Steam Blog:

So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn't be the ones deciding this. If you're a player, we shouldn't be choosing for you what content you can or can't buy. If you're a developer, we shouldn't be choosing what content you're allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling. Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see. We already have some tools, but they’re too hidden and not nearly comprehensive enough. We are going to enable you to override our recommendation algorithms and hide games containing the topics you’re not interested in. So if you don’t want to see anime games on your Store, you’ll be able to make that choice. If you want more options to control exactly what kinds of games your kids see when they browse the Store, you’ll be able to do that. And it’s not just players that need better tools either - developers who build controversial content shouldn’t have to deal with harassment because their game exists, and we’ll be building tools and options to support them too.

I’ll be honest - I think that there is a difficult game being played here.

• On one hand, you want to be an open distribution platform.
• On the other, you want to have control and rules, but not really define what they are - just "things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling".

I think that openness is always a better idea than being closed.

Some may abuse this. But at the same time, some may succeed where they were unable to before.

I’ve seen some of the gaming press wringing their hands over this - and I agree, some not great, tasteless stuff has been on Steam…but you can say the same thing about storefronts like Amazon.

What is the best way of being “open"? What is the best way to deal with things we don’t like?

I think at the end of the day, the dollar will rule here. For better, or for worse.

I’d be up for a friendly debate/discussion on this. Comments should be open. Fire away.