He also normalized hosting kid’s content and adult/gambling content on the same platform. Anyone who tried to open up a game store that also sold adult material would get crucified nowadays.
The reason Steam is praised so much is because unlike EA and Activision, regardless of what they try to push that they shouldn’t, they do put in the effort of going back and looking at issues from gamer’s eyes. Those cosmetics? They came about at a time when P2W was much more of a concern, and paying for something merely visual was considered much more acceptable. Early access? It came about from trying to open up development to more indies instead of just the big devs and publishers. Licensing instead of owning? The alternative were much more costly physical copies that also degraded with time and which you had to maintain a backup of yourself. If your local game store didn’t have it, you were screwed, and there could be no discounts. Porn on the platform? Don’t care, not a child and I’m responsible.
Even then, I still damn Valve on both normalizing licenses on a subscription service that were it not for its market dominance could easily be teetering right now along with most people’s game library’s, and for not bothering to make an adult/gambling only version of a game store. GOG needs a competitor (remember Devotion and now Nine Sols), and it has none. It is possible to make money and be a digital distribution service without being a subscription service. There should be far more distance between adult and predatory content and normal gaming content, not all parents are responsible and it more easily creates communities predators can target from overlapping interests.
Making the claim that adult content = predators preying on children has a couple issues:
- Predators are incredibly rare, and it has been repeatedly shown that these claims of predators-behind-every-account are blown out of proportion for political scare reasons (see Satanic Panic, all of human history for more examples).
- Even if the above weren’t true, why on earth would those people be spending their time on adult content instead of, say, roblox or minecraft? You know, games for children, that children play?
The debate over steam hosting adult content is some really regressive stuff. An alternative take, the one I hold, is “It’s really heartening to see a major content platform not giving in to the conservative moralists that view anime tiddies as somehow damaging to the fabric of society. Making sexuality a less shameful topic for discussion also, conveniently, reduces ‘shame’ as an effective lever for preying on children, and makes them more likely to come forward and tell people when they’re actually in danger”.
All it takes is another client, a lot of argument for not wanting to take one iota of minimal responsibility. Predators are not rare, they literally fuel television series regarding them. They don’t have to be many to be a threat, either, all it takes is a small number of very active ones. They do target children’s game, having adult content facilities introducing children to it as “lol lemme gift u / giv u dis CD key its so sik”. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/07/us/video-games-child-sex-abuse.html - What alternate reality do you live in?
The first sentence of that article lists Minecraft and Fortnite.
Neither of those games are available on Steam.
…
So, and stop me if this is too wild a conclusion, it maybe just might possibly be the case that having separate storefronts doesn’t actually have any impact on sexual predation of minors in videogames.
(Edit: actually, none of the games listed in that article are available on steam. Did… did you even read it?)
Fine, kick the kids off. It’s better that way. Heaven forbid there be a place with both kinds of content. Imagine what would happen if bookstores or streaming services or years ago video rental places would do if they had all kinds of content. Oh and imagine that Steam had a filter to hide all that adult content wouldn’t that just be absolutely crazy?
Not everything has to be safe for kids. Kick them the fuck out if it’s an issue. Don’t dumb down the adults experience.
Your analogy falls flat the moment your realize that G rated movies are served right beside R or unrated movies.
And steam has a filter to hide all adult content, and it also askes for your birthday all the damn time regardless of your account settings.
But what about the people who’ve got the maturity and responsibility of one, such as yourself?