Any game involving Africans has to be woke, according to them and the devs have been fighting a barrage of trolling and obvious racism since the game was put up on steam.

  • Agent_Karyo@piefed.world
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    1 day ago

    I generally use Steam forums/news for relatively niche indie/AA games in the economic strategy/city-builder genres. Rarely do you encounter overly heated discussion with some exceptions around Denuvo use or a particularly intense debate about gameplay approaches.

    But I have seen some sections of Steam that honestly look surreal due to the level of toxicity and the overall bad faith tone.

    Valve should honestly police this stuff, they have more than enough resources to do so, but they won’t since it goes against the “scalability and automation” mantra of modern technology companies.

    P.S. I don’t consider free speech issues to be relevant in this case. One can always start their own site/forum and spam it with whatever they like. If product owners finds this valuable, they can join the shitbox.

    • atro_city@fedia.ioOP
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      1 day ago

      I don’t know how to make Valve aware of the blatant racism going on. Maybe they only look at twitter and reddit and there needs to be a “shitstorm” about the harassment the devs are facing. It’s despicable how it just continues to happen and there doesn’t seem to be a “account banned for improper conduct” on most of those fasches.

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s definitely not just indie games. I was looking forward to the Trails in the Sky remake, checked on its discussion forums, and it’s polluted with overblown “censorship” claims, sprinkled with “Guess the game FAILED cause it went WOKE” cringe.

      If only Steam had something like BlueSky’s crowdsourced blocklists. That would be a freeform way of handling the issue.

    • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.

      It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.

      • Agent_Karyo@piefed.world
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        1 day ago

        I am not American, I have a completely different perspective on this topic than most North Americans (lived there for a decade, as well as Europe and Asia for many years).

        I was using the term in a very broad sense. Think of it as more of an “off the cuff” remark.