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Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

polygon.com

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Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#71

Post by godelski »

ectospheno wrote: post #2

Everyone I know personally still loves steam. We hate more than a few banks and strongly dislike the visa/mastercard duopoly but steam is great. Guessing the game drought is causing some news publications to reach for a story.

Interestingly Valve makes the most money per head compared to any other company. At $19m/head it's magnitudes above Meta and the average salary is $1.4m[0]!

I'm not trying to disparage steam, I actually really like them[1]. I'm pointing it out because it's a business strategy we don't see that often: loyalty. I mean what other billionaire do you know where there's tons of memes of but is also overwhelmingly seen in a positive light? Sure, he doesn't have Elon money but dude has $10bn, I don't think another $290bn is really going to make a big difference in his life[2]. He has way less controversy than Elon had even before all the political stuff. Steam is like Costco, except Gabe is a billionaire.

What I'm trying to say is that you can become a billionaire by building a quality product and through customer loyalty. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can be fucking rich, your employees can be fucking rich, you can build a useful, AND a beloved product. In a time where we live in a Lemon Economy, where it is all about making the s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶i̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ minimum viable product, where we rush for the newest feature and loudest bells and whistles (regardless of if they actually work), Steam stands out.

I want more companies like Valve/Steam.

[0] https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenu...

[1] Like another user pointed out, they won be over with Linux gaming. I've had a great experience with them, even from the early days. You could tell through github issues they cared. They wouldn't just dismiss things like "oh, we don't support that distro" and actually just figure out what's going on (because your distro doesn't actually matter). They were clearly nerds themselves and nerds that cared.

[2] You just can't spend that kind of money. Fucking MacKenzie Scott is trying to give her wealth away as fast as possible, has already given away half her wealth, but she has the same net worth as when she divorced Bezos. Compound interest is a crazy thing.

[3] P.S. Fuck Visa and Mastercard. Unless my transaction is illegal, you better fucking process it. Anything short of that is holding my own money hostage. That is fucking theft. You created the duopoly. Don't get greedy or you'll lose it.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#72

Post by kasey_junk »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #57
kasey_junk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 issues being commingled within this. First, the networks have brand protection stipulations for any partner that uses the network. None of them want to be known as the porn brand. Second, porn (and other similar categories) have a different risk profile than other charges. Specifically chargeback risk goes through the roof. None of the members of the network want to deal with sales of things that spike ch…

> none of this is an ethics issue A puritanical activist group circumvents the law/courts and successfully pressures the handful of companies that control the vast majority of transactions to remove content they find distasteful - content that is 100% legal - but this isn’t an ethics discussion?

It’s not an ethics issue _for the bank_. It’s purely a business decision.

Mentally modeling this as “this bank doesn’t like porn” is incorrect in ways that will cause you to make incorrect downstream inferences.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#73

Post by nilslindemann »

Indeed, PayPal is not gone for everyone, luckily. I am from Europe and can still buy games using PayPal, just did. This makes me happy, as I am trying for over two weeks now to buy credits on Open AI, just to be able to translate texts from the FastAPI docs to German. Open AI and others do not support PayPal and not even a prepaid credit card, which my local bank sold me as "works everywhere". It is frustrating.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#74

Post by maverwa »

lupusreal wrote: post #61
maverwa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who’s using steam daily for probably 50-75% of their lifetime now: I don’t love them, but it’s the lesser evil for sure. Sure, if GOG had even 20% of steams catalog and useability, it be no. 1 without question. But since we‘re sadly limited to this one reality, there is no alternative. XBOX GamePass is a trap I expect to spring every day, Uplay and EA Origin are just a splash screen I see when starting a g…

GOG is great but I'd like them even more if they did some of the wine/proton work that Steam does for Linux users. For the dosbox games at least it's not much to do (for them nor for myself to be fair.) Steam is simultaneously hard to like, as a DRM service, but also hard to dislike as they put so much care into getting games running on Linux and have a very reasonable return policy, full refunds for the game not wor…

I won’t complain about anyone investing into wine/proton. GOG/CDPR just seem less willing or less capable of spending that money. Valve is essentially printing money. From sales, but also from other, morally less likeable sources like gambling. It’s nice to see them spending at least a tiny part of this in ways that serve the greater good (besides their own business).

Same point: it’s not good, but that’s reality for you.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#75

Post by _aavaa_ »

vlovich123 wrote: post #24
_aavaa_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cryptocurrency A technological solution to a political problem. Visa/mastercard/banks will just censor the off ramps next. > wallet based system What does this accomplish? The same institutions will request proof that all transactions are compliant, which will most easily handled by simply banning the content.

Whose off ramps? Steam doesn’t need CCs for that. The more likely situation is them preventing payments through their system for Steam and Steam having to pick.

We were talking about steam transacting in crypto to avoid the censorship.

The people pressuring visa and Mastercard to drop porn/sex related services are not going to suddenly roll over when those services switch to crypto. They’ll simply go for the crypto off-ramps.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#76

Post by freedomben »

dizlexic wrote: post #27
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than love - I have friends who will actively refuse to buy games on other stores, even for significantly better prices. (To be fair - I think some stores like the Epic Games store actively make playing games on them worse, e.g. I played Alan Wake 2 through Epic and the achievements notifications were massively distracting, ruining many scary and dramatic moments, and they turn themselves back on every time…

I'm one of those. I have a few reasons. Initially it was just wanting to keep things in one place as much as possible, but as a Linux guy it's morphed into fierce platform loyalty as a way to support Linux gaming.

Same (excepting GOG, where I buy the game if they have it, but they usually don't). I'm so grateful to Steam for working on Linux that I actually feel good about buying games knowing it's a vote for Linux.

It definitely helps that it works (almost) flawlessly. If it stopped working well, I would stop using them, but with the current status quo it's a rare example of a company I transact with that I actually feel good about

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#77

Post by transcriptase »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #68
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than love - I have friends who will actively refuse to buy games on other stores, even for significantly better prices. (To be fair - I think some stores like the Epic Games store actively make playing games on them worse, e.g. I played Alan Wake 2 through Epic and the achievements notifications were massively distracting, ruining many scary and dramatic moments, and they turn themselves back on every time…

It’s because steam is 100% an aberration in our modern world. The closest comparison is, maybe, Costco? And we who are dependent on steam know how bad things would be if steam wasn’t this unicorn. Gaben is the rare feudal lord whose people show up to battle out because they know it’s good for them. All he had to do was not abuse his monopoly for the past 25 years, as the meme goes.

The “do nothing and win” strategy has served Valve well. The fact is every publisher wants their own launcher on start-up running all the time collecting data, updating all the time, throwing popups at the user.

The user on the other hand doesn’t want 8 different bloated game launchers slowing startup, siphoning bandwidth, constantly updating, using a bunch of memory, and each using 1-2% of CPU at idle doing who knows what.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#78

Post by wolrah »

creaturemachine wrote: post #36
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than love - I have friends who will actively refuse to buy games on other stores, even for significantly better prices. (To be fair - I think some stores like the Epic Games store actively make playing games on them worse, e.g. I played Alan Wake 2 through Epic and the achievements notifications were massively distracting, ruining many scary and dramatic moments, and they turn themselves back on every time…

Funny how we got here. Anyone with a 20 year badge remembers the hatred in the community over being forced to use it.

I wasn't a hater of Steam, but I did hate it being forced on the CS community as well as the news that it would be required for HL2.

At the time I had dialup. Patching on Valve's schedule simply did not work for me. Patching most games at that point was a multi-stage process involving resume-capable download managers and setting my PC to automatically get online and start downloading at night.

I will say that even those who had broadband did have legitimate grievances. Any kind of background process mattered a lot more back then, and Steam was not particularly light weight thanks in part to its use of a custom UI framework. I also don't recall it being particularly stable early on, nor the servers being able to hold up too well under load as demonstrated almost immediately by the HL2 launch. Neither insurmountable and both in fact surmounted within a few years, but again it was being forced on an existing community.

Had it been optional for CS it still would have had a rough start with HL2 and a lot of gripes from that community but I think it wouldn't have been hated as hard as what resulted from forcing it on CS players.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#79

Post by rightbyte »

lozenge wrote: post #19
abcd_f wrote: post #6

It bears repeating - While all games delisted at MC/Visa demands were from the rape and/or incest nsfw genre (and that should've not been on Steam to begin with), it still set a dangerous precedent as the game selection criteria was ultimately subjective. Relatable, but subjective. Next time it will again be subjective, but not as clear cut, yet the precedent will already be in place.

When are they going to remove the murder genre? Including the game where you can murder a prostitute to get your payment back... it's very obscure, you might not have heard of it... it's called GTA V.

Oh ye. And where you also collect people in busses and bring them to factories to make hot dogs out of them.

I seriously don't think we have the 'margin' to excuse GTA anymore. It is not the 90s and way to many people are on the brink of going mad.

Re: Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

#80

Post by Forgeties79 »

kasey_junk wrote: post #72
Forgeties79 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of this is an ethics issue A puritanical activist group circumvents the law/courts and successfully pressures the handful of companies that control the vast majority of transactions to remove content they find distasteful - content that is 100% legal - but this isn’t an ethics discussion?

It’s not an ethics issue _for the bank_. It’s purely a business decision. Mentally modeling this as “this bank doesn’t like porn” is incorrect in ways that will cause you to make incorrect downstream inferences.

But that’s exactly what it is. They are worried about the blowback from the very easy PR advantage groups like this have, all based on weaponizing how it is basically a PR slam dunk to paint these companies as “supporting disgusting pornography” and “exposing harmful content to minors.” As long as you can couch your points in that kind of rhetoric, you are virtually unbeatable in the US when it comes to messaging. No major company is going to stand in defense of pornography outside of Pornhub.

There’s a reason this hasn’t been taken to the courts and regardless of what you attribute the motivation to the outcome is the same. This is top to bottom an ethics discussion, and the banks are a part of it. By capitulating they have made a choice. They decided the public debate would be bad for business.

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