Nudity, violence, sexual content – Valve tries to notice customers on Steam by alerting them if they find a title containing any of these if they visit said game’s store page.

Let us quote a part of a lengthy blog post: „We think the context of how content is presented is important and giving a developer a place to describe and explain what’s in their game gives you even more information when browsing and considering a purchase. When you’re looking at the store page of a game with mature content, we’ll display that developer-written description to you.” Here’s an example below, and Valve „encourages” other developers with such content to follow their suit with the description.

A previously banned game (Negligee: Love Stories) isn’t mentioned in the post, so there’s no information when this sexual title will be released. Instead, Valve described trolling: „Trolls are developers who aren’t interested in good faith efforts to make and sell games to you or anyone. On Steam, some are simply trying to rile people up with something we call ‘a game shaped object’ (i.e., a crudely made piece of software that technically and barely passes our bar as a functioning video game but isn’t what 99.9% of folks would say is “good”). Some trolls are trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items; others are looking for a way to generate a small amount of money off Steam through a series of schemes that revolve around how we let developers use Steam keys. Others are just trying to incite and sow discord.”

We now have ten ignorable game tags instead of three on Steam, but games with these tags will still show up in our searches, although they will be „excluded based on your preferences.” We can also filter adult content: we can see sexual games and not violent ones.

Gabe Newell‘s company thus tries to listen to the audience, and also, their first game in a long time, Artifact, a card game, will launch in November. Going by their comments, it’s going to be just one of many games, as they feel ready to get back into game development…

Source: PCGamer