Everyone may like free promotion when it makes their business look good, but when the news starts to turn people away it's probably time to take a step back and think about how the news is affecting said business. This was something that Valve began doing after coming under fire like a forest in the dry season for allowing certain games on the platform that didn't seem to resonate well with some groups. Well, Valve has decided to finally take action and remove some of the games from the platform that fall under the "trolling" category in order to win back some PR brownie points.
IGN is reporting that a number of games have recently been disabled or banned altogether from the Steam storefront. There are a number of games that have been removed, including AIDS Simulator, which was an asset flip game about a killing AIDS victims in Africa; Occult Raise and Occult ReRaise were both removed from the Steam store as well. In addition, several "simulator" games were pulled, such as Glitch Simulator 2018, Blackscreen Simulator, and the obviously controversial Suicide Simulator.
Trolling games like Triggering Simulator, White Power: Pure Voltage and Asset Flip Simulator were also removed from the Steam store.
The game White Power: Pure Voltage is actually from the same developer who worked on Active Shooter, the first-person shooter that was also banned from Steam. Valve decided to ban all the games made from that developer along with the developer from having any of their games on Steam.
Previous to that, Valve was engaged in another controversy regarding some adult-themed dating simulators and visual novels on Steam. Originally Valve had claimed that it would be removing the games but then reneged on that and decided to inform developers that the games would simply be under reevaluation.
Shortly after that Valve announced that it would be changing its policies on content curation after a number of gamers voiced opposition to Valve's policies. Valve then announced that it would no longer be policing what sort of games would be added to the platform unless the games were "illegal" or "trolling".
Apparently, Valve considered all the games above as either trolling games or as illegal asset flips based on content already available in other games.
Some people believed that Valve needed to be more hands-on with the game curation on Steam, and that more than just trolling games and asset flips should be removed from the platform. Others believe that Valve should take a hands-off approach and let gamers decide.
The company has noted that it will create more end-user tools to allow gamers to choose what they see on the Steam store and what gets recommended to them. Right now there aren't a whole lot of options when it comes to user creation based on user settings. Valve wants to allow gamers to be able to choose what sort of games they see and what sort of games are recommended to users.
While the user tools won't be available until a couple of months from now, Valve is already taking steps to clean up the store by removing games deemed "illegal" and "trolling".
