Multiple game creators describe ineffective moderation on the platform, resulting in unchecked hatred in forums and targeted campaigns of negative ‘anti-woke’ reviews
I believe the answer is simply to give better moderation tools to the developers on their own games’ Store and Forum pages, since it’s developers who seem to have an issue with current moderation.
This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game’s “negative reception” entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about “woke devs” or “DEI” or “the chinese translation is bad”.
It could allow to hide the content of the review, but still count it in the total (recommended / not recommended).
Personally I am not in favour, and I see negative bigoted reviews as legitimate reviews. I wouldn’t hold on the same level professional reviews, but it’s only random players we are discussing here. Let’s not pretend that the positive reviews are always constructive, either.
Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to “mostly positive” or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you “only censored the racists don’t worry. We’re getting brigaded”
Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always… Read the reviews. If the good ones are all “lol cute dog” and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are “waaaah there’s a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah”, you can be certain the game’s actual reception among non-idiots is higher than “mostly positive”.
Reviewers that aren’t the developer’s friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing “chuds are mad about this” next to the “buy now” button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game’s sales right there.
Even if they had it, a lot of smaller developers don’t even want to be serving as chaperones for their playerbase. Some have even said they don’t want their game page to create a Steam subforum.
Yeah, a lot of it is based on having to manually flag things as harassment or bigotry or something like that, especially when it comes to actual game reviews, and it is obviously the case that whatever automated systems Valve currently has in place to auto flag things… are not sufficient.
And just for more context, here is the feed of Steamworks itself, which… more or less, is the sprt of update pipeline for Steam itself, as game devs would interface with it, which is also the system that would be the thing getting updated with new content moderation concepts.
I believe the answer is simply to give better moderation tools to the developers on their own games’ Store and Forum pages, since it’s developers who seem to have an issue with current moderation.
This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game’s “negative reception” entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about “woke devs” or “DEI” or “the chinese translation is bad”.
It could allow to hide the content of the review, but still count it in the total (recommended / not recommended).
Personally I am not in favour, and I see negative bigoted reviews as legitimate reviews. I wouldn’t hold on the same level professional reviews, but it’s only random players we are discussing here. Let’s not pretend that the positive reviews are always constructive, either.
Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to “mostly positive” or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you “only censored the racists don’t worry. We’re getting brigaded”
Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always… Read the reviews. If the good ones are all “lol cute dog” and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are “waaaah there’s a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah”, you can be certain the game’s actual reception among non-idiots is higher than “mostly positive”.
Reviewers that aren’t the developer’s friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing “chuds are mad about this” next to the “buy now” button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game’s sales right there.
Even if they had it, a lot of smaller developers don’t even want to be serving as chaperones for their playerbase. Some have even said they don’t want their game page to create a Steam subforum.
Which is allowed, as far as I know?
Well ok, that sounds reasonable to me!
What kinds of tools do you mean?
Like, I’m not trying to be duplicitous, I genuienly want Steam to not be a cesspool.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/community_moderation
There’s an overview of what currently exists.
Yeah, a lot of it is based on having to manually flag things as harassment or bigotry or something like that, especially when it comes to actual game reviews, and it is obviously the case that whatever automated systems Valve currently has in place to auto flag things… are not sufficient.
And just for more context, here is the feed of Steamworks itself, which… more or less, is the sprt of update pipeline for Steam itself, as game devs would interface with it, which is also the system that would be the thing getting updated with new content moderation concepts.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017
And here is basically the Steam Group for Steamworks/Steam itself, more or less, that may also be relevant:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks