Prime Highlights:

• Australian activist group Collective Shout claims credit for recent Steam game deletions.
• Collective Shout had also led a top-profile campaign against Grand Theft Auto V.

Key Fact:

• A batch of violent and adult games were removed from Steam, apparently because they portrayed negatively.
• Collective Shout advocates for media responsibility, especially in women’s and children’s portrayals.

Key Background

Australian campaign group Collective Shout, who were just in the news for condemning violence on television and sexual exploitation, has publicly claimed credit for having several offending games deleted from online video game retailer Steam recently. Collective Shout revealed that the games were complained against for involving graphic violence, violent or degrading material, particularly towards women and children, which violated Steam’s community standards.

This move by Collective Shout follows their earlier campaign in 2014 against Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), a widely rated and reported to promote violence and misogyny game. Their campaign resulted in the title’s removal from the shelves of major Australian retailers like Target and Kmart. Ten years on, the firm is back in the news, saying that they are actively engaged in flagging up abuse glorification or trivialization of abuse.

The newest batch of pulled games, Collective Shout stated, contained graphic violence and sexual exploitation written in the content. The organization attributed the access to the games and services like Steam for failing to police content sufficiently. That kind of content, they argued, is not entertainment—abuse is normalized, especially among young people, and there is reinforcement of bad stereotypes.

Valve Corporation-owned Steam has been criticized throughout its lifetime for being too soft on violent and adult material. Even with the addition of user reporting and self-regulation mechanisms in more recent years to the platform, these are kept by critics as insufficient. Collective Shout has called for more responsibility from the site, stricter content policy, and more explicit enforcement in order to prevent hosting similar games on the site.

The decision keeps alive new controversies regarding free speech versus responsibility of the media, particularly in the domain of entertainment on the internet. Some deplore that censorship kills creative liberty, whereas others believe that technology companies must ensure moral standards, especially when material stands on the precipice of exploitation or misuse. Collective Shout’s intervention can cause online platforms like Steam to re-examine their content policy and align this closer to community standards and safety, especially in the context of vulnerable groups.