Steam, Moderation, Toxicity, and “this shouldn’t be normal”

I guess I’m going to be here to vent a little, about culture in general, because I’m doing a bunch of maintenance and have to watch status bars go up…

It’s been an interesting past few weeks. I think the biggest observation I have is how absolutely everything established seems to be failing people on some level or another. It all seems so inexcusably broken.

Adobe had announced an “end of life” for Animate, and in their initial announcement they worded it in a way where they would cut access to Animate altogether, and people would lose access to their files. I got the email too. It was weirdly depressing. This caused a huge outcry in the entire animation industry. Within 24 hours Adobe had to walk back their decision, and said they would continue to support Animate with minor updates, but it is in maintenance mode only.

It is hard for me to believe that an application with, reported, 3 million users would just have the plug pulled on it in such a way… Although it’s walked back on, but still. That’s a lot of people for something going into maintenance mode only.
I have to reflect on how much I used to enjoy these companies, even dream of working in places like these.
Somehow it all just feels so… hostile? Not the same? An alternate reality?? (CW: That last one was a joke.)

There was a rant I saw, from someone else (vague), where the person was saying the shift from calling people “customers” to “consumers” is an indication to how companies view us. The change in wording is hostile.

I guess that’s the throughline I’m seeing here. Is it really about “the customers” anymore?
If you think about it, “consumer” is such a weirdly condescending word to use.
But maybe I nitpick…

Not too recently I spoke in this Guardian piece about my experience with Steam moderation.

I’ll go over that here, and show receipts. I found that creating a public record of your experiences, on your own blog, makes it much harder for people to manipulate the narrative. It’s better than letting the record vanish over social media…

I liked the Guardian piece. It’s well researched, and the journalist took his time.

My own experience was about how I got these nasty reviews on my games. These reviews had nothing to do with the actual games, and were just personal attacks…

Way back when they were new, people said they reported them. Obviously nothing got done because they stayed up.
I moved on from monitoring my Steam comments because they tend to be so insincerely toxic. If I can’t handle it, I should just not look at it, I’m told…
Which is funny because (as a developer) you should care about the reviews. So you can make a better game. How do you care about the reviews if they’re just an outlet for people to be gross? See the infinitely recurring logic loop here?

I saw Mike Rose speak out on BlueSky about racist anti-Muslim hateful reviews, and the discussion it started. Those reviews were also allowed by Steam.
It caused a discussion about Steam clearing outright bigotry.
When you (as an admin of your game page) flag something, a Steam moderator reviews that. If they clear it, then you can’t flag it again.

When I saw the discussions I thought I should just bite the bullet and clean up my Steam pages. I flagged the harassing reviews.
Eventually a mod cleared them, so I couldn’t flag them again…

It seemed inappropriate that they got cleared at all, because they were not about the game. They were in clear violation of Steam’s own community guidelines.

I took to BlueSky to ask people for help reporting them.
These reviews had gotten so many reports from people that something must have broken, because people started saying they got “error 15”. In their reports people also detailed what this was about.
I think it got more than enough to act.
One person even opened their own support ticket on their partner account, and another even emailed Gabe Newel.

I had opened my own support ticket, explaining that these were inappropriate, and that they violate the guidelines.

Steam removed one, but left the one about my sexual assault up. I had initially explained what this was about. I don’t believe there was room for misunderstanding because I tried to be as clear as possible.
So I asked why they didn’t remove it, they responded saying that “removing reviews can easily lead to concerns from players about censorship…”

There’s a lot you can read into this.

I kept asking people to report the review, even though Steam said that they wouldn’t remove it. Eventually I emailed someone at Valve. For the sake of complete transparency, this is what I said…
(I removed anything identifying because I don’t want to cause trouble)

Which I didn’t like doing. Normally people email cool industry contacts about features, or opportunities, or to say hi…

I also hate this entire situation. I don’t like talking to press about The Issues. I don’t like talking to press at all, for that matter. I would rather my games get talked about, but somehow I constantly end up in this position. (Not saying that I don’t appreciate the journalist that helped. He was great. I just hate this.)

I got a response from the Valve person, and the email was apologetic. It was a supportive response too. They said they forwarded my issue to the appropriate department.

To me this (kind of) indicated that Valve is not entirely “like this”… Which is an easy assumption to make if you deal with this stuff for too long. I often make that assumption. It’s hard for me to understand why a company like Valve, which is responsible for such a huge cornerstone in gaming, allows this issue to fester. Nobody is explaining anything. Developers can’t do anything about it. It’s fueling a toxic culture.

The reviews came down pretty much right away, after getting an answer back.
It’s also worth pointing out that around that time Steam removed the jester award. Many pointed to that as a reason that toxic users leave inappropriate reviews, to farm points from that award… I paraphrase heavily. The dynamic is complicated to me.

During this ordeal, I had also spoken to the journalist who pitched to the Guardian. He wanted to help. To me it was important that this gets attention because the amount of people that commented with their own experiences was… a lot. It seems like everyone is tired of Steam’s lack of moderation and toxicity.
In a way, listening to these stories, I would go so far as to say that it’s alienating customers too, not just developers.
The system is broken.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/feb/16/bigotry-steam-pc-moderation-developers-speak-out

The article went up, good discussions were had…

I got a minute amount of negative comments on my X (formerly Twitter), but that barely counts. I occasionally check X the same way that I check my junk email.
Sometimes people reach out to me there.
I’m also not certain anymore about the ethics of staying vs completely leaving X when literally all of social media and tech seems linked to some grotesquely creepy fascism or another. I’m trying my best to navigate anything.

Either way…

A couple of alt-right youtubers picked it up. I’ll show a screenshot of one…

Causing more of the response one might expect when speaking up about harassment (more harassment). It’s barely anything in comparison to what I’m used to, but I feel like it’s worth making a public record of.

I never fail to enjoy the irony of responding to someone talking about harassment with more of the same harassment. It only seems to prove the point.

I think it’s worth bringing this up to point out the complete reframing of this, in such videos.
It’s a good example.
The arguments made are not at all in line with the initial point, or even what happened… but manipulating the narrative into something else entirely. It’s so typical.

It’s framed as a censorship issue, with Valve telling developers affected “fuck you”. I’ve seen this brought up in a few pro-harassment discussions… that toxicity is a free speech issue, where they have a right to be… this… And if you don’t like it then you are not cut out for gaming.

I think it’s interesting because it’s not so much about the reality of the situation anymore. This toxicity hurts everyone, even people that play on Steam seem largely tired of it. The reviews in question were never even on topic (they were not about the game being reviewed). It’s just vitriol that serves no purpose… but there’s no real way to ever talk about these issues without the topic being hijacked by some weird alt-right guy.
It all seems so intentionally manufactured. I’m not sure there will even be the bridge building and discussions needed, between gamers and developers, to create something better. You can’t have that if it’s always turned into an “us VS them” argument.

I sometimes wonder what the point of this even is. What do you even get from defending your right to be the most toxic awful person on a storefront. Nobody likes it. It hurts the gaming experience. A large audience of people don’t even like playing games anymore because of this. It obviously damages the user experience… if we are talking about this entirely from a consumer point of view.
Does gaming really belong to the alt-right edge lords?

I was looking at some of the shitty comments made… at this point the things said are so predictable. “If you don’t like it then make a better game”, *animated gifs of some pop culture reference where the character is obnoxiously laughing*, “who would want to rape you bro”, “lying liar out to destroy men”, “DEI is hurting games”, “you’re only doing this for attention”… All the reframing… It’s always in a way where gamers are pitted against devs.

After how many waves of this, I’m always wondering why it’s this way. Nobody in power seems willing to do anything about it. Does it really benefit them? How? A storefront as influential and (arguably, allegedly) a monopoly like Steam should enforce its own community guidelines. Why is that a controversial thing to say?

I miss the idealized times, when it was exciting to call myself a gamer. When you could play TF2 with the mic on, and not get any harassment, even after the teammates noticed the feminine voice. Now there’s entire instagram accounts dedicated to “girl gamers” showing the toxicity they get, making fun of it. It’s so common that it’s popular content.
Toxicity is established into the culture in a way that it’s expected. It’s embarrassing to tell people I make games because they immediately think Call of Duty and brush me off as “one of those”.

I remember when I was in high school and the idea of being a “nerd” or “geek” was still very much a fringe thing. Somehow enough representation happened that now everyone has some type of nerdyness, without the stigma. I also think back about how gaming seemed to have gone the other direction. Instead of being something that is loved and appreciated by everyone, it’s associated with the worst possible behavior.
I don’t think things can get better if this is so normalized.

Overall, I’m just tired of thinking about it. That’s why I’m writing this. Maybe I can put it out of my mind now.
I’m equally as tired of weird leftist people saying “don’t platform them” when I talk about it or vent with screenshots. I’m tired of how this seems to have found that type of acceptance, where the person going through it just has to shut up and take it on the chin. It doesn’t have to be this way.