The rocky path of Valve for better communication about Steam

Credit to Valve: Over the last 15 years, Steam has been transformed into a megalith and has kept its relevance thanks to a constant flow, even if it is slow, new features. But by continually reacting to problems instead of anticipating them and limiting communication as much as possible, Valve left behind a lot of damage, ranging from critical bombs to addictions like fiascos, like the recent quasi-publication of post-rape fantasy. apocalyptic. Day of rape. After a press conference at the GDC in San Francisco this week, I spoke to Valve about its recent setbacks in the area of ​​transparency.

Valve still plays close enough to the chest in communication, but the people running Steam seem to realize that it does not quite work. Recently, statements from the beating heart of society in Bellevue, Washington, have increased.

"The company still thinks it's this small group of people," said marketing director Doug Lombardi. Kotaku. "We have never gone beyond the mentality that we are only 50 people. And the principle has always been: "Just send the orders, people will find them." Then we will listen to the developers and customers and make updates, among other things … We hear now to say that there are so many things happening, that they are fueled by the firehose and all that. "Perhaps if you had taken the time to prepare your messages a little better, we would not understand where you were going, where your head was, how to take advantage of it, etc."

Steam Business Specialist, Tom Giardino, was candid in his assessment of the unintuitive nature of Valve's earlier infrequent missives on new features, changes, and decision-making. "The developers are so busy," he said. "They can send a game every two or three years. A huge amount of Steamworks changes and enhancements have been made during this time. We will work very hard on an update, publish it and publish a blog about it that 500 people might read. "

But Valve remains a largely responsive company, turning fires on where they occur, instead of creating features and immediately fire-resistant rules. This approach has frustrated many developers and users over the years. More recently, this trend has sparked general anger when, earlier this month, a so-called "game where one can rape and murder during an apocalypse of zombies" was called Day of rape appeared on Steam, with a Steam page saying it was coming soon. After days of controversy, Valve announced that Day of rape After all, they would not have come out on their platform because of the "unknown costs and risks" that the game represented.

But that's about all that society has said, and no one has been able to analyze exactly the meaning of the statement. As always, Valve refused to put things in cultural, moral or ethical terms, preferring to speak from behind an incomprehensible trade veil. This led to more confusion and anger over the entire incident.

When I tried to question Lombardi and Giardino about the specific wording of this statement, they circumvented the question twice. However, Lombardi, along with Alann Kroll, steam man-model, explained how Valve hoped to prevent another Day of rapetype of incident to occur in the future.

"It's this problem that is occurring and that we're currently working to fix when a developer or publisher is signing up for something, it will make a difference. [store] This page will be put online, then the code will be transmitted and an evaluation of the code will be made – for the game itself, "said Lombardi." So there's this step where the sign goes up – "soon," for so to speak – and then there is this process of watching the game. We are working to correct that now so that everything is reviewed before anything goes up. "

Day of rape, he said, was never really approved; this is what appeared only because the developers put the page in place. This should not happen in the future.

"Of course, we would prefer to avoid grief to people. But it's difficult to accurately predict the limits you need to put in place because you do not know what people are going to try and you do not want to constrain the way people can express themselves. "

Kroll said that despite the belief that Valve was automating too many Steam processes, "a human Valve team has reviewed several times" 90% of the games "submitted to Steam.First, the review team reviews the a game's store page, then creates a copy and makes sure that the game is functional and contains the features listed on the store's page. "We go through a checklist of 'Is that?' he does these things? Does the construction correspond to what is on the store page? That's what they promise? "Said Kroll.

There is also another "marginal cases" review team, according to Kroll. This team meets once a week to review games that do not match pre-established molds and to evolve Steam rules over time.

"These are things that we can not deal with right now, and we need a group to determine" How does this fit into our decision-making process and how do we fit in? " our decision process to this? Kroll said, "We knew from the beginning that we could not set a set of gray lines in advance, because you can not anticipate what people are going to make, so all these weekly conversations around "It's in this gray area here, how do we see this, how do we determine what it is?" So it's a continuous, iterative process, and we're constantly refining how it works. "

No doubt this team has a lot to learn from Day of rape.

Valve's particular responsiveness style has also left many gaps in terms of users' abusive behavior. Over the years, the developers of Steam have treated barely moderate communities, examine bombs, harassment groups and other forms of toxicity. Valve first let these things unfold without much human intervention, imposing moderation duties on developers and opposing critical bombs only by setting up a graph system in 2017 that served mainly to make more visible the critical bombs.

Recently, the company has been more open to creating specialized teams of flesh and blood specialists – rather than automated solutions – to eliminate the deepest issues in Steam. Valve now has its own community moderation team to help developers. Recently, he has created a team that will look at games that appear to be bombed and, if so, lock them so that incoming critics do not temporarily count in their scores. These are positive breakthroughs after years of ineffective action or inaction, but by choosing to stay largely silent and let these things happen, Valve has been partly responsible for a lot of harassment and a lot of harassment. devs culture eyeing the green pastures of the Epic Games Store. Still, Valve seems to be thinking of sticking to his weapons.

"We can go back to the day we launched Steam and say that we would have liked to know everything we knew before that we could have done it in advance," Lombardi said. "In part, you understand it, you think you have it, you send it, and you discover a lot of things once they are in the wild and millions of people have them. You find not only the lists of things you thought you should include, but there is also this whole list of things that users and developers point out for you and that you need to do. We are more aware of how quickly we can react to these data, update them, and continue to react when times and technologies change. "

Lombardi went on to point out that even a long time ago, when the company released Half lifePlayers were not expected to stack crates and find strange ways to break the game. "It's a bit of a fun example, but the same applies," he said.

But it's a single-player video game. Steam is a global platform where every decision made affects hundreds of millions of users and developers. One accumulates much more collateral damage than the other.

In response to this point, Kroll said he regretted but he ended up remaining convinced that the Steam team had handled tasks such as control bombs.

"Of course, we would prefer to avoid grief to people," he said. "But it's difficult to predict exactly what the limits are, because you do not know what people are going to try and you do not want to restrict too much the way people can express themselves or – in the case of new features , moderation or new types of games – you do not want to limit the creativity that people can put in the system, because we are always surprised by what people bring. "

"But if you look at the examination system, for example, it was difficult to predict how people would use it. Revision bombing is a symptom of a popular platform that matters. What people care about. If nobody cares about Steam, reviewing the bombing would not be a problem on Steam. "