Valve fights for the users.
The gaming community is massive. In fact, in an ocean of subcultures, it's the size of a blue whale and has the aggressiveness of an orca.
It's also proof positive that a community is not what the mainstream parts of its industry represent. The gaming community's development side is split into two groups. There's the indie space and the corporate space, and the latter is choking to death on government interference.
Corporations like EA, Bungie, Blizzard, and Ubisoft are known as AAA studios that churn out increasingly awful games, and when you look just a little closer, you can see why. It's the same reason many things went from legendary to absolute garbage.
Politics got involved.
Companies like Blizzard began facing lawsuits alleging sexism and discrimination, prompting the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to launch an investigation. Around that same time period, California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against Activision over the same "frat boy" culture. As a result, gaming corporations began adopting DEI hiring/firing/promoting practices, like other corporations from other industries, to avoid government scrutiny. "Consulting firms" were hired that not only oversaw the diversity and inclusion of employees, but also the products.
As a result, the AAA gaming space became a joke where millions of dollars are spent to create a game that ends up being a horrific woke waste of time. As I write this, once great studios that produced video games that defined generations are silently drowning as the woke employees who were injected into it like a virus create content that is unimaginative, message-heavy, and worst of all, boring.
Like every other corporation, it was infected with the woke virus through the HR department, which plays to whatever tune the government says they should. It doesn't help that many investors buy massive amounts of stock in the company and then "force behaviors" on the business that make said wokeness all the worse, such as BlackRock and Vanguard.
Yet, unlike most communities, gamers don't define their spaces by the corporations that play in them. In fact, there is more or less an agreement among the gaming community that these corporations are outliers. Intruders into the space that, despite the budgets, promotions, and press attention, aren't actually representative of the space.
So what is?
Gaming is an industry that continues to be a fortress of creativity and income, thanks to everyday people who make games in their spare time and release them to the public without any publisher, and this is, in great part, due to one of the last corporations that does not bend to government pressure, Valve.
My fellow gamers, at least the ones who game on PC, will know about Steam, the online video game store owned by Valve. It is the largest marketplace for video games in the Western world, and it's entirely online. What's great about Steam is that it allows for AAA studios and indie developers to both release games with equal importance, and you'll often find that the indie developers get the edge.
This is because indie devs don't have to play by corporate rules. If they have a wild idea, they just make the game. They don't need board approval; there's no consultant firm banging down their door demanding access while holding government papers, and no need to please anyone but their customers. They make what they want, they release it on Steam, and they make the money.
As you can imagine, Steam's existence doesn't sit well with the leftist authoritarians. They see a wild west of free expression, and to be sure, they see it correctly. Steam is rife with games that range from innocent and cute to vulgar and mature. Valve lets it all on the platform, for the most part, and allows the users to decide for themselves what kind of games they want to play. It treats you like an adult.
As such, the government has come after Valve more than once to try to get its boot on Steam's neck.
Recently, New York Attorney General Letitia James attempted to seize an element of control over Valve by attempting to label its ability for gamers to trade in-game items for real money as "gambling." I won't get into the details here, because that's not what this article is about, but I do want to highlight Valve's response, which was effectively, "Go f*** yourself."
From GamesRadar:
"The type of commitments the NYAG demanded from Valve went far beyond what existing New York law requires and even beyond New York itself," the company says. "It may have been easier and cheaper for Valve to make a deal with the NYAG, but we believed the type of deal that would satisfy the NYAG would have been bad for users and other game developers, and impacted our ability to innovate in game design."
Notice what Valve said was one of the chief reasons they weren't about to cave to James. They highlighted that government intervention, if accepted, would limit the creativity of developers and hamper innovation.
Valve is an incredible company that does all it can to hold back the influence of government, not just for the sake of its own business, but for the sake of regular people like you and me to exist in a world where censorship is minimal. We can create at whim, release our creation, and earn money if the market has a desire for it as free people.
Later this month, I'll be heading to DC to discuss Valve and Steam, and the importance of free expression with a think tank filled with gamers in positions to actually help fight back against these forces that try to limit our free expression, and reinforce companies in the gaming industry when they're inevitably confronted with government lawfare.
Read: Video Games May Be One of the Last Refuges of Masculinity
The gaming community is massive, and as such, the left wants to use every creative body it can to push its message into it. Valve has, so far, held the line and single-handedly kept the gaming community thriving in its purest form. It's one of the true last bastions of free expression on a macro scale, and given its size, it's in our best interest to keep it free to create and enjoy.
