‘This shouldn’t be normal’: Developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming storefront | steam

FOr years, the Steam gaming storefront has allowed abuse and bigotry to slip through its moderation, according to players and developers who use it. The platform now hosts batches of content that violate its own guidelines.

According to developers who spoke with The Guardian, abuse — specifically directed toward trans creators — is a fact of life on the platform. “Everyone is fighting each other all the time in reviews, discussions, forums, anywhere you can find them on Steam,” says creator and Steam curator Bri “BlondePizza” Moore. “It ensures that no one is safe on the platform; developers and consumers alike.”

Aside from the content of the Steam forums, sources cited two main causes for concern: fanatical reviews posted on games’ Steam pages, which can significantly impact their developers’ sales; Steam curators (self-proclaimed tastemakers on the platform) are directing campaigns against games they see as leaning left or seeking inclusion.

“I’m not new to online harassment,” says designer Natalie Lawhead, who spent two years trying to remove comments from her gaming pages. Both point to sexual assault allegations made by Lawhead in 2019. “I assumed that reporting Steam abuse might have its own problems. But when people suggested I open a ticket, I hoped that would be the way to solve the problem.”

One review published in 2023 read: “An annoying game made by a liar.” The other review, a review of Lawhead’s Blue Suburbia published in 2024, said: “Woman [sic] Who seeks to destroy others [sic] Career made this. It’s very bad together. She also likely has dual Israeli citizenship with the extent of her pointy nose.”

Despite Steam’s online code of conduct and community guidelines prohibiting “abusive language or insults,” general accusations, or “discrimination,” moderators initially deleted both reviews after Lawhead reported them.

Steam does not allow cleared content to be reported again by the same user unless it has been edited. So Lawhead asked others on social media to report the reviews, prompting Steam to remove the anti-Semitic example. But the other was passed again. “We are not in a position to verify the accuracy of data provided in user reviews,” Steam’s response sent on January 9, 2026 said, “and we do not attempt to moderate reviews based on accuracy.” The response claimed that removing reviews could be considered “censorship.”

“Crushing,” is how Lawhead describes Steam’s message. “The implication seems to be that I have to prove my sexual assault [to Steam] “If I want to be protected from harassment because of this,” they say, “I’m having a hard time knowing where the misunderstanding could be. And they had all the information about the situation. It’s a clear position. It’s a choice.”

The remaining review was eventually removed, but only after Lawhead personally reached out to an employee of Steam developer, Valve, outside of the moderation ecosystem. “This was a lot of work for two clearly unwarranted reviews,” they say, describing having to resolve the issue outside the usual channels as embarrassing for both parties. “I think this whole moderation process is broken.”

Although Lawhead was able to ask for public support to help remove reviews, this is not an option for every developer: not everyone has enough followers. Others who went public with moderation issues on Steam were subjected to further harassment, asked to speak anonymously or to be identified by their first names only.

Some games have been targeted by Steam curators. Ethan, the developer of Coven, a first-person action horror game set in the 17th century, says he was targeted by “CharlieTweetsDetected,” a curator dedicated to recommending games based solely on whether their developers were seen to have properly mourned the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

CharlieTweetsDetected’s review of Coven, a first-person action horror game set in the 17th century, reads simply “September 10th was celebrated against blue skies.” [sic]” This encouraged others to post more reviews and comments related to Kirk (not the game). “I mentioned it to Steam Support, how it originated from the moderators list, but they weren’t interested,” Ethan says. Instead, Steam Support claimed that the “off-topic” words constituted “a cookie recipe, or something completely unrelated to video games and is clearly trolling.” Reviews mentioning Kirk, including one that simply read “RIP Charlie Kirk” along with a negative review, did not meet those standards. According to Steam, all of that is still in place today.

Elsewhere, campaigns are going after games that include trans or LGBTQ+ characters. One trans developer listed as “NO WOKE” cites frequent discussion threads, including one that referred to them as “transvestites” and asked if their game included “woke gay.” Aimee Lefebvre of Plane Toast points out reviews and discussions of Caravan SandWitch, a sci-fi, adventure and driving game, often approach its alien characters negatively. “Very LGBTQ [sic] … There is no future or continuity for these sad gays and lesbians,” reads one of many words still visible on the game’s store page.

“The anti-woke curators have certainly brought insincere negative attention to the game,” Lefebvre says. “Valve’s refusal to mitigate any of this makes Steam reviews and forums a battleground for a kind of culture war, and makes it unsafe for marginalized people and casual players simply trying to enjoy the game they bought.”

Thanks to this influx of bad actors, and the lengths developers need to go to in hopes of removing hateful content from their pages, often without success, many report feeling held hostage by the platform. Steam has become a must-have for developers. It brings in millions of daily users — last month it had nearly 42 million concurrent players — and billions of dollars. “No other storefront has the influence that Steam has,” Lawhead says. “Publishers don’t take you seriously if you’re not.”

This level of success results in hundreds of thousands of support tickets each week. Details on how Valve, which has been reported to employ fewer than 400 people, handles its moderation burden, are elusive. The consensus online, including those who previously participated in Steam’s volunteer moderation program (retiring in 2022), is that the process should be outsourced. The Guardian has reached out to Valve on multiple occasions, through multiple channels, to seek further information and comment on why moderators have flagged so many clear violations of Steam’s guidelines. Valve did not respond to these requests, nor did it provide any public comment that The Guardian could find regarding Steam’s moderation issues.

Developer Phi endured a similar process to what happened with Ethan and Lawhead when Heart of Enya launched in 2021. After escalating a support ticket due to transphobic reviews, Phi received the following response from a Steam agent: “It is much better to continue working on the product, while allowing the community to use the Help feature to view reviews they agree with or find to be uninformed.” (This was the exact wording in Steam Support’s response to Lawhead five years later.) “Most of our moderation decisions come down to yes/no criteria… That’s a frustrating line to walk, and I think it inevitably leaves out content that could be considered offensive.”

The agent suggested discussing the issue with their team, but five years later little seems to have changed.

“For us, it looked like that on Steam [view]“Hateful comments about an individual are abuse — but targeting them toward a group of people is perfectly fine, and that’s welcome rhetoric,” Fay says. “We had no other choice for what to do about the transphobia in our reviews. And they’re still there today.”

Recourse to developers is limited. Some are looking into their own security, beefing up protection for developers on their team against being surveyed or hacked by trolls. Or, in the case of the developers of Caves of Qud, they pay their own moderators to deal with the forums and hate seeping out of Steam. Others are pushing bigoted comments into the public eye in an attempt to impress Valve, such as Mike Rose, head of No More Robots, who spoke out against racist reviews of its game Little Rocket Lab last year. “Woke game. There are also Muslims,” ​​one negative review said; Rose’s response read: “Please never play any of our games again.”

Others are just trying to deal with it. “Brown space lesbians try and fail to contain a minor fungal outbreak” is, despite its original derogatory intent, “the harshest line in all of our marketing copy,” according to Ambrosia Sky developer Christina Pollock.

However, it has become increasingly easy for the average consumer to log into Steam and encounter abuse, bigotry and hate, much of which has been removed by moderators. Because reviews influence a game’s appearance on Steam, one negative review can mean the difference between success and failure. Lax moderation not only causes individual harm, but has profound professional and economic implications for developers across the platform.

Many of them say they feel forced to simply put up with it — unable to break away from Steam’s near-total monopoly on PC gaming. “If I were to continue being on Steam, I had the impression that I would have to go through this exhausting ordeal every time I wanted to report abuse,” Lawhead concludes. “This shouldn’t be normal.”