Steam Under Fire As Game Devs Report Rising Hate Speech And Weak Moderation

As a platform for selling games, Steam has garnered some deserved praise for its lax approach to moderation, allowing developers to break into the market and players to speak as harshly as they like on awful PC ports or game-breaking updates. That laissez-faire methodology also seems to have some negative consequences,  as it is reportedly resulting in numerous developers being personally harassed under the guise of critique. Per a report made by The Guardian, this harassment includes examples of antisemitism, transphobia, and political brigading wholly unrelated to video games.

While Steam's official guidelines forbid "abusive language or insults", "discrimination" and public accusations, reviews containing that exact content have become sadly common on Steam. What's worse is that some reviews reported for those violations still get cleared by moderation, with Blue Suburbia developer Natalie Lawhead reporting a review stating that "A woman [sic] who seeks to other's [sic] career made this. It's very poorly put together. She probably also has dual Israeli citizenship with how pointy her nose is." While this review is blatantly antisemitic in nature and refers disparagingly to a sexual assault allegation Lawhead made against composer Jeremy Soule in 2019, Steam moderation still initially cleared it after review. Others reporting the review eventually prompted Steam to remove it, but another review simply reading "cringe game, made by a liar" remained up after this.

Valve's defense of this incident states that "We aren't in a position to verify the accuracy of statements made in user reviews and we don't try to moderate reviews based on accuracy." Valve doesn't want to be accused of censorship on its platform. Eventually, Lawhead speaking directly to a Valve employee prompted that review to be removed as well, but as Lawhead notes, "This was too much work just for two obviously unjustifiable reviews. [...] I think this entire process of moderation is broken."


While Lawhead was able to get support from the public to help get harassment removed from her game's reviews, that isn't a luxury shared by all developers targeted by brigades like this. Some Steam Curators even seem to exist wholly for the sake of disparaging games that include or are developed by LGBTQ or minorities in general, particularly the "No Woke" curator highlighted by the original Guardian piece, among others. As stated by Emi Lefèvre of Studio Plane Toast, "Valve's refusal to moderate is making Steam reviews and forums the battleground for a culture war", and that statement seems sadly accurate. Another curator, "CharlieTweetsDetected", exists almost solely for culture war purposes, brigading Steam games like Coven solely based on whether or not their developers mocked the assassination of Charlie Kirk and resulting in a wave of reviews wholly unrelated to the actual video game in question.

The full Guardian piece goes in-depth on more examples than this, but the picture painted of Steam as a largely-unmoderated platform rings true. There are silver linings to this, though. One developer targeted by this behavior wound up using it to their advantage and twisted it into marketing. Also, we've seen games justifiably targeted with waves of negative reviews in response to patches that tank performance, add unneeded DRM, or simply break the game entirely. Steam reviews should be a place where gamers are free to speak their minds on the game in question, but its own guidelines indicate there should still be some semblance of moderation to prevent political brigading, personal harassment, and outright hate speech.