Valve to allow all games on Steam unless they are “illegal” or “trolling”, is building tools to give users more control over what content they see on the store
After a few weeks of controversy — which included a pulled game about school shootings and confusion …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 policy arrived after weeks of backlash, including Valve pulling a game about school shootings — an episode that exposed how arbitrary ad-hoc removals looked next to Steam's scale. Valve's answer was to stop curating by taste: everything ships unless it is illegal or trolling, with the filtering burden pushed onto users via new visibility tools.
The years since show how elastic that rule is. Valve went on to target review bombing campaigns as off-topic noise, then quietly banned blockchain and NFT games under the existing rules (the 2021 Steam blockchain ban), and in 2023 refused games using copyright-infringing AI artwork while denying reports of a blanket AI-art ban (Valve's AI-artwork clarification). The open door holds — but 'illegal or trolling' keeps absorbing whole new categories.
First-order effects
- Developers of controversial-but-legal games regain a path onto Steam, while Valve hands users the curation job through store-level content filters instead of deciding itself.
Second-order effects
- Competing storefronts face pressure to match either the openness or the filtering tools, because a store whose catalog is 'everything' competes on discovery quality rather than selection.
Third-order effects
- Platform governance drifts from pre-publication review toward narrow exclusion rules plus user-side controls — but as the blockchain and AI-art cases show, the exclusion list quietly re-widens whenever a new content category strains the 'illegal or trolling' line.
The trend: Game storefronts are replacing upfront editorial gatekeeping with minimal exclusion rules and user filtering, then re-expanding those exclusions category-by-category as new content types test the boundary.