Another talk is needed about that whole Steam thing.
As those of you who read my website know, one of my many unpaid jobs comes in the form of monitoring Steam and specifically discussing Valve’s generally terrible quality control. Specifically the amount of fraud that occurs on the platform and the few times that Valve actually wakes up and starts handing out developer bans.
It’s very easy to come to the conclusion that Valve doesn’t particularly care about their store’s image and they don’t do a lot to prove otherwise unless a title either generates massive embarrassment or legal liability. We’ve seen scam contests, scam raffles, outright piracy, and all kinds of fraud on the Steam platform. Some got yeeted so fast the proverbial ink hadn’t dried on my coverage. Others are still running after five years of Valve’s indifference.
A few weeks ago we reported on the ban of developer BMC Studio. BMC Studio has been around since the Steam Greenlight days. The studio is effectively one guy who brings his friends on board to make what started out as terrible asset flips and eventually became these weird interactive movies. I’ve spoken to Alain on a few occasions and while he’s definitely the kind of eccentric oddity you’d expect to float out of Quebec he never struck me as anything other than a bored guy who wanted to expend some creative energy making games. And while I would never add their titles to a must buy Christmas list, I never got the idea that he was doing anything that would fall into Valve’s simple store policy: No trolls, and nothing illegal.
But then someone handling Valve’s approval process decided that BMC Studio was a troll developer and threw the hammer down not just on the game looking for approval but their entire history. Everything gone in the blink of an eye, and nobody at Valve even willing to sit down and have a talk about it.
Which brings me to the next subject and the pun in the title. The last few weeks have suggested to me that Valve either tightened their policy on what constitutes a “troll game” or they have someone new handling game approvals running the store with an iron fist and a miniscule nerve for developers that in their eyes are toeing the line.
2GenPro is a developer that I’ve been watching for some time since they popped up on Steam and not because I was waiting to pounce on them but because I wanted to see how they would fare in Valve’s “no troll games” policy world. Apparently just fine up to now. I found 2GenPro to be interesting because what I expected to find in their forums was a distillment of aggressive edginess. What I didn’t expect was that the dev would compose themselves with something resembling professionalism better than many other indie devs. And they did.
Here’s how they respond to a complaint about their first game allegedly promoting hate:
We respect your opinion and your right to express it, however we disagree with you wholeheartedly. This game is a (rather obvious) parody of political, social and cultural issues today. A hate crime is, as returned by a Google search, “a crime, typically one involving violence, that is motivated by prejudice on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, or other grounds.” There is nothing in this game that suggests that anyone do such a thing against any real world individual, and certainly not because of immutable characteristics as just listed.
We understand you may not be fan – with every piece of satire there is always the risk of it offending someone. Steam has tools in place that allow you to filter content you see. We suggest you make use of those tools available if you would rather not see our game, as opposed to demanding that no one – especially those who are able to see that this in fact blatant satire and want to play it – not be allowed to see it.
All the best,
2GenPro sells games with titles like Simp Slayer Simulator 2K20 and Karen Simulator: Wagecuck vs. Karen. Their games are chock full of memes, soyjacks, Pepe frogs, and it feels like if you combined Alex Jones and the darkest recesses of the Chans, boiled them down to their very essences, then packed them into a bouillon cube and somehow fortified it with vitamin meme that this is what would fart out.
Their titles fall into that crack where they are too crass in their satire to be taken seriously and simultaneously too low quality to be the devious work of a mastermind looking to infect Steam with some subtle dog whistle. The stories are not subtle; including one where Jesus teams up with Hitler, Mussolini, Trump, Putin, Napoleon, and others to take on “homosexual billionaire reptilian satanists George Sorrows and Mark Cuckerberg” as well as the New World Order leader Noseberg Shekelstein to reclaim the Earth as the only remaining straight men. It sounds like something a couple drunk college bros would have a conversation about, pass out, and forget.
It sounds so utterly idiotic that some of my readers will think I’m making all of this up. I’m not. Read it for yourself. For many it’d be too easy to look at the premise that 2GenPro games present and come to the conclusion that the titles are spreading hate speech under the thin veneer of ‘satire’. Some have pointed out that the games almost seem to be a reverse satire, effectively taking ignorant ideas that people genuinely believe and dialing them up to ten to show just how absurd they are. George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg being homosexual reptilians, or the idea that the LGBT+ community wants to eradicate heterosexuality on a global scale is beyond stupid, but real people genuinely believe that.
What’s most important here isn’t the merits of 2GenPro or whether we individually believe that they deserve a spot on Steam. Instead it’s the fact that Valve for months looked at their games and said “yea that’s fine, whatever. The $100 cleared? Awesome, let’s get lunch.” Valve gave direct approval of the content in 2GenPro’s games for months over several iterations. Someone looked at the idea of the player controlling Hitler gunning down a gay night club to save the straight future and determined it met Valve’s benchmark for quality content.
Until some employee decided it didn’t.
If I had to guess with a gun to my head I’d say whoever at Valve was in charge of approving 2GenPro’s latest title looked at the content of the game as well as how similar they are to each other in deciding that the company was trolling. 2GenPro’s titles overwhelmingly feel like the company is reusing the same pre-made shooter asset packs and effectively rearranging the deck chairs and slapping on a new coat of paint to present as a different game. The fact that the game’s low brow style of satire would be regarded as trolling doesn’t surprise me. The fact that it took Valve multiple approvals to come to the same conclusion does.
But this isn’t the first time Valve has unilaterally and without warning reversed course on how it approves games and it certainly won’t be the last. The problem this reversal presents is that the people Valve chooses to do business with have no idea if six months down the line the company won’t change its mind and decide that the games it previously approved are no longer welcome. For that matter we don’t even know if it was the result of company policy or because one of the employees assigned to the role for the week was having a bad day; they spilled coffee in their car or the McDonald’s added pickles to their Big Mac for the sixth time in a row, and that disgruntled employee is just looking for someone to punish. Maybe they just didn’t want Steam approval work.
Valve doesn’t show much oversight of its employees. We learned recently that a salty Valve staffer could basically pitch a tantrum and ban players in Dota2 on a whim, a privilege that only ended because the developer in this instance was bold enough to pull a “don’t you know who I am” and made the frivolous ban reason obvious. The developers that Valve ban seem lucky to get any sort of correspondence including a simple notice and reason why Valve terminated them. And if you’re thinking there’s some kind of appeals process, think again. Valve tend to immediately ghost the developers they terminate.
Like the owner of a McDonald’s franchise, Valve never has to worry about treating its partners unfairly because for every person they fire there are two dozen desperate others willing to take their place. So you’re not going to see a big Twitter campaign for #freeBMC or #free2GenPro, but I think it’s worth pointing out that Valve’s continued inconsistency and treatment of ex-partners leaves a lot to be desired.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 