New Steam Curator Rules: Participants Must Disclose If They Were Paid

All hail the PC Master Race! Our benevolent masters at Valve have, probably, had enough of #Gamergate and the lack of trust generated between the reader and reviewer. This point of contention puts Valve’s new Curator system into a sticky wicket when Valve isn’t the one making the recommendations.

What is a Curator you say? Here is how Valve explains it: “With Steam Curators, anyone can become a tastemaker to help others discover those unique, fun, overlooked, or just plain awesome games.”  This all sounds great but wont people make money off of this system directly from Steam? Nope. Sure, you can link to a review offsite, but Valve is not letting people make money directly from them; it’s about the games not profit.

To further cement that this is about the games and not profit. Valve has updated its Terms of Use to say: “If you’ve accepted money or other compensation for making a product review or for posting a recommendation, you must disclose this fact in your recommendation.” Some might say that getting paid to do a review is a cost of doing business; I for one do no subscribe to that ideology.

If #Gamergate has taught us anything, it’s that people, even in the game industry, can make biased decisions when profit or personal gain is involved. Valve is a company that has built it’s reputation for being fair to its community and this helps to prevent anyone from sullying that reputation. At least now everyone will have a little less to worry about when reading a positive review and whether or not the reviewer is being paid to make it positive.