people on Steam would flip their poo poo every time a game ended up in a tier they didn't like.
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Mar 8, 2019 06:19
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And it would very easily turn into tiers of 'how much the developer pays us'.
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Mar 8, 2019 10:34
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Oh yeah, that's another big selling point for Epic. The store/Dev profit split is much more favorable for the developer there.
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Mar 8, 2019 12:35
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