You have to remember game journos hate Valve a lot for not doing content curation (IE: promoting their friends games because they are art and not games that actually make money). This is only going to make them hate Valve more, which is to say, its a lot like mosquitoes hating a hurricane. There's not anything they can do about it because the hurricane does not give a fuck that they are there and barely notices them in the first place.
Journalists LOVE companies that 'care', in which they can moralize to. The problem arises when the company says, 'We don't care, we don't have a morality, you can chose what you see or don't, don't come at us'. They have absolutely no power. Rape game on Steam? Steam says: 'You have the power to not see it. Do it yourself.' Nazi game? 'You have the same power, ignore it. Don't talk to us about it.'
What Valve is doing is limiting their ability to complain, to push their worldview. Valve has effectively shut their morality out, because, guess what, don't want to see any game Kotaku or Polygon recommends with an indie label? Oh shit, now you don't have to see TrannyFag Fuck Simulator 9000 starring Jim Fat Fuck Sterling anymore. Which sells even less copies.
Valve stopped it's war on anime titties, but only because they remembered that they've never shown any fucking willingness to curate their store ever before so why should they start now? Their war was getting in the way of profits.
Its my personal belief that the 'anime titty war' was one or two employees going off the reservation on their personal beliefs and abusing their authority. The way Valve is set up as a company is very much like, 'Yeah, work on whatevah' and lacks structure, so once Valve at large woke up to what the fuck was happening, that shit stopped almost instantly.
Its my personal belief that it was not a company-wide decision, but employees with certain 'values' who did it. My bet is they were fired and Valve decided to spite them by saying everything is allowed (except for games with fucking). I still think they should just have a 'Valve After Dark' or whatever and have 18+ games on it.
So does this mean Valve won't care if barely/non functional games go on to their platform? Or would that fall under the nebulous "straight up trolling"?
The 2 hour 'return for any reason' policy basically killed these games off completely. Also if you put enough games like this on the store, Valve will eventually kick you off. Asset flip games are also dying because of the 2 hour return and people enjoying reviewing them straight into the ground.
Despite what game journos think, its very very difficult to try to con people out of money on Steam anymore because they can simply return their money and most con artists don't have the merit or the ability to program a decent 2 hour experience to convince people otherwise.
