Valve has stopped trying.

Today’s blog post makes something explicit that many of us have seen for a while: The company doesn’t really care about the content on its platform. It doesn’t want to be put in the sticky situation of being responsible for the things being sold through Steam, so it won’t anymore. Anyone can sell their game on Steam, with a few tiny exceptions.

“...We’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling,” Valve’s Erik Johnson said in a blog post. “Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see.”

The wording is important there, because you’d think what is illegal is a question for laws and courts, and not Valve, but this allows them to wash their hands of most decisions while keeping the control to interpret which “illegal” games should be removed and to be the final arbiter of what is and isn’t trolling. It’s a way of making sure the peasants know that they, and only they, are responsible for themselves, but the king is still the king.

There are also no stated mechanisms with which Valve will find games that are illegal or trolling. Why pay to do something yourself when you can just tell the audience it’s their job, or responsibility, to do it for you?

You can say the thought process behind this decision is profits, since it costs Valve very little to allow a game on its service and the company takes a large percentage of everything that’s sold on the platform, but the blog posts makes it clear that it’s also about cowardice.

“The harsh reality of this space, that lies at the root of our dilemma, is that there is absolutely no way we can navigate it without making some of our players really mad,” Johnson said.

Saying there are no rules is a good way to make sure no one gets mad, and if people get upset about the flood of abusive and hateful games that now, by policy, have a home on Steam ... well, tough shit. It’s your responsibility to not look at them, if you don’t like them. Valve doesn’t want to have to think about this stuff, it gets in the way of counting the money.

This isn’t a free speech issue, because Valve isn’t a government entity. This isn’t an issue of lack of resources, because Valve makes enormous profits from Steam and could easily afford to put more robust vetting in place. It isn’t an issue of lack of people, because more people could be hired to work on the problem if it was something Valve actually cared about solving.

But this solution keeps things simple, and profitable. Anything goes, and Valve is going to make money on all of it. If you don’t like it? Well, that’s your issue. There’s plenty of money to be made selling games that seek to profit from hateful ideas and images, and it can only cost money to run your company with basic decency. This blog post isn’t a statement, it’s an excuse. And in 2018, it’s a lazy excuse.

“If you’re a developer of offensive games, this isn’t us siding with you against all the people you’re offending,” Johnson said. Valve isn’t picking a side, because that would mean turning down money from someone. The argument is made that someone in Valve may even agree that some games shouldn’t be on the service, but this policy means that no one at Valve ever has to feel responsible for how they make money. It’s an open declaration of for-profit sociopathy. You can’t give something a home, take a percentage of its sales, and say that the product doesn’t reflect your beliefs. Your beliefs are being reflected perfectly in that situation, in fact.

This was probably a simple decision for Valve, and if you’re upset, just remember that your anger isn’t the anger that Valve cares about.