We're a small team of three who recently released our first game after five years of development and a $0 budget. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and I'm super proud of that, but there's a stressful hurdle that's causing us lots of pain.
Our game features a character encyclopaedia of NPCs, and among the numerous details listed, like height and dislikes, are pronouns. This single decision has had a purely negative effect on our game.
- We were placed on "Woke Alert" curator lists before release, attracting negative attention.
- A long Steam Discussion thread attacking pronouns devolved into transphobic rants and was linked from 4chan as a justification for pirating our game.
- A guide was posted on how to hex edit our game to remove pronouns], with offensive replacements.
Our game is called "woke" in Youtube comments and Groomercord channels.
Negative reviews protest the inclusion of pronouns despite enjoying the game otherwise (Example 1, Example 2 ). The oldest remains a month later, despite being reported to Steam. These reviews have dropped our rating from what would have been 96% to 94%, below the 95% threshold for "overwhelmingly positive" when we hit 500 reviews.
The encyclopedia is purely optional fluff; practically speaking, we'd actually benefit if it (and its tens of thousands of words) were never written, which is a shame because we loved making it.
All this for simply including pronouns in an in-game encyclopedia.
It's not just us. Fellow indie Arco recently faced a Steam user threatened buying, refunding, and negatively refunding the game over perceived "wokeness". Multiple comments assure the devs that Steam would quickly remove such reviews. Is this the general perception of how Steam handles this kind of thing? Based on our experience, I don't have a lot of confidence in that. That's what pushed me to make this thread and start a dialogue about it.
AAA games can outpace this kind of attention; indie devs can't. In an algorithmic world where every bit of feedback has a huge impact, the fact that protest reviews mask the actual reception of our game is extremely frustrating and disheartening, and it feels like Steam doesn't have our back.
Discussion points:
What should Steam be doing about activist reviews?
How can small indie teams protect themselves from this, without self-censoring?
We're lucky our game found some success, but any small game risks being buried by an angry mob before it gets any momentum of its own. The current climate forces indie devs to choose between inclusivity and financial success. Would we, or other devs, make the same decision today? I'm not sure. And this doesn't even touch on the broader issue of games getting tagged in "Woke Alert" lists just for having female protags or diverse casts.
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Don't like it? Build your own game distribution platform. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
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And it's not even the big platform doing the heckin consequences, it's the unwashed masses, the users.
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The customer, who isn't always right.
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