This post might come across as highly political but there are other threads for the special people to play in so if you want to talk politics go do it elsewhere.

Unfortunately it might be the result of a highly political event for this discussion to truly mean something.

The Brazilian elections are happening soon and the wave of hyper-right-wing discourse continues its merry roll across the planet. This time the man who’s likely to win the presidency, Jair Bolsonaro, is yet another one of those vile beings who incites all sorts of hatred and enables bigots and fuckstics to air their hatred and violence against minorities who can’t defend themselves.

All of this is background to the release of a game on Steam called Bolsomito 2K18, a game in which the player takes the role of presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro on a quest to kill women, blacks, LGBTIQ+ people and “lefties”. Thus:



As Jim Sterling points out, there is a very hands-off approach to game publishing on Steam and it is only a matter of time before a game is released that causes the eye of government to cast its weary gaze upon the platform and result in bad ju-ju for the game industry. Bolsomito 2K18, in Brazil at least, seems to be that game.

The games industry has been constantly fighting battles in the public and legislative spheres to convince people that games don’t cause violence or poison the minds of those who play them. Yet in 2018, a game is released on the world’s largest games publishing platform that totally oversteps the mark and risks reversing all of that.

Valve’s current position on allowing content onto Steam is very basic. It says it will allow anything to be published as long as its not illegal, or outright trolling. Yet here we are. Hundreds of games are uploaded every week that are of utterly poor quality, and a few of those are pieces of work like this. Steam, it seems, is mightily close to becoming another outlet for far-right hatred, and could join the likes of Twitter in being an utterly toxic wasteland of bigotry, hatred, racism and sexism.

I think it’s time that Steam calls it a day. It is a shadow of its former self. The platform holder Valve doesn’t seem to care any more, unless it’s about making money for very little effort. As a developer they’ve erased almost any goodwill that gamers had toward them with their choices in making or cancelling games tied to their biggest franchises. They’ve lost and squandered so many opportunities for great indie games to find success, to the point where PS Vita and now Nintendo Switch are the go-to platforms for smaller developers to make their mark.

Stop buying games on Steam. If you can, please find other methods to purchase games. Go to sites like GOG, or even better, directly to the developer and see of they can sell you a game that way. Buy them on other platforms like the aforementioned Switch or PS4/Xbox. Or… resort to piracy, and donate money to the developer.

Steam does not deserve our money any more. It’s time it ended.