Hey, I don't know if you've heard about this or not, but… there's pornography on Steam. Despite increasing restrictions around adult content on both Valve's platform and across the internet, you can still find all sorts of extremely adult material there. While Valve has historically tried to take a hands-off approach to moderation – at least in principle – it was apparently a pretty contentious topic between Gabe Newell and Valve's top lawyer.
That's according to a wide-ranging report from Bloomberg (paid article link), detailing some of Valve's history in the context of an ongoing class action antitrust lawsuit against the company. Based on interviews with anonymous former Valve employees, the report paints Newell as an unusually hands-off executive – except for the times when he's not.
One of those instances was a debate over whether to allow porn on Steam. According to one person who recalled the incident, Newell ripped into general counsel Karl Quackenbush when the lawyer advocated for more hands-on moderation on Steam. "What the f--- do I pay you for if that’s your opinion?" Newell reportedly interjected.
If you've turned Steam's safe search off, you'll already know that GabeN won that debate, as Steam now hosts a seemingly infinite array of (at least semi-)interactive pornography at vastly varying levels of quality. But if Newell was hoping this would be a simple answer to the moderation question, well, that's clearly not been the case.
Historically, Valve's policy has only banned games that are "illegal or straight-up trolling," but that has opened the people running Steam to an endless series of subjective value judgements. For years, sporadic reports emerged of developers making anime-style smut getting ghosted by Valve – presumably for the genre's association with high school settings and underage characters. Similarly, Steam took direct action to pull a cheap, trashy visual novel called Rape Day from the platform in 2019.
Ultimately, Valve's decision to be hands-off with content moderation has proven that you can't really be hands-off with content moderation, particularly as pressure from global payment processors makes releasing adult content even more restrictive. And even if you're not looking for video game pornography, the ban of artsy horror game Horses offers a notable example of the spillover effect these policies can have on non-pornographic material. Maybe Quackenbush's approach could've saved Valve some headaches along the way.
