Chaturday: The Seeming Lack of Non-Trolling Offensive Games


I’ve been thinking long and hard about Valve’s new policy regarding offensive games and how this could negatively affect their user base, by which I mean I haven’t been giving it much thought at all. My attention, however, has turned to the idea that Steam will be flooded by horrifying, bullying, aggressive, abusive, games designed to be abusive and bullying, because the media told me to prepare for it and when have they ever published sensationalist material?

If you consider the history of offensive or controversial games, the list is actually pretty small once you filter out the titles that were deliberately cobbled together in a week by a guy using pre-built assets. A guy whose motivation is little more than a stupid joke for his friends or to intentionally bait the games press into writing outrage clickbait about his title, thus increasing its sales potential from zero to three because such coverage rarely results in sales if the game is genuinely awful.

Even then, what you are left with is a pile of games that were controversial for other reasons than its direct content, like Persona 5 bullying streamers or Baldur’s Gate pushing a low quality expansion. You just don’t see serious developers, or even semi-serious indie devs, trying to create games in the same vein as Active Shooter Simulator. As incredible as it may sound, there isn’t much money in that sort of controversy, and the negative blowback can be more damaging than any potential sales revenue. Just ask Konami what it thinks about Six Days in Fallujah.

Which leads us to the group that will for the most part be making these games: Tiny fly-by-night indie developers that nobody has ever heard of before, virtually indistinguishable from the troll accounts. If a game like Active Shooter is submitted again to Steam, would it even be given the consideration that it might not be a troll title? Or Gay World? I have my doubts.

I suppose the goal here is two-fold to discourage troll developers: You’re spending $100 to submit a game that has a high chance of being flagged and dumped as a troll game and you’re not getting that $100 back. If, by chance, the troll game gets through the initial screening, odds are it will either be drowned in the sea of Steam games and nobody will see it or the wrong person will see it, raise a ruckus, and we’re back at square one.

Will that discourage trolls? Hell no, and to further my point I point toward the Something Special for Someone Special, a wedding ring in Team Fortress 2 that broadcasts a global message to all servers upon activation. The ring costs $100 and that price hasn’t stopped thousands of people from purchasing it and some using it to broadcast messages like “Anne Frank has accepted Adolph Hitler’s apology ring,” because those messages aren’t checked. $100 for a joke is nothing for a large swath of people, even if the payoff is people see it for five seconds and then it’s gone.

The developer behind Active School Shooter denies that his game was meant to troll the public, a claim that ultimately falls on deaf ears considering his previous list of published titles including White Power: Pure Voltage and Tyde Pod Challenge. Most trolls will deny that they are in fact trolls, meaning Valve will need to use their critical thinking skills to determine if the next Active Shooter Simulator is a troll game.

On second thought, Valve only declared the game a troll title because of its association with Ata Berdiyev, so we might be doomed in that department.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Valve Addresses Fake Steam Games Again, Again, Again, Again


Valve is once again taking on fake games plaguing Steam, this time focusing on achievements. In a leaked post to the private developer forums, Valve announced that games will now be subject to confidence constraints that will limit how many achievements a game can have and how those achievements affect your account, until the game is validated as being an actual product that people are buying and playing.

The post notes that, until a game is validated as being genuine, it will be limited to 100 achievements and progress will not be visible, nor will it count toward global achievement numbers. Achievement games have become more prevalent on Steam due to Valve’s lax restriction and quality control on products, with an entire genre forming around games that offer thousands of achievements with no real underlying game, generally simply requiring the game to be launched and idling to generate achievements.

This move is very similar to one that Valve took against trading cards, where Valve placed limits on which games would be eligible for the marketable, tradeable cards. It is important to note that unlike trading cards, where an entire black market of mostly Russian bots formed to farm games developed purely to profit off of fraudulent card sales, that achievements are absolutely worthless in Steam other than for decoration and ego purposes.

(Source: Twitter)

Planetside 2 Rolls Out New Event System, Weapons, and More


Daybreak Game Company has released the latest update for Planetside 2, bringing forth continent-wide events and more. Continent events bring back the aerial anomaly event, tasking the three factions with controlling the most facilities of a certain type within a 30 minute timer, also making all aerial vehicles free to spawn during that time frame. Construction is seeing a change to make the attacking portion less frustrating while also reducing prices to build. Finally, new battle rifles available to all classes will be made available, one for each faction.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to the major changes noted above, Daybreak is also making some tweaks to the user interface and squads, as well as other fixes and balances. The entire list of changes can be found at the link below.

(Source: Daybreak)

[Video] Remedy Entertainment Unveils Control


Remedy Entertainment and publishing partner 505 Games have announced Control, set for PC and consoles in 2019. Players take on the role of Jesse Faden, director of a secretive agency in New York when the world is invaded by aliens. Players will have to master a variety of powers, loadouts, and reactive environments.

“Control represents a new exciting chapter for us, it redefines what a Remedy game is. It shows off our unique ability to build compelling worlds while providing a new player-driven way to experience them,” said Mikael Kasurinen,game director of Control. “A key focus for Remedy has been to provide more agency through gameplay and allow our audience to experience the story of the world at their own pace”

Remedy Entertainment is known for their work on Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break.

Lawbreakers Will Shut Down In September, Now Free To Play


When Boss Key Productions announced its closure back in May, the question of its two titles sunsetting became a matter of when, not if. As of today, competitive shooter Lawbreakers has been made officially free to play in preparation for the servers to sunset in September. No information has been posted to Radical Heights, which is already free to play, on when that game will follow suit.

The announcement in its entirety has been posted below. All in-game purchases have been disabled and no refunds are being granted.

(Source: Steam)

Dear LawBreakers,

In light of the unfortunate news regarding Boss Key Productions shutting down, we regret to announce that we will be sunsetting our support of LawBreakers on September 14, 2018 as we are not able to operate the game.

Our servers will remain open until then and the game will be made free-to-play on Steam for all players effective immediately. Please note that any and all new in-game purchases will also be disabled and we will not be able to accept any refund requests.

We truly appreciate your understanding in this difficult time and we want to thank you all your support and being a part of the passionate LawBreakers community.

Thank you for staying with us throughout this journey.

-The LawBreakers Team

The Division, Elder Scrolls Online Hit Xbox Game Pass


Xbox Game Pass is a $10/month service that allows you to play an impressive library of games on your Xbox One, and with E3 kicking off the service just got more valuable. As announced over the weekend, Microsoft has added several games including The Division, Elder Scrolls Online, and Fallout 4, with more titles on the way.

As is standard the with service, the Game Pass won’t get you any DLC for any of the titles listed and there is the likeliness that some of the games may be removed from the service at some unspecified point in the far future. Any game on the service can be purchased at a discount, including relevant DLC. If you haven’t already invested into the game on other platforms, now might be a good time to start playing.

(Source: Xbox Game Pass)

[Column] EA Origin Premier Is A Value Proposition


Back when Origin/EA Access debuted on PC and Xbox, I said that it was one of the most gutsy things that Electronic Arts has done in their history next to the Origin Guarantee (refund policy) and my reasoning was pretty simple: By showing off their games in 10 hour trials before launch, EA is taking two major risks that players could A.) burn out of the game within that ten hour window and B.) If the game isn’t good, it can tank day one sales.

And you don’t have to look far for evidence of this, because Battlefront II is a prime example of a game that most assuredly lost a lot of day one sales because of the reception to the early access demo. Yes, the service costs money and for many the $30 per year is worth it to cover the included vault games as well as the ability to personally preview new releases and see if they are worth it. Even if you are not an Origin subscriber, you still see a benefit in that other people are playing the games early and able to report on their quality.

This weekend, EA announced a new tier of membership to Origin: Origin Access Premier. This is no doubt a response to Microsoft’s Game Pass on the Xbox One and functions very similarly. For $14.99 per month or $100 per year, you get full access to new games without the ten hour time limited demo version that standard Origin Access members receive. This seems to include all of EA’s first party lineup as well as potentially some third party titles, since the promo page teases Anthem, Battlefield V, A Way Out, and EA’s 2019 sports games. Incidentally, this is also marks the first Madden game on PC in a decade.

I’ve seen some varied response to this service and, as I said with Origin Access when that first launched, this is a value proposition that is entirely subjective to your wants and needs as a customer. If you are hardline militant on owning your games or refuse to go digital except when necessary and don’t care about the five day head start, well this service doesn’t offer much to you. If you’re the kind of person who burns through several Electronic Arts games per year from day one, then dumps the games like a bad habit, there might be a value proposition in $100 versus whatever you’re currently spending. If you’re the casual player who only buys games once they are extensively marked down, it might not be a bad value to subscribe for one or two months out of the year to check out the current library without restrictions.

Ultimately I still stand by my belief that Origin Access and Premier are a net positive for gamers, even if you only consider it to be the canary in the mine for EA publishing low quality releases. If Anthem is bad on launch, trust me when I say the internet will let you know with plenty of time to cancel that pre-order.

Chaturday: The One in Which I Get Myself Blacklisted, And That’s a Good Thing


I had some extra time to work on today’s Chaturday article, so I thought I’d make this one extra long. Sit back and enjoy.

This week I’d like to take a look at Valve’s recent decision to no longer curate games on Steam, barring games that are illegal or blatantly trolling. This has prompted an immediate and unsurprising backlash from a population of the internet whose income and livelihoods are directly proportional to the amount of drama that they can stir up. The doomsayers came out of their holes to proclaim that the service is now damned to be a hellscape of disgusting pornographic games where Nazis and white supremacists murder babies! The National Center on Sexual Exploitation claimed that there were one thousand games on Steam with sexual content, and every single one without exception was objectifying in nature.

It’s important to note here that none of the games journalists you may have seen talking about this are trying to take your games away, and I know this because they’ve been telling us repeatedly for the past five years. If I am repeatedly slapping food out of the hand of a small child, it doesn’t mean I’m against that child eating or trying to control him, I’m just saying that his hands can’t hold the food that I don’t personally like.

And for what it’s worth, I think that a lot of these recent decisions at Valve come down to the flat corporate structure. The decision to remove Hatred all those years back was done and then reversed because there is no real managerial structure in the company. Nobody to come out and squarely lead with a vision for how the Steam store should exist. As a result, factions form with differing opinions which arguably led to the warning letters being sent to certain developers a few weeks ago, and you have a company that massively disagrees on how to police the store with nobody around to pull rank and say “my word is final.” Nobody can agree on who gets to push the big shiny “approved” button, so nobody gets to push it at all.

I could spend a year going over quotes from our friends in the games media losing their collective sanity over this announcement, but I don’t have that kind of time. Inverse posted a piece saying that Valve’s response to trolling was to monetize it, despite that being a complete lie, saying that Valve’s answer to bigotry is to monetize it, despite not having any evidence of games genuinely advocating bigotry appearing or attempting to appear on the platform. Polygon’s Ben Kuchera wrote a piece with the subheading “anything goes as long as you give Valve a cut,” a blatantly false statement followed by paragraphs of trying to connect how Valve is wrong for deciding what constitutes an “illegal game” as it makes them the arbitrary decision maker, but also wrong for not acting as arbitrary decision maker on which games pass muster for the store. Freelance writer Nick Capozzoli compared the statement to Valve essentially saying “We believe we should bring Nazis together,” a flagrant misrepresentation.

Even the founder of Itch.io got in on the salt-throwing, posting “A platform that allows “everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling” is ridiculous. Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off . Our ban buttons are ready.” Incidentally, within five minutes of searching, MMO Fallout had managed to pick up a lengthy list of titles hosted on, and thus presumably endorsed, by itch.io, including hentai games with less-than-consensual sex, games where the objective is to beat up aggressive, beautiful girls, and a game that simply describes itself as “Learn Japanese You Faggot!” Itch.io is a veritable dumping ground for virtually everything that would never make its way on to Steam, be it meme games, troll games, outright piracy, and unfettered copyright infringement. If there are any stores that have no standing to criticize Valve’s curation, it’s itch.io.

It’s not entirely surprising to see outlets deliberately misinterpreting Valve’s statements, bringing up titles like Active Shooting Simulator and conveniently passing over either the fact that the game was removed, or why it was removed, and presenting hyperbolic questions on whether or not Valve will accept certain games, pointing to titles that a reasonable person could conclude to fall under the trolling rule. I say unsurprising because many of these writers are the same people whose bread and butter lies in outrage bait, throwing out accusations and feigning offense to drive hate-views by the thousands, otherwise known as trolling for profit. If these articles had been video games, they’d be banned from Steam.

One subject in which I will agree with my fellow press on is this: If Valve is claiming that they are going to only block illegal games and troll games, they damn sure better start actually doing that. As I said previously, Valve has pretty explicitly stated that they had no intention of selling Active Shooter Simulator on Steam, a statement that would hold more water if Valve weren’t clearly getting ready to sell Active Shooter on Steam. The same goes for titles like Aids Simulator, Gay World, and that shooting game where the only goal is to kill gay people. Titles that are so obvious from the slightest glance to be troll titles and yet they managed to get their way on to Steam before being removed.

In reality, the media should be happy about these changes, as should Youtubers. After all, the idea of Steam being flooded with dozens of games on a daily basis just means that people will be going back to modern and traditional games media in order to find the titles worth playing. It also grants a fantastic opportunity to the portion of games media that really likes writing troll bait but hates actually playing games. If Steam actually becomes the cesspool that you predict, you will have a lifetime of articles to express faux outrage.

The only people who have a genuine right to be angry about these changes are the developers, for whom many this open door policy means drowning in an even larger ocean of competing voices.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Valve’s Steam Policy: Aids Simulator, No, Suicide Simulator, Yes


(Update: Since this posting, all of the developer’s titles have been pulled from Steam)

Aids Simulator was a game set to launch on Steam on June 12, 2018, at least until Valve shut it down and ripped it off the game store (still available in its archived state) According to its developer, BunchOD00dz, Aids Simulator is a game where you play as someone who goes to Africa and gets HIV, and must now kill all of the Africans who gave you HIV. It bills itself as an asset flip that performs poorly and isn’t fun. In short, it’s exactly the troll game to make the press go nuts.

The developer’s other titles include Suicide Simulator, which has apparently been deemed not a troll game and thus suitable for Steam, and Blackscreen Simulator, a title that is not in fact a black screen but instead a zombie shooter using flipped assets that similarly bills itself as short, low quality, and prone to crashing.

With Valve’s new stance on lowering the barrier to entry for Steam while toughening its stance on troll games, we’ll have to see how games like Aids Simulator and Suicide Simulator are handled going forward.

Wild West Online To Offer Free Trial As Traffic Drops


Wild West Online is preparing to implement a free trial as its Steam numbers continue to drop. Having released barely a month ago, Wild West Online launched to a peak of 559 players on Steam and currently sits at less than 40 as of this writing with a 24 hour peak of 84.

“We’re adding free trial version of the game. It’ll be available both at our website as well as thru Steam on a game’s store page. Free trial version will let users to play game as a normal player, but with some restrictions.”

Trial accounts will be restricted to level 20 and will not be able to unlock achievements or receive rewards. Wild West Online currently sits at a 37% “mostly negative” rating on Steam.

(Source: Steam)