Steam Is Full Of Hate Groups

[Initech]

In 2014, Valve introduced a feature to help the 125 million users on its digital storefront Steam sort through the daily glut of new video game releases. Steam Curators, as the feature is called, allows groups or individuals to create pages where they recommend games. Motherboard, for example, can create a Steam Curator page where we'd recommend games we think Motherboard readers would enjoy.

To promote this feature and introduce Steam users to new curators they might enjoy, Steam now features six curators on the front page of its store. On Tuesday, Joe Parlock, editor-in-chief of games website Let's Play Video Games, posted a screenshot that showed Steam was featuring a Curator on its front page named "dank memes for faggots."

I've reached out to Valve asking how this Curator ended up on the front page of the Steam Store, but have not heard back.

That the largest digital video game store in the world and the platform that has largely come to define the way video games are played on PCs put a homophobic slur on its front page is obviously not a great look, but perhaps inevitable given the size of Steam's user base, the amount of content users can create on Steam, and Valve's notoriously hands-off approach when it comes to moderation.

What Parlock saw on the front page is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to see some ugly stuff just search Steam curators with terms like "Nazi," "Jew," and "Trump" and this is the results you'll get:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3dzvw/steam-is-full-nazi-racist-groups

This is scary. While we're paying attention to Twitter and Facebook, real hate is brewing online and on video games. Valve definitely needs to step up and start monitoring this.

[Docreed2003]

1. Its sick...and its infesting the gamer culture

One of many reasons I purposely avoid Steam

[Initech]

2. I play games but I avoid the online components for this very reason.

Too much hate.

[Docreed2003]

3. Yeah, Im a gamer as well

I try very hard to avoid the online gaming abyss, and usually play with a core group of guys that I’ve played with for years for that very reason.