And what does Valve do about these exploitations of the systems they’ve made? Nothing. Or at least, nothing that prevents them from continuing to happen. At the end of the day, Valve is profiting from these borderline-illicit enterprises, and whether they’re willfully allowing the garbage parade to run rampant or they just don’t give enough of a shit to take a closer look, Valve takes a cut of these transactions, too. We can’t ignore that fact.

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All that in mind, it’s not really surprising that many hardcore Steam users are intensely distrustful of developers. They know about this stuff, or they’ve heard bits and pieces of it secondhand, or their friends recount larger-than-life exaggerations that were never true in the first place, but a friend told them so why wouldn’t it be true?

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Which brings us to the other side of the coin: Steam developers often face audiences who are hostile by default. Honest mistakes, or tough creative decisions, or chaos born of that un-wrangle-able bull known as Game Development—these things are interpreted as signs of purposeful malice, and massive-scale rage often follows. Sometimes it’s constrained to Steam reviews and forums. Other times, it leaks out to Twitter and other social media. Digital Homicide, awful though they were, claimed they even received a bag of feces in the mail.

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What do developers have to mitigate this? A slim selection of moderation tools not unlike what you’d find in a regular Internet forum, as well as the ability to flag off-topic, scammy, or harassing reviews in hopes that Valve might do something about them. But when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of people, that’s a cold comfort—especially in an environment where, again, moderation frequently gets conflated with “censorship” and leads to more trouble. It’s not difficult for especially troublesome Steam users—say, those who want to repeatedly harass a specific individual—to make multiple accounts and just swap between them as soon as one gets banned from a game’s forum or blocked by a user.

It’s almost funny to me that, nestled beneath a picturesque mountain of bullshit, the Digital Homicide guys had one good point. They were vile assholes, no doubt, frequently stoking the flames and doing crappy things to Steam users. They and their games were all too worthy of criticism, and they got a lot of that. But I don’t think they deserved the abuse they also got. Because the truth is, nobody does. It’s a mean-spirited, under-handed tactic, and it rarely convinces anybody to change. Instead, in the face of mass-rage, people either dig their heels in or flee. Neither of those are good outcomes.

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Valve could’ve done any number of things to prevent this. They could’ve curated Steam slightly more carefully to keep such obviously terrible games out, to avoid the junk pile-up Steam now contends with on a daily basis. They could’ve intervened when it became obvious that Digital Homicide was a toxic presence possibly exploiting their systems to turn a profit. They could’ve offered developers and users alike better tools to mitigate toxicity, abuse, and harassment and taken an active role in fostering a less mean-spirited culture. They could’ve seen the false opposition between Steam users and developers for the ticking time bomb it is. They could’ve tried to dismantle it.

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Instead, it detonated, and a bunch of people got sued by two crackpot brothers who shouldn’t have ever had games on the world’s most prestigious PC gaming service in the first place. And the worst part is, there’s not really anything to stop something like this from happening again in the future, nor is there any sign that Steam will become a better, less hostile place for users or developers.

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I’m not saying Valve is solely to blame for all of this. There are always gonna be some crappy people, regardless of how many steps you take to safeguard against them. Valve, meanwhile, does have people watching over Steam, and they do sometimes step in and take care of problems before they go nuclear. They’ve even been doing a slightly better job of communicating lately, which gives me a small sliver of hope.

But I am saying that you can’t just build an “open” platform and then abstain from responsibility when your systems give way to abject ugliness. It’s not simply the fault of toxic individuals or groups. It’s also the systems surrounding them, as well as the underlying choices, priorities, and beliefs that went into the creation of those systems. At some point, you’ve gotta do something to course correct. You’ve gotta make things better instead of allowing them to keep deteriorating. You’ve gotta step in before the breaking point, not after the damage has already been done.

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Steam has a sickness, and Valve is, at this point, the only one who can cure it. In the wake of the Digital Homicide fiasco, I sincerely hope they re-prioritize, and I hope they do it fast.

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