Written by Flamecaster, edited by Otaku Apologist
Following up on their promises from June, Valve has updated Steam with new content filters.
Back in June, Valve had promised to double down on their hands-off approach when it comes to content on Steam. While they didn’t yet have the technology at hand, they announced great plans to allow developers and publishers to bring all manner of content onto the platform, adult-only titles among them. Not wanting their customers to be barraged by undesirable or potentially offensive content, they had to postpone these changes until better filters and other such tools were in place.
Today, Valve has published a new blog entry summarizing their progress so far. Many of the planned changes have already been implemented. Developers and publishers now have their own home pages to make tracking their work easier, you can choose whether you want to see early access or pre-order titles on the store page, and the upcoming releases tab now tracks your interests. The tag filter is now also more effective than before. While it originally accepted up to three tags it gave lower priority to, now you can select up to ten tags, and games which prominently feature these tags will be completely excluded from your search results.
Among these changes is a completely new mature content section in the store preferences tab. Within it, you can select whether you want to see games with mature content of any sort, and then specify what kind of mature content you’re fine with.
The specific options include frequent violence and gore, commonly seen in action and hack and slash games like Warframe, nudity or sexual content, like sex scenes in The Witcher 3, and finally, Adult Only Sexual Content. You can adjust these preferences by clicking on your name in the upper right corner of the steam client, and selecting “store preferences”.
Currently, the only provided product example of an Adult Only game is “Meltys Quest“. It is important to notice that this preference option is unchecked by default. Until you change this setting, Steam will not suggest you any games identified as Adult Only, be it on the front page or in the search bar. The only exception is if you search directly for the game’s, publisher’s, or developer’s name. In that case, you will be told how many titles have been hidden from you. The system provides you with an option button allowing you to change your preferences. If you’re not logged in, an informational splash-screen will tell you about the game’s contents.
Valve notices that this is not the end of their journey to make Steam more accessible. Future updates will see the inclusion of parental control, community management tools for developers, and other improvements.
You can read about the changes yourself in the Steam blog post.
