Good. Lawyers for companies are too quick to demand that you get rid of things that might make anyone slightly upset, and it ruins online places. It's why NSFW games went away, and why everything needs a thousand warnings. It's why companies are so happy to add age verification, because it "CYA"s them.
Good on Gabe there. That's your job, to protect the company if they get sued, not make content decisions
To be fair, their job is also to recommend the course of action least likely to get Valve sued.
Least likely to ~~get Valve sued~~ lose Valve money in a lawsuit*
Frivolous lawsuits happen all the time. You're never going to avoid all of them, and shouldn't be trying to. The lawyer's job is to make sure that all their ducks are in a row for WHEN they get sued so that the judge can review all the information and throw the lawsuit out.
Well said.
Only if they ask for that advice, presumably
No. Their job is to find the legal gray area to operate in so that if they get sued they're not instantly guaranteed to lose. Do you think Meta hires lawyers who tell them "maybe don't spy on people" instead of lawyers who will fight all the fines EU throws at their way? Companies don't hire lawyers just so they could say something can't be done, they're hired to find a way to get it done or find an irrefutable point why it can't be done. The fact that Valve did go ahead with the hands-off approach shows that the lawyer didn't do their job properly when they presented their opinion.
Have you seen what Steam's forums look like? They NEED better moderation. They need to put an end to all the racism and other hateful shit on there. It's a fucking disaster.
Article is talking about what games they have on the platform. Separate moderation issues.
that is different kind of moderation
I personally encourage you to learn more about which you speak before forming such passionate stances. There's merit to what you say, but it's not relevant to the context of the discussion you responded to.
A big part of legally protecting a company is being proactive about things that will get you sued. The lawyers were correctly operating in our bad criminal Justice system.
I thought this was going to be about the blatant Nazi posting, both in the community forums and and in asset flip/game spam in the store. Apparently the lawyer in question was bringing up accepting more censorship in the lead up to more pornographic content becoming available on Steam.
I don't typically care for Gabe, but yeah, I would have said the same thing. Probably not for the same reason tbf. But even if you don't have any political concerns outside of making money for your yacht collection... Hate speech isn't currently costing Valve money. Porn bans are directly effecting a market they have invested into. Why would you pay a legal expert to be so spineless?
Well, at the risk of repeating the obvious, what do you pay a legal expert for? As in, what did you hire them to do?
If you hired them to do research on current laws and regulations to see what you must abide by / can get away with, then you've paid them for information, even if its information you don't want to hear.
If you hired them to represent your interests, to argue your case in court for you as their client, then yeah you can't really have a lawyer that's wishy washy on your position. As stupid as they sound, that's what Trump's DOJ is doing at great risk to their own careers. Which is why more and more of them are resigning.
Historically, Valve has hired lawyers to weasle out of legal responsibilities around the world, to limited success. They repeatedly tried to get out of legally mandated refunds for digital goods in several western nations, and now people think that Valve is the good guys for eventually capitulating like it was their idea in the first place.
I cannot imagine a scenario where Gabe Newell would hire a lawyer just to have him say "comply with the new laws instead of fighting back".
EDIT: Just cause I felt like it made for more present context, Valves legal team clearly isn't going to take the "maybe we should ban loot boxes as a form of online gambling targeted towards children" debate lying down. You mess with Valve's sources of revenue, they will pull out every possible slime ball argument to say they are legally allowed to piss over any and all consumer rights. Gabe's not about to allow porn to be banned on his store of "digital game license's where you don't own anything actually". Not until the legal situation gets so dire that porn isn't worth attempting to profit off anymore. He has fought far more tasteless battles in his career.
People probably think Valve is the "good guy" in the case of refunds because they made it a worldwide policy after the Australia case. Other game platforms have only offered refunds explicitly where required. Hell, PlayStation gets away with no refunds almost anywhere if you've downloaded the game.
outside of making money for your yacht collection
Interesting tidbit I just learned: apparently he's really into marine biology and most of those are research vessels
All he wanted was to not have to pay for employees to do moderation. I love Gave, but let's not pretend this was altruistic.
Steam Forums are slowly devolving into one of the worst right-wing incubators because they refuse to proactively moderate. Any time a game gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd, the boards become flooded with propaganda, and Valve does not care.
The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don't want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.
Maybe they're supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I'd guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I've ever looked at has just piles of threads asking "Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???" or "PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!" as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I'm the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.
There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying "devs should do it" is just passing the buck.
The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don't opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.
Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don't have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don't.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely agree with you, but Steam is not the only place with this problem and Steam isn't the only one with lackluster moderation for it. We literally wouldn't be in the global political situations were in right now if it wasn't for propaganda flooding every facet of the internet. Gamers are a minority internationally and most actual gamers think the steam forums are not even worth looking at.
I'm just saying don't blame only blame Steam. There's an issue with this type of shit literally everywhere and nobody in charge gives a shit.
I never said Steam was the only website on the internet with problems. But I'm replying to a thread specifically about Steam.
This isn't about this type of moderation, it's about NSFW censorship from payment processors.
Something I want Valve to work on is a “blocklist” feature like Bluesky.
Valve themselves are libertarian and don’t want to quash any voices they don’t need to, including negative ones. However, community members could decide “We are tired of anti-woke trolls whining about inclusion, and creating their own enemies for rage farming”; and then write a blocklist of said trolls, that many players choose to subscribe to, making those posts invisible.
Could even configure a blocklist to remove any players with a Steam level of 1, just to remove factory-made bot accounts.
It's complicated I guess. People often use the "Nazi bar" analogy and I kinda get it. But I am also conflicted. Yes I disagree with their opinions and wish they will stop having those opinions. But on the other hand moderating them will just make them move to somewhere else, and they will still be having those opinions, and arguably in a worse environment. Because it would be more of a bubble with nobody countering them.
Forcing the most radical extremists underground won't deprogram them, but it will make it significantly more difficult for them to spread propaganda. The point of deplatforming is to shut down the pipeline so that fewer people get radicalized.
I'm glad this was over what sort of games Steam sells and pushing back against payment processors, but the flipside to this is how Steam has far too lax moderation of its community forums as well (which is explicitly part of Gaben's position here). Billionaires aren't your friends, Gabe is politically a weird libertarian that people just happen to like, and Steam's community is one of its most toxic features.
we got an anecdote from an anonymous former Valve employee of a time when Newell downright bit the head off Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush
Quackenbush is a wild name.
He should at least have a proper American given name like Bront or Firehose.
They should become a payment processor... I'd have a valve card. Hell, I wouldn't mind if it even had a relatively high cost at this point, just to say fuck you to visa/mc/amex
Valve being Valve... So they keep winning, Thank you Valve. Fuck everyone who wants to stop them when they do the right thing. Content moderation anywhere on the internet just feel like straight up censoring nowadays.
Because it is. It's social engineering.
Holy based.
Gabe Newell could very very easily afford to pay for more moderation.
This kind of "moderation" (read: censoring adult content) is something he doesn't want.
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