Valve changes the way games are presented on Steam for unhealthy, violent and sexual content

Valve has just released a series of immediate changes to Steam, designed to more effectively filter violent and sexual content on the platform. While this announcement makes no judgments regarding prohibited sexual content, the changes show Valve’s intentions for similar software in the future.

Perhaps the most important change is that Steam now requires developers to describe what violent or sexual content appears in the game. The picture below shows an example. “We believe that the way content is presented is quite important and will give developers a place to write a description and explain what’s in their game so you have more information when searching and deciding what to expect. buy it or not,” Valve said. “When you look at the game page of a game with mature content, we will show you a description that the developer wrote for you.”

Valve said that each developer responsible for games with mature content will be “incentivized” to add new descriptions in existing titles. Meanwhile, Valve will require administrators to ensure these games are subject to the new rules.

Valve defines what a ‘troll’ is on Steam

Also, in another interesting point, Valve has a definition of what a ‘troll’ is on the platform. Admitting the word troll is quite vague, the blog summarizes that trolls are developers who “don’t really invest properly to make games and sell games to you or anyone.”

On Steam, some people simply try to piss people off with what we call ‘game objects’ (software that is made, technically just barely qualified to be called a game, but in reality 99.99% of players wouldn’t call it a “floating game”.)

“Some trolls are trying to trick the community into taking over Steam crate items, others are trying to make a small profit from Steam through some scam about how we let developers use Steam. Others are deliberately inciting and causing trouble.”

User filtering has also been reworked. Previously, players could ignore up to three game tags in their account; the limit has now been increased to 10. This filtering not only affects recommendation lists, they now also ignore games with those tags.

This does not mean that those games will not appear in the search results. Instead, the notice will say that the game is “excluded based on your request.

Finally, you can filter mature content. If you want to see content related to sex, but not to violence, now it is completely possible.

Those are important points in the long ‘broadly’ update, but again, Valve still has not confirmed the fate of games with adult content removed from Steam.