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[Sirus]

Steam recently removed a game, Active Shooter, where you could play as an active school shooter. What I want to know is how the hell it got on Steam in the first place so that it needed to be removed.

My understanding is that you just need to pay a fee to get a game listed on Steam. Not a big one either, maybe $100. My guess is that no one bothered to actually look into the submitted game until complaints started coming in.

[Doomblade187]

Steam recently removed a game, Active Shooter, where you could play as an active school shooter. What I want to know is how the hell it got on Steam in the first place so that it needed to be removed.

My understanding is that you just need to pay a fee to get a game listed on Steam. Not a big one either, maybe $100. My guess is that no one bothered to actually look into the submitted game until complaints started coming in.

On top of that, it was described as a "SWAT Simulator", I believe. So they probably just scanned the description and let it go by.

[KittyTac]

Greenlight is flawed, and with slightly incompetent owners (Valve), it is a recipe for disaster. I hope it gets replaced with something that actually stops 99% of bad games.

[smjjames]

Greenlight is flawed, and with slightly incompetent owners (Valve), it is a recipe for disaster. I hope it gets replaced with something that actually stops 99% of bad games.

They're already phasing it out, not sure what they're replacing it with though.

[Egan_BW]

Pretty sure that greenlight is not entirely replaced by a flat $100 fee. Which means that everything is now on steam, regardless of quality.

[KittyTac]

Pretty sure that greenlight is not entirely replaced by a flat $100 fee. Which means that everything is now on steam, regardless of quality.

That would be even worse.

[smjjames]

Having a flat $100 fee doesn't seem very fair to indie developers since there would definetly be those who have something good to offer but at the same time, don't have all that much cash. Especially if we're talking about single person devs or small teams.

I'm sure Valve makes enough money from their cut of purchases or however they make money that they wouldn't have to do game release fees.

[milo christiansen]

If you cannot scrape together $100 you have no business on steam.

To put it in perspective, most new AAA games cost $60.

[Egan_BW]

Many people have no business putting their things on steam despite being able to scrape together $100.

[milo christiansen]

That too. Ever browse the list of games for less than $0.50? shudder

[Reelya]

Steam recently removed a game, Active Shooter, where you could play as an active school shooter. What I want to know is how the hell it got on Steam in the first place so that it needed to be removed.

It's still better this way. $100 gets you an automatic game listing. 7000 games go up on Steam per year.

By not checking out each game that goes up, Steam is using an implicit trust system - they don't go and check out each game, and rely on player feedback to root out the bad ones. However, it's unarguably better to leave that to the consumers to decide on.

If Steam had to check everything out before it's launched for content violations then they'd have to expend a significant amount of money paying people just to play games. And of course that creates a chance for devs to get pissed off and for politics to creep in. For example, if some hardcore SJW person worked at Steam as a game reviewer, played your game and refused your application to launch the game because they didn't like how a black character talked or that a white guy had a sombrero (cultural appropriation). You'd have politics playing into who reviewed what, for sure, as well as drawn out social media battles between left and right over the validity of the Steam approval process with some calling it alt-right-Nazi because some Visual Novel with sexy girls got approved, and some calling it SJW-cuck, because some game with a questionable racial stereotype didn't: regardless of why it was actually not approved. That could easily happen and it would be a huge headache for Steam, who would be caught in the middle of all that.

It's just much cheaper for everyone and less headache for Steam if they let people create whatever they want then let the market decide if any one piece is acceptable, or not.

[Jopax]

But you don't need to spend 10 hours on checking each game. In the vast majority of the cases you can see it's a shitshow and not worth anyones time, let alone money within minutes. Similarly if the game does look like actual work was put into it then you just need to check the minimal functionality of the product, which again shouldn't take 10 hours, the rest should be on the developer.

Steam doesn't need to be running a full Q&A team for every title they sell, but they should be running the barest fucking minimum of Q&A so that they don't sell any piece of shit software whose owner had a 100$ laying about.

[Reelya]

I think you're underestimating how much that would cost and how long it would take. Every single game concept and execution would in fact need to be run passed the legal department. If a single steam employee just glanced at the game as said "god no, we won't approve a game called Active Shooter" then what sort of crappy "approvals" system would that be? It would be a complete crapshoot, since one reviewer might not have a problem with that, while another would. So you could just re-submit the game and cross your fingers that you get a different guy this time. If they're keeping any sort of per-game records to prevent people just doing that, then it would end up as mountains of paperwork, not a quick glance at each game.

Also the legal and PR implications of taking responsibility that way, and the PR implications of having an approved/disapproved system and how that would play out with social media battles over which games did and didn't get approved.

EDIT: "We played it for three minutes" isn't any sort of approvals process, and you could face legal liability then. Being able to say "we don't control what goes up" is in fact a good defense against being sued for a game containing something like a racist caricature at the 10-hours-in mark.

EDIT2: Imagine a hypothetical situation where the game flashes up child porn at 11 hours, but your budget and rules only specify that you test each game for 10 hours. Every dev would learn the 10-hour limit, and malicious devs could work out how to exploit the approvals process to slip things by the Steam censors. And some asshole would just for the lulz of what they managed to slip passed the Steam game approvers. Then, since it's "Steam approved" making the company legally liable becomes a more plausible court case.

[George_Chickens]

Steam recently removed a game, Active Shooter, where you could play as an active school shooter. What I want to know is how the hell it got on Steam in the first place so that it needed to be removed.

It wasn't the content (nor should it be) that got it banned. It was found to be made by an alt account of a content stealing upload troll who was banned for scamming, so he was re-banned and all of his games removed.

[Jopax]

Yeah, I'm not buying that "We don't give a shit what goes onto our storefront" is a better defense in any way than "We're sorry a turd slipped past our censors"

Because over time (and it started happening already) people will lose faith in the system, you already have indie devs jumping ship and refusing to sell on Steam because it's just not worth the time and effort only to get drowned in hundreds of asset flips and things that barely qualify as games.

And let's be honest here, Valve does have the cash for this shit, however expensive it might be, they do have the money to foot the bill. The only reason they haven't done so is because they have a monopoly on digital distribution, but sooner or later people will get fed up with this shit and jump ship, even if it means missing out on some games. What happens then? Will they finally start actually curating the shit that gets submitted? If they do, I have a feeling it'll be too little, too late because once you've lost the faith of the consumer (as well as the publisher selling trough your platform) that shit is very hard to win back, and not cheap either.