Steam forum is a cesspool of homophobic incel and racist but at the same time in all my years using steam i’ve never once felt the need to use or go on the forums for anything as all the info needed for games are mostly easily available elsewhere they could just close them all
I was originally part of the “fuck the steam forums” because asshats would troll the forum to get steam emojis, which gave you some steam credit or something. So it was an incredible cesspool of shit.
But their last update made steam emojis worthless beyond being a extra status, and I think that’s making the forums more bearable.
Better mod tools. Better flagging of shit users. And maybe the steam forums can become a better place.
Because right now, if you want to talk to a fan of a indie game, you’re stuck finding some YouTube video comment or Reddit.
I mean, after GamerGate, are we really surprised?
I love video games, but its naive to say there isn’t a misogynistic/racist/transphobic/bigotry problem with the community.
I mean, there’s been multiple developers that don’t want to bother with text/video chat because they just don’t want the responsibility of dealing with it in their game.
Steam forums suck so much, any game with a female protag has at least one thread asking about how ‘woke’ it is or a thread complaining about the game being ‘woke’ because there is a single gay character or smth.
Reminds me of when I saw a thread along the lines of “Can we get an option for a male character? I don’t feel immersed with a female character”. I really couldn’t tell if he was a troll or not. The most charitable reading would be that he also wouldn’t mind more female options in other games, which is absolutely possible, but somehow I doubt it.
Even worse is the constant harassment of indie devs.
Just constant “Is this AI?” And them demanding more and more evidence rather than letting the dev cook.
Just constant “Is this AI?”
Tbf a ton of games with AI-generated graphics are not flagged as that despite Steam’s rules, so I’m not surprised that people want more reassurance.
And the people who ask “is this game dead?” if there haven’t been any updates recently. No, it’s not dead. It’s just finished. Final. Not in need of further development.
This is developers who don’t like criticism whining. Yes, there is some bigotry and such in the market, but it’s not as big as they’re making it sound.
These people want Steam to step into a role of world gaming police, even though Steam have provided the necessary tools for users on the platform to vote incorrect information down into oblivion. Going further than that is asking for censorship and is as effective as paid reviews.
If you can’t cope with your product taking criticism, valid or otherwise, don’t waste your time peddling what you’ve made. We’ve seen time and time again that games find their audience, even with BS ‘criticisms’. Those who are interested will look further than the basic complaints. If there’s only those complaints, maybe you just didn’t make a very good game.
So they can just deal with them, fairly sure Devs can mute or block you from their posts if they care to.
Devs can moderate their forums, but not their reviews. They can only flag those for Steam to look at, but Steam is extremely hands-off with its moderation, see the examples listed in the article.
There’s a big difference between allowing people to comment and allowing people to be openly racist, sexist, and homophobic. Steam reviews, forums, and curator pages are absolutely full of the latter because of Valve’s hands-off ‘not my problem’ attitude, and it often goes hand in hand with doxxing and harassment campaigns.
Are they full, or is there a small subsection that has them and we’re giving them undue attention? I rarely come across such things myself, though that’s obviously anecdotal, I feel that at least means there’s plenty of space that isn’t dominated by what you speak of.
They are full. Are you joking or are you one of them? You can’t name a single game whose community page isn’t littered with nazis and/or incels
I see anti-woke racist/sexist chuds every single fucking time I look in any game’s Steam forum since around 2007 when they stopped being specific to the Steam app itself and aren’t moderated. Where the hell are you not seeing these wankers?
Games that get declared a target by the alt-right often do become full of it. Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not a serious problem.
I literally avoid anything on Steam that isn’t buying a game or launching a game because everywhere else I’ve strayed, I see bigoted shit.
Eeeeevery once in a while I’ll peek into a game I like’s discussion forum and almost without fail I find some bigoted stuff on the front page. Same deal with update/news post comments.
Maybe so, but the values of free speech apply to wrong opinions too. Hit the “unhelpful” button and move on. Their bullshit isn’t worth the time.
Sir, it’s 2026. We haven’t done free speech for a while.
Consider me old fashioned.
So I should be able to go down to my local GameStop and write the same sorts of things on game boxes and put up signs saying the same things?
That’s speech too.
Just because this is digital, it does not give a pass IMO. These are private spaces still. They are not administered by the public.
write the same sorts of things on game boxes
Don’t be ridiculous. You’re describing criminal property damage. Of course that’s neither okay, nor the same.
I’m sorry you feel the need to be dramatic about this issue, but Steam have provided adequate tools for the userbase to handle the problem, in my eyes.
Of course that’s criminal.
Make it Post it notes, free standing signs, whatever. I mentioned signs too, for a reason.
I believe you should be allowed to stand in front of your local game store and say dumb things. Vandalism is something else.
Of course, neither is currently allowed, so your opinion and my opinion are irrelevant.
Read the article before you comnent
Some games have been targeted by Steam curators. Ethan, the developer of Coven, a first-person action-horror set in the 1600s, says he has been targeted by “CharlieTweetsDetected”, a curator devoted to recommending games based solely on whether their developers are perceived to have correctly mourned the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.
CharlieTweetsDetected’s review of Coven, a first-person action-horror game set in the 1600s, read simply “Celebrated Sept 10th on blue sky [sic]”. This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game). “I even mentioned it to Steam support,” Ethan says, “how it stemmed from that curator list, but they weren’t interested.” Instead, Steam support claimed that “off-topic” constituted “a recipe for cookies, or something completely unrelated to video games that is clearly trolling.” Reviews referencing Kirk, including one reading simply “RIP Charlie Kirk” alongside a negative rating, did not fit that criteria according to Steam; all remain in place today.
Elsewhere, campaigns chase games that include trans or LGBTQ+ characters. A trans developer included on a curation list titled “NO WOKE” cites frequent discussion threads, including one that referred to them as a “transvestite” and asked whether their game included “woke faggotry.” Plane Toast’s Émi Lefèvre points to reviews and discussions of Caravan SandWitch, a sci-fi action-adventure and driving game, which frequently approach its queer characters negatively. “Too LBGTQ [sic] … There is no future or continuation for these sad gays and lesbians,” reads one among many that remain visible on the game’s store page.
“For sure, the ‘anti-woke’ curators brought insincere negative attention to the game,” Lefèvre says. “Valve’s refusal to moderate any of this is making Steam reviews and forums the battleground for some kind of culture war, and is making them unsafe for marginalised people and regular gamers trying to simply enjoy the game they bought.”
The issue here is that I, as a gamer, want to know if developers espouse opinions that I strongly disagree with, because I don’t want to give them my money. So if a developer was (for example) in the Epstein Files, I would want to know that before buying their game. Reviews are an effective way to communicate that information, and I’d be rather upset to see them go.
You can’t reasonably allow reviews outlining some developer behavior and disallow others - that’s straight up censorship. As much as I disagree with the 'I will downvote games by someone who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death" stance, I think it’s their right to take that stance. I’m not really sure how you reconcile those two things without just banning them both.
What Steam could do is have a separate review category (from ‘normal’ ones and ‘off-topic’ ones) to categorize character profiles of the developers, and let people opt in or opt out of having those included in the aggregate score. Alternately, they could categorize reviews by the reason (e.g. “Performance / crashes”, “Unfun”, “Too hard”, “Too Woke”, “Developer is a horrible person”), and let people choose which categories they care about.
My friend, every online platform is censored. Yes, it’s censorship, no I’m not saying it’s good, but that’s the world we find ourselves in.
At the end of the day, the question is “would you recommend this game” and it’s your prerogative to answer as you wish, as long as you don’t break Steam’s rules. And if you do, your review is removed.
“If you can’t cope with your product taking criticism, valid or otherwise, don’t waste your time peddling what you’ve made.”
One of the reviews, published in 2023, read, “cringe game, made by a liar”. The other, a review of Lawhead’s game Blue Suburbia posted in 2024, said: “A women [sic] who seeks to destroy other’s [sic] career made this. It’s very poorly put together. She also probably has dual Israeli citizenship with how pointy her nose is.”
So by your standards, she should have thought about being a woman?
product taking criticism, valid or otherwise
So by your standards, she should have thought about being a woman?
This is the same level of intellectual dishonesty as making those awful comments. It stems fron “I’m right, thus moral” instead of engaging with the actual idea.
Nah, it’s worse. At least those comments criticized the game before the ad hominem.
Honestly, using the woke label should be classified as hate speech. “Woke” is literally anything that goes after hate speech, favors different point of views, and empowers traditionally suppressed groups. For all their claims that woke is somehow recent, the loudest proponents don’t have any problems going back a few centuries and to call that woke. It’s just an attempt at gaslighting critics who themselves don’t have the moral foundation to admit it. They are worse than the hardcore racists because at least they have the decency to be honest about it.
For all the flak I give GOG, I will actually have to praise them over Steam if they take a decent stand on this, but I suspect that they will join in with Steam and avoid virtue signalling on this lest they risk the wrath of “many gamers”.
Woke means aware of social injustice. Which interestingly, is being aware of how hate speech laws can be unjust.
