In light of recent controversies surrounding the availability of certain games on Steam, Valve has altered its approach to content policing and will begin to “allow everything” on the store, as long as it isn’t illegal, “or straight up trolling”.
Last month, there was much discussion after Valve began removing visual novels with adult themes from Steam. Shortly after, there was an outcry following the discovery of Active Shooter, a school shooting game, on the digital store. “As is often the case,” Valve’s Erik Johnson explained in a new blog post, “the discussion caused us to spend some time examining what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we could be doing it better.”
“Decision making in this space is particularly challenging, and one that we’ve really struggled with,” Johnson continued, “Contrary to many assumptions, this isn’t a space we’ve automated – humans at Valve are very involved, with groups of people looking at the contents of every controversial title submitted to us. Similarly, people have falsely assumed these decisions are heavily affected by our payment processors, or outside interest groups. Nope, it’s just us grappling with a really hard problem.”
Source: Eurogamer Valve backs away from content policing, says it will "allow everything" on Steam