“Valve has now rejected my complaint, confirming that ‘I don’t like muslims’ is a valid reason to leave a negative review on a game on Steam,” Rose wrote. The review currently reads: “Also has muslims… Noone is asking for this type of stuff, in a building cozy game.”
“I just don’t know what to do about this. I’m genuinely at a loss,” Rose added in a reply to his own post.
“‘Has muslims, thumbs down’ is now literally written on the Steam page for Little Rocket Lab, and I cannot remove it,” he continued. “Anyone visiting our store page will understandably be baffled, and there’s nothing I can do to take it down.”
I contacted Rose about his exchange with Valve and his wider experience on Steam. He told me, “We’ve seen an uptick of horrid reviews — I’m sure you have too if you skim Steam pages. In my entire time working in video games, I’ve never had a single flagged review removed by a Valve moderator.”
“How this should be handled is straightforward: racism violates Steam’s guidelines. ‘Has Muslims, not recommended’ is overtly racist and should be removed without debate.”
More than 1,800 people had shared or replied to Rose’s post at the time of writing, many criticising Valve for a permissive approach to review and forum moderation. Several commentators contrasted this incident with the fate of the banned-from-Steam arthouse horror game Horses, questioning where Valve draws the line.
Valve’s review guidelines explicitly advise against directing abuse or insults at other players, developers, or groups — language that appears directly at odds with the review in question. See Valve’s review guidelines.
After the Horses ban, Steam lost gooner monolith BrownDust2 to “the platform’s policy requirements”: “We encountered an issue that cannot be reasonably resolved.”
Source: gamesradar.com
