If you owned a retail store, would you let a customer start cursing and yelling at your customers or would you kick that customer out?
Steam’s curator program was implemented a little over a year ago. This program allowed individuals and groups of users to put together a selection of recommendations with a brief text component that appears on everyone’s Steam store page when enough people are following that curator.
Some curators are what you would expect. Publications like Cheap Ass Gamer, PC Gamer, Giant Bomb, Gaming On Linux, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, have groups and recommendations. It’s nice to see that a publication you like is recommending a game, and it says a lot when none of them are. Then there are community action groups dedicated to specific causes, like one that is a group of made up of non-developers highlighting games that lack features that they feel should be available on every computer game regardless of what era it was developed in or if the lack of such a feature would even be an issue for this type of game.
Finally, there are curators on Steam that are beyond hyperbole. For example, Waifu Hunter. Normally this name would just imply that the group is operated by anime fans who will never know how to speak with actual women. Their disgusting motto is “I will tell you if a videogame has attractive anime ladies in it.” Here’s a sample recommendation from Waifu Hunter:
This game is a matryoshka doll of cancer, furries, and Tumblr. Play this if you hate good writing, loathe functional game design, and want to get AIDS.
Valve allows this to exist in their store, why? This negative recommendation is for a point-and-click adventure that has very positive overall user reviews. 103 positive and 10 negative reviews are shown directly on the store page for the game. Destructoid gave the game an 8 out of 10. This system is intended for positive recommendations, not rants from 8chan users. It is time to kick this customer out of the store.
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