This past week’s announcement by Valve stating that the company would not moderate or vet games that it sold except for ones that were “trolling” or straight-up illegal stirred no small measure of controversy among the industry and games community. While some have praised the company for creating an open store model that is free of moderation, many others see it as opening up the platform for titles full of offensive or hateful content, not to mention continuing to flood the store with poor quality games.
Valve hasn’t changed its stance on this, but the company did attempt to elaborate on what types of games that it considers “trolling.” Long story short: It’s being pretty vague on the definition.
One example that it gave was the removal of a game that was made to generate outrage: “We rejected Active Shooter because it was a troll, designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence. In addition, the developer had been involved in numerous misrepresentations, copyright violations, and customer abuses. There are no second chances for Active Shooter, or its developers. And to be explicit, while the developer behind it was also a troll, we’d reject Active Shooter if it had been submitted by any other developer.”
