Steam store to sell VR porn video games
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
I feel that total inclusionism is the only long-term stable policy. Excluding things based on morality is inherently an unstable position - "why do you allow this but not that? Don't you know this is literally killing babies in Africa?" where this and that could be nudity, gore, violence, rape, women's suffrage, blasphemy, political incorrectness or any number of other topics. Well, I suppose hosting no content at all would also be a stable policy... But it's not one that many storefronts are going to support.
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
I don't think this will end well for them. They've declared open season for the internet's worst people to push the boundaries of acceptability, for which they'll earn a cut of a tiny number of sales, and reams of negative press.
It's a smart move for Valve, as only an explicit commitment to principles of neutrality have any hope of shielding them from the ever-growing Culture Wars where various outrage-groups weaponize platform rules to chip away at others' ability to enjoy content on their own terms.
For a long time, Steam was distribution platform where the distributor was also the curator. Granted, this curation mostly resolved to "is this an AAA or someone peripherally in the Big Boys club," but it was a certain level of curation that consumers came to expect.
Now that Steam is the de-facto app store of the PC platform, Valve is strongly incentivized to make sure that any game you can buy, can be bought through Steam.
Combine this with their general unwillingness to scale their employees to match the size of the business they have (which is IMO a silly thing on Valve's part, but I'll avoid this discussion for now), and the shift away from Valve-as-a-curator makes sense.
But Valve hasn't sold this as providing Steam's distribution platform as a back-end service to curators/other "stores", they've sold it as Steam and damaged their own reputation in the process.
There's a reason why large businesses have so many different brands that are hard to associate without a lot of digging, and Valve's handling of Steam is a good example of why.
I have a feeling they'll use tasteful judgement on segmenting that section of the store and it's not going to turn into a big smut-house overnight.
Prior to this announcement, Valve was taking a -hands off- approach to erotic games. Now, Valve has a plan for segmentation.
I think naivete would be overlooking an emerging and highly profitable market. There are vast incentives for Valve to segregate the pornographic material from the general games feed. The incentives quite outweigh the -hands off- approach of the past.
MindGeek's (online porn conglomerate) annual revenue was $460 million in 2015.
Steam has 125 million active users. I doubt they will make an average of $3.68 per user on porn next year, considering the VR install base is small, and there is so much free online porn.
Porn has a huge influence on technology. I won't be surprised if within the next few days, there's a huge surge on VR headset sales.
I'm pretty sure that's literally in the realm of how much Valve makes selling hats and skins for CS:GO [0].
Porn is definitely bigger than Counterstrike. They're doing this for the money.
[0] https://www.hltv.org/blog/11798/how-much-money-valve-is-maki...
A very small minority of the population literally derives pleasure from simulating murder. And you can't act on that / do it in reality to drive the stimulation further, unless of course you want to murder someone and take on the very high risk consequences.
Or put simply, sex is radically more popular than murder.
The difference in popularity between the two is over 10000x.
A sex simulator will typically have a direct, considerable physical consequence to you in real life. Murder simulation very, very rarely will have that - at least until or unless VR gets hyper realistic.
The more movies, games etc we have to meet such needs, the less we seem to want the real thing. This actually strikes me as reducing the risk of pregnancy and STDs. On top of that, actual studies show that increased access to porn correlates to reduced incidence of sexual assault.
An extremely small percentage of the population feels any motivation related to wanting to murder other people. Murdering people isn't very popular at all, and drives no pleasure for 95%+ of the population, despite the attention it stirs in media.
Somewhere between a very large minority and a majority of the population spends a large share of their teen and adult lives being motivated by wanting to have sex, sexual intimacy, etc. with other people.
Most people are biologically driven to want to have sex with other people. An extremely small number of people are similarly biologically driven to murder (perhaps a near zero population).
If you are sexually clueless and try anyway, it's embarrassing and you go have a good cry and write about it in your diary. If you have no idea what you are going and try to kill someone, well, there's still that issue that they may fight back and then the cops get called afterwards.
I think there are a few holes in your theory. Repeating it to me over and over doesn't fill them in.
I said very few people derive direct pleasure from simulating murder in eg a video game. When you stomp on a bad guy in Mario, you are not feeling the serial killer equivalent to some kind of sweet orgasmic reaction high to murdering a fellow human with a butcher knife in real life. There is no connection at all.
To put it into movie terms: a lot of people enjoy action movies (which include violence), the latest flick by The Rock etc, they're exciting. A dramatically smaller share of the population enjoys watching highly graphic, gruesome, murder movies like Hostel or Saw. And that's not the person simulating murder, that's second hand, watching the simulation of it, and the drop off in popularity is extreme.
People are not having fun in GTA because they get off on actually murdering people and their sole physical outlet for it is relegated to a video game. All of those players aren't actually lusting after wanting to slaughter their fellow humans.
You can simulate sex in VR, or watch porn, and then go have sex, jerk off all day, etc. There's a direct connection.
Very, very, very few people murder or actually want to murder; some extremely high percentage of the population wants sex, has sex, jerks off, etc.
How about Assasin’s Creed?
Beware of sensationalism.
A school shooting game is no more offensive than a driving sim where you run people over or a war shooting game. The only reason people are offended is because real life school shootings are popular exciting news so they also come to the forefront of people's minds as something they're supposed to get offended by.
In the current era, the urge to censor is increasingly coming from elements of the Left, where socially or politically "problematic" material becomes the new "blasphemous". From the quoted article:
>"Unfortunately this also means they'll likely be taking a similarly hands-off approach regarding wildly sexist, racist or homophobic content."
That's my guess as to why this isn't yet a "solved question" -- the fringes of both sides have to get their attempt at busybodying in before a stable synthesis can result.
That's optimistic. My prediction is that the pendulum will switch all the back once sexbots become affordable.
I would never allow my kid browse that kind of shit, even if they're 17. VR schoolgirl rape? Seriously? Why are people defending this. How can this be good for you psyche? Not to mention the more depraved shit that are going to arrive.
This is exactly the right attitude, you should be paying attention to what your children are consuming--it's not Steam's job to parent them for you.
> Why are people defending this. How can this be good for you psyche?
Because as with things like smoking and alcohol, some people enjoy them, and in a free society we let people make their own choices even if it harms them. (And it's not even clear that porn and video games are bad for you.)
For example people in this thread are talking about the potential for rape-fetish materials being in a video game while ignoring that most major bookstores or even Walmart sells tens of books about the same subject with no age restrictions at all.
I mean Game of Thrones (several rapes, sexual fetish scenes, under-age) and 50 Shades of Grey are literally sold at the checkout line.
PS - Not arguing for books to be age restricted/banned, just pointing out the hypocrisy.
However I don't know for a fact because I haven't seen a decent opinion piece or anything about this, just tweets
Movies and books present a story. I haven't seen any movies or series portraying rape as desirable rape lately, but even if they do, you don't have to identify with the protagonist. In VR, you are the protagonist, always, and actions are presented as if they're actually yours, trying their best to trick your mind into thinking they are.
So yeah, many differences, nothing good about them.
It used to be illegal to make movies with a man and a woman in the same bed together because it was thought to create uncontrollable carnal desires in people. Music and television and books used to be heavily censored due to all their corrupting ideas. Dungeons and Dragons was considered satan worship and evil as well. See the Comstock Law. See prohibition of alcohol...
The problem with all of these arguments is that they have ALL BEEN PROVEN WRONG every single time. Porn, beer, cursing in music, violence in movies, playing an immersive tabletop game where you make the decisions... have never once ever throughout all of human history caused your average person to lose their minds. Normal people are capable of receiving new ideas and using them to build a richer world perspective instead of turning into slathering immoral animals at the first chance.
Another infinitely better argument is that this type of entertainment is cathartic and beneficial. People fulfill desires through a fantasy instead of reality, thereby decreasing the behavior and actually making the world a better place. But that would requiring viewing people as responsible, self-aware, reflective, adults who are capable of thinking for themselves.
I disagree. I'm worried that Steam's porn won't be properly separated from the rest of their library. I've frequently had borderline-naked prepubescent children from erotic visual novels show up on the front page of the Steam store, and would like it to stop happening before somebody calls the cops on me.
The Steam marketplace has had, e.g. nudity Skyrim mods forever.
The "i" has replaced it in print (highbrow tabloid)- independent.co.uk has been reduced to a website that drives traffic towards itself largely through clickbait/tabloid-style reporting.
It's still on a different level to dreck like the Daily Mail, but it's long since slipped from its old status as a respected broadsheet.
Almost all games by Illusion (japanese 3d porn company) involves rape. Search Playclub VR on youtube to see examples.
Not kink shaming or anything but I can see this crossing a line for a good chunk of people. Especially when they realize you can physically roleplay a homeless guy raping an underage school girl in that game (not even talking about using mods, this is one of the default scenarios).
Rape wasn't the main problem. The more important issue is that it might violate child pornography laws:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_child_pornography#Vi...
The Japanese defense is that all teenagers are actually 500 year old vampires. But you still need to convince your prudish American peers that this makes it legally not "obscene".
[0] https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom
[1] https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/06/the-tearoom-as-...
Will this increase VR adoption?
Similarly people attracted to steam for pornography might stay to play a game, adjusting the demographic of the larger community.
a) a significant portion of the people who consume their porn products is not a current Steam user, b) the new users will not only buy and play games, but also interact with the community (message boards, etc.), c) these new users will on average exhibit more anti-social behavior, d) their behavior is linked to lost game revenue larger than the amount brought in by the porn sales.
I do worry a bit that it might trigger some sort of moral panic when e.g. parents hear that one game program Steam is giving 8 year olds free porno or some other exaggerated claim. Jim Sterling made a pretty good case for this in a recent video about the school shooting simulator game, that by allowing that kind of content Steam is exposing itself to becoming the victim of a hysterical panic like has happened many times in the past.
Segregating the controversial content away behind an 'edgier' brand with a different client would deflect a lot of criticism, even if it was just a new coat of paint over the Steam client. Valve needs to make the content expectations clear to people who have never used Steam themselves.
Having it seperate would also allow them to change the default UX. Among other things, the default behaviour of sending notifications to your friends like, "Bob has started playing Call of Duty," is probably not the right behaviour for porn games. If they don't firewall those sorts of games off into a seperate area, Steam at least needs to clearly communicate at every point where the user interacts with the game on Steam (store page, cart, profile, library, etc) whether that interaction is public or private, because historically just about every interaction has been visible to the user's friends.
I would bet money that the historical overlap between regular consumers of Steam and pornhub look more like a single circle than a venn diagram.
And it's great to see a platform moving to be more liberal for once.
What exactly do you mean by "communities"? e.g. isolated small towns are usually viewed as having extreme levels of social control, not inadequate ones.
Good parental control settings and monitoring of their computer usage.
And honestly any kid who's started puberty is going to try to watch VR porn videos, which are already easily accessible. So keep an eye on your Vive / Oculus.
If Steam is successful with their plan to "enable you to override our recommendation algorithms and hide games containing the topics you're not interested in" then I look forward to having an easier time finding child-friendly (gun-free) games.