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    • Steam is Now Enforcing Full Disclosure of Paid Recommendations

    by on October 5, 2014 at 8:36 PM, EDT

    steam 10-5-14-1

    After some abuse of their terms of service regarding their newly opened Curator service, Valve has stepped in to create some new standards.

    The new policy clearly states that while getting paid to endorse a game is fine, if the curator has “accepted money or other compensation for making a product review or for posting a recommendation”, they must disclose in its entirety.

    Coming from this, game developers have now been given the power to control which Curators show up on their game’s page. This means they can conveniently hide bad Curator recommendations, while highlighting the good ones.

    If you haven’t checked out our completely independent Curator page and Steam Group, please check them out.


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    7 comments
    1. geezer_man
      geezer_man
      October 5, 2014 at 9:19 pm

      what makes them think [Steam] that this won’t devolve into GamerGate redux?
      now their reccs will look like ads!

    2. Brotagonist
      Brotagonist
      October 5, 2014 at 9:32 pm

      This is already pretty similar to the whole thing that happened with tagging on Steam. At first anyone could tag anything they wanted, and while that did cause a small amount of abuse(though funny) Steam then gave control to the devs or publishers, allowing them to add or delete any steam tags that they wanted to.

    3. nonscpo
      nonscpo
      October 5, 2014 at 11:14 pm

      Steam has a lot of soul searching to do, they may be the leader in digital distribution of games. However that won’t mean much if there brand goes downhill with bad games and misguided reviews.

    4. Anbutou
      Anbutou
      October 6, 2014 at 5:36 am

      I’m torn on this one. On one hand I enjoy free speech, but on the other hand I understand that there’s a lot of people out there who just want to do things that cause negative reactions and laugh. I think that devs having control over who shows up on their system is necessary, but I also think there needs to be a way to police that. There’s plenty of shady devs on steam that just dump their back catalogs and walk away not caring about quality or even playability, and them having the power to censor criticism is grade A awful.

    5. miiyukichan
      miiyukichan
      October 6, 2014 at 7:49 am

      yey, they have to disclose this now

      eugh they allow curator to hide things
      i don’t know. i really don’t.

    6. LurkerJK
      LurkerJK
      October 6, 2014 at 8:29 am

      whats the point of making “bad lists” ? its not like you you have a “do not show any game in this list” option to use them negatively

      for the little curation valve does i wish they would just let the tags run wild, they had some insults but most of the time they were spot on

    7. LurkerJK
      LurkerJK
      October 6, 2014 at 8:44 am

      they should only be able to report things, but then valve would need a huge community management task force so they just wash they hands and let the devs police their store pages, at least they cant ban reviews … yet