Valve Decides To Get Out Of The Curation Business When It Comes To 'Offensive' Games

from the the-good-and-the-bad dept

As we've said in the past, Valve has always had a tricky line to walk with it's Steam platform, having to straddle the needs of both the gamers that use the service and the game developers that make it worthwhile. Frankly, it's walked this line fairly well for the most part. The platform, which was always popular, has exploded as the place to release a new game title online. As we noted way back in ye olde 2016, this popularity has also presented a problem for Steam: saturation. There are now simply so many games available on the platform that blindly wading into it and expecting to find new content you didn't know you wanted is a dicey proposition at best. More content is an undeniably good thing, but it would be silly to suggest that the deluge of new games released in the past few years hasn't also had a deleterious effect on the usability of the platform.

Our solution? It won't surprise you. We advocated that Steam empower the gamers that use it to act as curators. If done properly, this would allow an ecosystem of trusted advisers among gamers that share interests to tell them which titles they should be looking at. To that end, Steam subsequently employed a curators program within the platform that attempted to build exactly this ecosystem. To date, it's been mediocre at best.

But this isn't the only publicized problem Steam has had in recent days. In addition, the platform has been in the news for its wishy-washy but ultimately heavy-handed approach to games that have either mature sexual content or are offensive to large swaths of people. Combinations of so-called sex-games and games that make such topics as school shootings central to gameplay have been banned, or not, often to much critique from every side from gamers.

The concept of empowering its community to serve as its own filters and the no-win situation when it comes to offensive games has now collided, causing Valve to announce that it's getting out of the game content moderating business entirely.

In a blog post musing on the difficulty of deciding on a case-by-case basis what should and should not be allowed on Steam, Valve’s Erik Johnson explained that the company does, in fact, have a team of humans that looks at “every controversial title submitted to us,” and employees frequently disagree like Steam users do. “The harsh reality of this space, that lies at the root of our dilemma, is that there is absolutely no way we can navigate it without making some of our players really mad,” Johnson wrote.

“We’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling,” said Johnson. “Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see.”

There are two reactions that leap immediately to mind. First and foremost, this will be a good and useful experiment by Valve. Empowering customers and communities is almost always the right approach. Acting as a gatekeeper or the warden managing the walled garden is not an approach we believe in. Moreso, an approach by a company that puts its trust in the everyday customer is typically an inherently consumer-friendly one. The ideals behind this kind of move are a good one. Censorship sucks, choice is better.

On the other hand, the other immediate reaction has to be that Valve had damned well better have its user tools in order when it rolls this out en masse, because two things will happen otherwise. Most directly, gamers who are being inundated with games and content they find horrifying, offensive, or otherwise view negatively are going to be fully up in arms. It's easy to imagine families that game together, between parents and young children, losing their shit if the Steam homepage is suddenly full of games laden with overt sexual content or school shootings.

Even more so, if you thought the floodgates had been open when it came to the sheer volume of titles on Steam previously, this is going to introduce a potential tidal wave of new games onto the marketplace. If Valve isn't supremely prepared to empower users now with far better curating tools than it already has, the platform is likely going to take a severe dip in its usability as a place to discover games.

In other words: decent idea, assuming Valve has put a ton of thought into how this will impact its platform.

Filed Under: content moderation, steam, tools, users
Companies: valve

Steam Yanks Another Developer's Games Over Fake Reviews Posted By Employee

from the when-will-they-learn? dept

Astro-turfing and fake reviews continue to be plagues upon the online marketplace, creating a wave of distrust with the public when it comes to properly assessing any business via online means. It's impossible to know how big or small a problem this is, which only adds to the distrust in the public, forcing them to assume the worst. All that being said, Valve has actually been pretty good about policing reviews on its gaming platform, Steam, and also making a big public stink about instances in which it has had to take action against developers for trying to game the review system. Studios have had their games pulled from the store entirely, such as when Digital Homicide and Insel Games each had their respective titles pulled. Given that Valve made sure the volume was turned up when it took such actions, one would think that game studios ought to have gotten the message by now.

And, yet, not all of them have. Acram Digital, a developer that makes digital versions of board games, just had all of its titles disappeared by Steam when it was discovered that an Acram employee was creating fake Steam accounts and posting fake positive reviews. As it did so, Valve released the following statement.

We’ve received a number of reports for Steam review manipulation on the titles Steam: Rails to Riches and Eight-Minute Empire, from Acram Digital. After investigating these reports we have found that the developer, Grzegorz Kubas, has been trying to inflate the user review score for his titles. This is against our policy, and something we take very seriously.

Because of Grzegorz's actions, we have removed all games/DLC developed by Acram from our store, and will no longer be doing business with him. Existing owners will be able to keep their titles.

Say what you will about Steam, but the platform has had a steady stream of consumer-friendly practices rolled out to gamers everywhere. These types of actions, particularly when accompanied by a public statement like this, are fantastic ways to preserve the trust gamers have in the platform and its review system. It's also a good way to demonstrate that, despite Steam wanting as many games as possible in its store, the platform also values the feedback and interests of its gaming customers.

For his part, Kubas has admitted to the wrong-doing, while also pleading on behalf of his employer.

You are right. I'm guilty. It came from my frustration of few bad, unfair reviews on Valve's Steam only. It was stupid action, not something planned. This is my individual, bad behavior, not the team, so I would like to blame me, not the devs. It's a lesson for the rest of my life and it will not happen again, ever.

Good on him for taking responsibility in this way, although it sure would be difficult to place full trust in the rest of the studio when one of its employees actively attempted to fool potential customers in this way. Maybe it's true that Acram had no idea he was doing this. Maybe not. The public sure can't know the answer to that question and it seems likely that the trust has been broken beyond repair at this point regardless.

Either way, game developers really ought to know at this point that there is no percentage in fake reviews. The costs are simply too high.

Filed Under: astroturfing, fake reviews, grzegorz kubas, reviews, steam
Companies: acram digital, valve

Game Studio Threatens Employees' Jobs If They Don't Write Positive Reviews Of Own Game, Then Steam Pulls Game Entirely

from the backfire dept

It's no secret that Valve's Steam platform is the dominant marketplace for PC video games. Much comes along with that status, including the strategies and metrics studios must employ to get their games noticed on Steam. One of the important metrics for recognition is Steam reviews. And it's not just the review scores themselves that are important, but actually getting reviews -- any reviews -- to begin with is a big deal.

So it's no surprise that game studios strategize on how to get their games in enough customer hands to generate reviews. Still, one studio's strategy has massively backfired. Insel Games out of Malta recently released Wild Buster, it's latest title. Sadly, in the all important initial release window, the game was not generating enough reviews to result in a general review score on the game page. Those scores are often used by consumers to quickly decide whether a title deserves their attention at all and a lack of a score can indicate that the game isn't good enough to even warrant a look. Insel's CEO, Patrick Steppel, decided to address this with a strongly-worded email to his own staff insisting that they all buy the game and review it, despite having had a hand in making the game. If employees refused to do this, Steppel warned that it could mean that they would no longer have a job at the studio.

“I had [sent] an email earlier but I was told that some of you announced to colleagues that you do not want to make a purchase of the game and/or a review. Frankly, this leaves me pretty disappointed. Of course I cannot force you to write a review (let alone tell you what to write) - but I should not have to. Neglecting the importance of reviews will ultimately cost jobs. If WB fails, Insel fails, IME fails and then we all will have no job next year. So I am asking you either of do the following: buy the game and present me the receipt until Friday night for which (together with a claim form) you will be re-imbursed within 24h or explain to me tomorrow why you do not wish to do this. I would like to discuss this individually and privately with each of you and will follow up.”

Corresponding with the timing of this email was a deluge of reviews suddenly washing over the game's Steam page, all of them glowingly positive. This, as many of you will know, is a form of astroturfing and it's plainly unethical. The point of reviews is for Steam customers to get a sense of what other Steam customers think of a game so as to inform their purchasing decisions. It is not a place for those who made the game to surreptitiously fool customers into thinking a game is better than it is by posting reviews from a clearly biased source. For the CEO of a studio to suggest employees do this at the end of a pointed employment-gun is all the more galling.

And, ultimately, ineffective, given that Valve has responded from pulling every single Insel Games product from its marketplace.

In a post last night on the Steam forums, a Valve representative wrote that as a result of this new information, the store has pulled all of Insel Games’ products. “The publisher appears to have used multiple Steam accounts to post positive reviews for their own games. This is a clear violation of our review policy and something we take very seriously. For these reasons, we are ending our business relationship with Insel Games Ltd. and removing their games from our store. If you have previously purchased this game, it will remain accessible in your Steam library.”

Laughably, Streppel has publicly admitted to sending out the email while also insisting that he will appeal Valve's decision. What the basis of that appeal could be, given his admission, is anyone's guess. Streppel also insists that he didn't mean to threaten anyone's job and that he has not punished any employee that refused to write a review or buy the game, although that kind of gaslighting likely won't find much purchase in a gaming public that doesn't look kindly upon this kind of subterfuge.

So, the lesson is that game studios should take the efforts they would spend conniving over how to fool customers and just make great games instead. Otherwise, the backlash may be more than they can handle.

Filed Under: employees, fake reviews, patrick steppel, reviews, steam, wild buster
Companies: insel games, valve

Sega Releases 'Sonic Mania' Without Informing PC Customers Of Denuvo Inclusion And Always Online Requirements

from the always-dumb dept

Searching for stories about Sega here at Techdirt results in a seriously mixed bag of results. While the company has managed to be on the right side of history on issues like SOPA and fan-made games, it has also managed to be strongly anti-consumer on game mods and has occasionally wreaked havoc on the YouTube community, all in the name of copyright protectionism. Despite all of this, Sega has gone to some lengths to successfully craft for itself a public image more accessible and likeable than its long-time rival Nintendo.

Stories like the following will put dents in that image, however. Sega recently ported its new title Sonic Mania to the PC and released it on the Steam platform. The port also included Denuvo DRM and an always-online requirement, except that it (oops!) forgot to tell anyone about either.

I tried loading the Windows version of Sonic Mania while my Steam account was offline. That's when Sonic Mania informed me, in no uncertain terms, that "Steam user must be logged in to play this game."

Turns out, Sega has applied the much-malignedDenuvo copy-protection system to Sonic Mania's PC version—and this Denuvo implementation won't unlock the game for players so long as Steam is operating in "offline mode." Until the game receives an update, Sonic Mania fans hoping to play the PC version in an offline capacity are out of luck. (Your backup option, should you want to do something like board a plane, is to boot the game while connected to Wi-Fi, then disconnect from the Internet and leave the game running in the background until you're ready to play. It's not necessarily an ideal workaround.)

Gamers immediately began complaining both that the DRM was keeping them from playing their legitimately purchased game and that the Steam store page for Sonic Mania was devoid of any notification of Denuvo or its online requirement in the system requirements page, or anywhere else for that matter. Somewhat oddly, a Steam account with the handle of "Sega Dev" responded to the complaints, saying the omission on the store page was a mistake. That mistake has been rectified and the store page now informs buyers of the Denuvo requirement. But that same account also informed Steam users that "Sonic Mania is intended to be played offline", and has promised to investigate the issue.

Even stranger, the PR lead for the Sonic franchise went even further and practically begged for the public to complain to the company about Denuvo and the online requirement.

I simply can't recall ever having seen anything remotely like this, with the PR wing of a company soliciting complaints to corporate in what sure seems like a way to get corporate to move off of a DRM. It seems there is some infighting at Sega over this requirement, though to what level that infighting rises is unknown to me. Any Sega employees reading this are free to contact me and relay your concerns.

Regardless, this is a terrible look for Sega among the gaming community. Including a much-maligned DRM and requiring a single-player game to be online to play it can only have one sort of impact on the company's standing in the public. While Sega has not removed Denuvo from the game entirely, it has since released a patch that allows the game to be played offline. The damage, however, has likely already been done.

Filed Under: denuvo, drm, offline, sonic mania, steam
Companies: sega

Developer Puts Game On The Pirate Bay Because Steam Key Resellers Are The Bigger Evil

from the gifts-for-the-poor dept

Leaving aside the AAA publishers for a moment, the video game industry is actually starting to get really good on recognizing better ways to react to copyright infringement other than pounding their fists on their tables and knee-capping their customers with DRM. This still occurs, of course, but we've also seen stories of publishers treating pirates as potential customers with whom it's worth connecting, giving away Steam keys on torrent sites, or just playfully messing with pirates instead of screaming at them. These efforts generally are done to the tune of great PR and the humanization of a content company that can only help their businesses.

And, thankfully, it's not a trend that is slowing down. Acid Wizard Studio, publishers of the game Darkwood, made some recent news by deciding to put its own game on the Pirate Bay.

On torrent site The Pirate Bay, typically the domain of illegal rips of media, one username among dozens uploading the horror game Darkwood stands out: the game’s publisher. Today, the Poland-based Acid Wizard Studio uploaded their own game for free with “no catch, no added pirate hats for characters,” their torrent description reads.

Now, why Acid Wizard Studio did this is somewhat unique in these kinds of stories. In part, the studio says it did this because it doesn't want to keep the game from those who truly cannot afford it. It aimed this message particularly at children who game at the pleasure of their parents' credit card bills. But while we've seen that sort of thing done before, the studio also did this because it believes the Steam key reselling business is the greater evil compared with piracy.

Acid Wizard saw a comment from someone who refunded the game because they didn’t want their parents to get stressed out over the bill, Acid Wizard writes on Imgur.

“If you don’t have the money and want to play the game,” they say, “we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood.” They explain that a flood of emails asking for free Steam keys helped bolster their decision to upload a free Darkwood torrent to The Pirate Bay, and asked that those who can afford it later buy it discounted on Steam. It’s an interesting move that spits in the face of shady key-selling services like G2A, where Acid Wizard figures a lot of the free keys they’d send out would go. “This practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don’t have the money to play Darkwood,” Acid Wizard writes. “Please, don’t buy it through any key reselling site. By doing that, you’re just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry.”

The replies to the studio's message were almost universally positive, with many promising to try the game out via the torrent and buy it afterwards if they liked it. How many of those people ever would have tried the game out at all, illlicitly or otherwise, is impossible to determine, but it seems obvious that the amount of additional sales revenue that will be generated because of this is not zero. In other words, the publisher gets the good PR of treating people well, gets to make a point about a key-reselling industry that is genuinely pretty scummy, and picks up some indeterminate number of sales in the process.

That's the kind of nimble response to piracy the AAA publishers should recognize as a winning strategy.

Filed Under: darkwood, piracy, resellers, steam, video games
Companies: acid wizard studio, the pirate bay

How One Game Developer Views Steam's Refund Policy As A Boon In The Face Of Over $4 Million In Refunds

from the the-long-game dept

It's been a little over a year since the Steam platform finally rolled out a true refund program for digital game purchases, with Microsoft quickly following suit. While gamers rejoiced at the news that every game purchase wasn't some form of a gamble, game developers reacted in a range generally between being nonplussed to vocally angry or fearful. The overall concern was that this move to shift the balance of Steam's supportive stance towards the consumer and away from the game developer would negatively impact the bottom line of developers now faced with a negative column in their sales metrics.

Yet there are still very smart people in the gaming industry. One of those people appears to be Garry Newman, the developer for Rust, a survival game available on Steam's platform. Rust has been refunded a staggering 300,000-plus times, resulting in nearly four-and-a-half million dollars in refunds. But rather than freaking out and lashing out at the Steam refund policy, Newman instead decided to publish the refund statistics for everyone to see. And then he went on to explain why he thinks the refund policy for his game is actually a good thing.

Newman believes, however, that refunds provide Steam users who might normally keep their wallets under lock and key with some leeway. “I think in the long run, people knowing the refund system is there probably gained us more sales than it lost us,” he said.

That's the sound of a man confident in his product. So confident, in fact, that he trusts that taking away some of the fear and mental cost to a transaction for his game will ultimately result in more cashflow in by gamers who keep the game than cashflow out from gamers refunding it. We make this argument all the time about digital marketplaces: taking away barriers for potential customers to enjoy a product will grow the customer-base enough to render any negatives unimportant.

There's also something to be said for the vision of being consumer friendly in this way. Anyone reading Newman's comments must certainly favor this kind of transparency and, again, the confidence in his product that he is demonstrating. More so, the flip side makes the inverse argument: game developers afraid of a refund policy are clearly afraid of it due to the anticipation that it will used. That would seem to indicate a wavering stance on how good the product is to begin with.

If nothing else, this past year has shown us that digital goods can still come packaged with consumer friendly policies while keeping the industry successful. Hopefully we'll see more of this sort of thing.

Filed Under: developer, games, garry newman, refunds, rust, steam
Companies: valve

Digital Homicide's $10 Million Lawsuit Against Game Critic Gone

from the bang-bang dept

Update: We've made some corrections to this piece to clarify that, while this is a victory for Jim Sterling, it's a result of Digital Homicide agreeing to a settlement, rather than the court tossing the lawsuit, as the original suggested.

The saga of game developer Digital Homicide whipped through our pages like an idiotic windstorm. This gust of blustery nonsense started with the company's lawsuit against a game critic, Jim Sterling, then moved on to it suing Steam users over reviews they wrote, before twirling into the stage where Valve banned Digital Homicide games from Steam entirely and the company stated it planned to shut down operations. All of that happened in the span of six months, which would be impressive if it weren't so sad.

Still, the resolution of the threats against Steam users wasn't the end of the story. The lawsuit against Sterling was still out there, a $10 million dollar anvil hanging over the game critic's head. Until this week, that is, when the court in which the suit had been filed dismissed it with prejudice as part of a settlement agreement between the two parties.

Pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(ii), the parties hereby stipulate and agree to the dismissal of all claims in this action, including the claims raised in the Amended Complaint of February 3, 2017, with prejudice with each party to bear its own costs and attorneys’ fees.

Plaintiff agrees to forever refrain from directly or indirectly filing against Defendant any cause of action arising from the same facts or circumstances alleged in the Amended Complaint. Plaintiff also agrees to refrain from taking action against Defendant’s business, such as sending DMCA takedown notices, without first considering whether Defendant is engaged in fair use of a copyright under 17 U.S.C. § 107, as required under federal law and Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015).

And that will be the end of that. But Sterling wasn't the only one casting a wary glance at this lawsuit. Many in the game-critiquing world watched on, wondering whether or not a court was going to allow a critic to be punished for doing his job. Were it to have happened, that would have sent a chilling effect through the gaming industry. Fortunately, it didn't.

Which isn't to say that this all ends without any blood being drawn.

What’s particularly disturbing about lawsuits like this is that, even in cases where they are clearly frivolous, as this was, they can force critics to spend significant amounts of money on legal defenses. Sterling had to hire a lawyer, Bradley Hartman, who helped convince the court to dismiss this case, which, in Sterling’s words, involved “series of allegations that were difficult to comprehend even for the one accused of them.”

“Not all threats from the Internet are idle ones, and I wouldn’t recommend anybody brush them off,” Sterling concluded.

Which is again why this country is desperately crying out for strong Anti-SLAPP laws at the federal level. Having to fend off these vacuous lawsuits with no recourse at the end is a burden without justification.

Filed Under: criticism, defamation, free speech, jim sterling, reviews, steam
Companies: digital homicide

Amidst The Game Release Boom On Steam, It's Time For Valve To Weaponize Its Community For Curation

from the gamers-unite! dept

A review of stories here at Techdirt about Steam, the chief online retailer for digital games distribution, offers a mixed return of grades on its approach. Valve has a tricky wire upon which to balance as it seeks to protect the relationships it has with both its gaming customers and the publishers that sell their games on Steam. At times, Valve makes decisions that favor publishers, while at other times Valve's actions are quite good in terms of protecting its customers against those same publishers.

But this balancing act is going to become an issue in yet another way that revolves around the recent explosion in titles being released on the Steam platform. The excellent Steam Spy account on Twitter tweeted out the following graph, which should come as a shock to nobody with a Steam account.

Even for those of us who have noticed the uptick in games being released on Steam, I doubt most of us realized that nearly two-thirds of all the games currently on the platform were released within the past two years, or that over a third of them were released in 2016 alone. It would be silly to try to argue that such a deluge has no effect on the customer experience. An explosion in available titles adds to the workload involved for gamers searching for new titles to play, as they must weed through more titles in more genres, searching for the gems they want amongst an ever-growing number of rocks that they don't want.

And, in fact, Steam recognized this a ways back when it introduced its Steam Curators program, through which gamers can pare down game searches using curators they have come to trust for recommendations. However, the Curators program quickly managed to suffer from the same problem as the game titles deluge: there are thousands of curators, at times more than there are game titles on Steam. At some point, if Steam wants to remain useful to gamers as a platform on which to find new games, as opposed to simply buying them, it's going to have to do something to get out ahead of this.

That could take many forms, of course. The worst idea of the bunch would be for Valve/Steam itself to get involved in pimping some titles while pushing others to relative obscurity. This is a solution to the deluge problem offered in other arenas, notably in the way Apple restricts access to its iTunes platform and App Store, partially as a way to play quality police. It's not the optimal solution for two main reasons: it benefits existing entertainers more than newcomers, and it's partially the reason why Android and other music services are the preferred platform of users.

Better would be a solution that weaponized the Steam community itself, relying on reviews and feedback of both games and curators to lead gamers to "expert" curators, or something of the like. Alternatively, Steam could implement a matching system to match up gamers and curators by interest. This idea was laid out by James Beech at Gamasutra, who delightfully compared it to the matching system for dating sites.

If Valve really wants to make this system useful, they should implement a OKCupid style matching system. No really, make me fill out a one-time profile where I list my five favorite games, my five least favorite games, genres I love/hate, game elements I appreciate, (exploration, story, twitch gameplay), preferred game length, subject matter, etc. Have curators fill out a similar profile, and then generate match percentages, (just make sure it doesn't use the same match algorithm that the Discovery Queue uses; a feature theoretically far more useful than curators, if it weren't so consistently off the mark).

Anyway, all the answers would be private, with an option for curators to display theirs publically, so other users can see what those curators value. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’ll get me in the ballpark a lot quicker than manually sifting through thousands of curation pages with the same, “only great games within,” description.

Steam is going to build on its curator system at some point to battle this issue. The last thing anyone should want to see is Valve itself getting in the business of picking winners and losers, as it were. Force-feeding recommendations like that to gamers will make the problem worse, not better. Instead, they should trust their gaming customers and empower them, even more than they already have.

Filed Under: curation, filtering, games, steam, video games
Companies: valve

Sega/Steam Took Down A Bunch Of Legitimate Steam Workshop Mods Over Copyright Concerns

from the sigh dept

We've talked often about how common it is for legitimate customers to get caught up in attempts to thwart piracy and copyright infringement. From DRM keeping legit purchasers from using what they paid for to Fair Use uses of content getting taken down by automatic systems on sites like YouTube, it's worth noting whenever this happens. After all, there is an expression in the legal system that goes something like: I'd rather set 100 guilty people free than imprison a single innocent. The stakes when it comes to copyright aren't as high as jail time, typically, but it's interesting how little this mantra penetrates with those who would enforce copyright via carpet-bomb rather than a scalpel.

Take the recent incident with Sega's Steam Workshop mod-space, for instance, where dozens and dozens of mods within the platform suddenly disappeared.

Earlier this year Sega opened a Steam Workshop section for their Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics Hub, allowing modders to tinker with emulated versions of games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage. On Tuesday, dozens of those mods were removed without explanation.

Modders asking why their creations were taken down have received a stock reply from Steam Support: “Due to reporting of content that violates the Steam Terms of Service, the content in question has been removed from the Steam Community.”

Now, some of the mods taken down did indeed violate Steam's ToS, including some that weren't so much mods as they were full uploads of classic Sega games. Those takedowns make perfect sense. But many other mods were exactly the type that Sega itself had allowed, if not encouraged, which certainly did not violate the ToS. These included game mods to make games easier, mods to mix Sega games with the original music from their PC counterparts, and even mods designed to help those with certain disabilities play classic Sega games. We've even noted recently that Sega has made it clear that it wants gamers to mod its games in this way, even poking at its competitors for issuing these kinds of takedowns. So what gives?

Well, in a later update, PC Gamer posts a response from Sega. It essentially acknowledges that a bunch of innocent mods were taken down by an automated system not intelligent enough to discern between what was allowed and not allowed.

"SEGA would like to reiterate how delighted it is with how the Mega Drive/Genesis Collection community has self-moderated content on Steam Workshop. We've seen some fantastic mods created and released on the platform and want to encourage the community's continued creativity by helping to curate a library of outstanding mods.

"However, due to some erratic user behaviour over the last few days, many mods which didn't breach Steam's terms of service were automatically removed from Steam Workshop. SEGA and Valve are working together with the affected modders to reinstate their work as soon as possible and have already reversed a number of removals.

"SEGA and Valve are not actively removing mods that do not violate the terms of service, only those that do. We appreciate the help of the community's self-moderation in removing illegal or offensive content to maintain the high standard of legal mods on the platform. If you feel your mod does not breach the Steam terms of service but was removed, please contact community@sega.co.uk and SEGA will investigate."

Which, fine, but why not just reverse the automated process, put everything back up, and use those same Sega investigators to only take down the infringing mods? Why does the human element always seem to be reserved for remedying the mistakes as opposed to preventing them? Why must innocent modders suffer, like a villager caught in a cluster bomb?

Filed Under: mods, steam, video games
Companies: sega, valve