It seems to be fashionable lately to hate on Valve, who run the wildly successful Steam platform, and I really don't understand some of the pure manure that's passing as for journalism these days where Steam is concerned. Case in point, this piece from Kotaku about the release of Negligee: Love Stories:
Slowly but surely, Valve seems to be letting uncensored adult games onto Steam at last, starting with Negligee, which came out today. The catch is that it’s only available in some regions, and it remains banned in a globe-spanning majority of others. In a thread on Steam, developer Dharker responded to prospective players’ confusion by explaining where and why Negligee remains unavailable.Because open marketplaces are apparently a bad thing now. Because reasons.
“Several of the restricted countries banned the game [before release], which prompted us to realize that we can’t release it under the radar,” the studio wrote. “You might think that it is ludicrous, but Dharker Studios is a company. If we release a game in a country where the content is illegal or could be considered illegal, then potentially we could suffer. If they fined or targeted Steam as per our agreement with Steam, we would be liable for it. Therefore sadly we must err on the side of caution. And that determines the restrictions.”Yes, Dharker Studios, laws passed by a sovereign nation that prohibit the sale of your product will determine whether or not Steam can help you sell your product there. But be clear on this point: while the range of what a business can do in a jurisdiction is indeed constrained by the laws of that jurisdiction, those constraints are not determined by Valve. In fact, Valve have just done a ton of work that will enable developers like Dharker to continue selling their
But, wait! The stupidity continues:
Here’s the full list of countries where the game currently cannot be sold: Japan, Malaysia, Botswana, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Bangladesh, China, Lebanon, South Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Iceland, Ukraine, Russia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Guyana, Iraq, Dubai, UIE, and Germany.Valve is available in nearly every country on Earth which has access to the Internet. There are 192 countries in the United Nations, so removing the 27 counties listed above still leaves... well, most of them, really. Which means that Negligee: Love Stories is currently available in far more countries than would ever have been the case without Steam. And, again, Valve is helping Dharker navigate the legal landscape here, in addition to extending the game's reach far beyond what Dharker, or any indie developer, would ever have been capable of without the service. So are they even a little but grateful that Valve are making their careers in Adult Entertainment possible?
“I wish country restrictions were not necessary,” wrote Dharker, “but I must comply with laws in countries for the sale of such material. There really is no choice in the matter and is one of the downsides of releasing a mature adult game on Steam.”I guess not.
There is no downside for Dharker in releasing a game on Steam. There is, in reality, nothing but upside; a massively successful platform with customers all over the planet, almost all of whom can now buy their game with very little difficulty, and no legal hassles whatsoever for the developers, because Valve has already done all that work. The only downside here relates to the nature of Dharker's product: the downside is entirely a product of the fact that they chose to make and release a video game filled with sex.
I am not a prude; I do not hate pr0n, and actually consume what I assume is an average amount of the stuff, in various online forms. I don't begrudge Dharker the right to make a sexy videogame at all, or to distribute it everywhere that it's legal to sell, and profit by doing so. But considering how recent a development this widespread availability of pr0n actually is, and how impossible it would have been for them to find any kind of an audience for a game like this pre-Steam, Dharker sure do seem to be whining a fuck of a lot about their good fortune, don't they?
As much as the self-entitled whining of these digital pornographers irks, though, it's not nearly as irksome as the fact that Kotaku seem to have swallowed this bait hook, like, and sinker. Dharker have released a game to most of the planet via Steam, something with thousands of developers do every single week; and their game is banned in those countries where laws allow censorship, something which would always have been the case anyway. There is no story here, but Kotaku are determinedly pretending that there's some sort of controversy here, regardless of the total lack of controversy.
And that's all down to the fact that hating on Valve is de rigueur, for some reason. It's as if people have forgotten what state PC gaming was in before Steam.
I am a lifelong PC gamer; Steam Link is as close as I've ever come to owning a console. And I can remember what life was like in the years before digital distribution.
- Do you remember when all the AAA publishers were pushing console gaming over PC because DRM was easier on console? Or how many times those same publishers declared that PC games were over, and that console gaming was the future, purely because they could make more money selling console games?
- Do you remember when even Microsoft couldn't do any better for PC gamers than Games for Windows Live, which was basically just an XBox Live-like subscription service for PC, with an extra helping of DRM in there? Do you remember how wildly unpopular Games for Windows Live was? Do you remember Games for Windows Live at all?
- Do you remember brick and mortar retailers reducing the linear footage devoted to PC games literally every single quarter, and reducing the variety of games offered there... assuming that you could find a retailer who still sold PC games? Do you remember when Wal-Mart blew out all their inventory of PC games, because they figured they didn't need to cater to PC gamers anymore?
- Do you remember when digital distribution, in the form of Steam, turned all of that around, kicking off a PC gaming renaissance in the process? Do you really think the PC gaming renaissance would have happened without Steam?
It's fair to say that Steam saved PC gaming, and has made Dharker's career in
And yet, for some reason, Valve are near-villains to the game journalism community. Only EA receive more consistently negative coverage.
Valve has a solidly loyal and growing customer base of 150 million gamers because they've spent more than a decade earning it. They've earned their success, they've earned the good will and high regard of their customers, and they've done nothing which would undermine that loyalty. Why is that so hard for outlets like Kotaku to understand?
Steam has no competition mainly because nobody apart from GOG are even attempting to do what Valve have done. If EA wanted Origin to compete with Steam, then they needed to open it up to games from other publishers; they needed to be willing to sell their competitors' games. Can you imagine EA selling Call of Duty through their own storefront, alongside the latest Battlefield? Yeah, neither can I. Until they change that, though, Steam will continue to dominate the PC gaming marketplace, winning by default, with a loyal customer base who have no reason to turn on a company that's been nothing but good to them.
Don't expect game journalists to twig to that reality, though. They're too busy trying to cozy up to the big publishers to care. Better access means more content, after all, and the fact that the resulting content is just a steady drip-feed of PR bullshit apparently doesn't matter all that much. The fact that Valve have largely opted out of that corporate PR bullshit circus probably isn't helping the average tone of their coverage, either.