It’s well known that user reviews on Steam are a mixed bag, to say the least. You’ll get everything from actually thoughtful reviews to snap reactions based on less than an hour spent with the game, and often see a slew of negative reviews that are clearly part of a review-bombing campaign of players complaining about a singular issue, regardless of that issue factoring in on the game’s quality.
A new report from The Guardian delves into another aspect of Steam’s user reviews and forums, with developers and even some content creators speaking out about the abuse and bigotry that Valve allows to run rampant on the platform, despite several statements directly violating content guidelines set by Valve.
More than calling out the content itself, the issue developers and creators have is Valve’s apparent unwillingness to do anything about it, offering little to no support, even with reviews that violate their own content guidelines.
One example included in the report describes how game designer Nathalie Lawhead wasn’t able to get reviews with antisemitic comments that also mocked allegations she made regarding her sexual assault, without using her public following, and ultimately, had to step outside the moderation process by directly asking someone they knew at Valve to remove the reviews.
Valve’s moderators had cleared both reviews after Lawhead initially reported them, which prevented Lawhead from reporting them a second time, since developers cannot report a cleared review without the author editing it. The reviews were also cleared despite Valve’s user-generated content and online content guides citing “insults or harassment,” “discrimination,” and “public accusations towards others” as examples of what not to do in user reviews.
Lawhead was able to remove the antisemitic review, while the other, which, like its antisemitic counterpart, accused Lawhead of lying about their sexual assault, cleared moderation even after it had been reported by others. It was then that Lawhead was able to get it removed after speaking with someone they knew at Valve. Before Lawhead took that route, all Valve said in response to their report was “We aren’t in a position to verify the accuracy of statements made in user reviews,” with Valve adding, “we don’t try to moderate reviews based on accuracy,” and claiming it was against removing reviews as it could be seen as “censorship.”
“Everyone is at one another’s throats all the time in reviews,” said content creator Bri ‘BlondePizza’ Moore. “It ensures no one is safe on the platform; developers and consumers alike.” For Lawhead’s part, getting the response they got from Valve was “crushing,” adding, “the implication seems to be that I must prove my sexual assault [to Steam] if I want to be protected from harassment over it. I am hard-pressed to see where the misunderstanding might be. They had all the information regarding the situation. It’s an obvious stance. It’s a choice.”
“This was too much work just for two obviously unjustifiable reviews,” Lawhead added. “I think this entire process of moderation is broken.”
Another example shared in the report describes how another developer, who did not have the kind of public following Lawhead did to fall back on, was unsuccessful in getting user reviews removed that had nothing to do with their game, and everything to do with whether the developer properly observed the assassination of Charlie Kirk last year.
Their game, Coven, is a first-person shooter and action game described as a “hyper-violent retro FPS,” and it has also been targeted by a Steam curator, ‘CharlieTweetsDetected,‘ which recommends games based solely on whether the developer has posted something negative or not about Charlie Kirk’s death. The developer, who wished only to be identified as Ethan, said that Steam was not interested or didn’t seeminigly care that several of Coven’s negative reviews stemmed from the curator list.
“For sure, the ‘anti-woke’ curators brought insincere negative attention to the game,” says Émi Lefèvre, a developer behind Caravan SandWitch, a game that has several negative reviews that call it “too LGBTQ…there is no future or continuation for these sad gays and lesbians.”
Lefèvre continues, “Valve’s refusal to moderate any of this is making Steam reviews and forums the battleground for some kind of culture war, and is making them unsafe for marginalized people and regular gamers trying to simply enjoy the game they bought.”
One developer who tried to report transphobic reviews to Steam was told they should “continue working on the product, while letting the community use the helpfulness feature to surface reviews that they agree with or find to be uninformed,” language that was exactly similar to what Lawhead was told five years prior, showing no change or growth in its process in half a decade.
“To us, it seemed that in Steam’s [view], hateful comments about an individual is abuse – but targeting it towards a group of people is totally fine, that’s welcome speech,” said Phi, who received the above response when trying to remove transphobic reviews from their game. “We had no other choice for what to do about transphobia in our reviews. They’re still up there today.”
Lawhead concluded, “If I am to continue existing on Steam, I am under the impression that I will have to go through this exhausting ordeal every time I want to report abuse. This shouldn’t be normal.“
Valve’s apparent unwillingness to moderate these reviews or even update its moderation process is only compounded as a problem when you consider that Steam is the largest digital platform for PC games, one that many developers believe to be a monopoly. Beyond the economic issues this causes, developers are forced to choose between publishing their games on platforms where Lawhead admits game publishers “don’t take you seriously” because you’re not on Steam, or stay on Steam, and endure reams of abuse.
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