For years, the gaming storefront Steam has let abuse and bigotry pass through its moderation, according to players and developers who use it. The platform is now host to reams of content that violate its own guidelines.

According to developers who spoke with the Guardian, abuse – particularly directed towards transgender creators – is a fact of life on the platform. “Everyone is at one another’s throats all the time in reviews, discussions, forums, anywhere you can possibly find it on Steam,” says content creator and Steam curator Bri “BlondePizza” Moore. “It ensures no one is safe on the platform; developers and consumers alike.”

Aside from the content of Steam’s forums, sources pointed to two main causes for concern: bigoted reviews posted on games’ Steam pages, which can hugely affect sales for their developers; and Steam curators (self-appointed taste-makers on the platform) directing campaigns against games they perceive to lean left or pursue inclusion.

“I’m not new to online harassment,” says designer Nathalie Lawhead, who spent two years trying to get reviews removed from their games’ pages. Both reference allegations of sexual assault that Lawhead made in 2019. “I assumed reporting Steam abuse might have its own issues. But when people suggested that I open a ticket, I did have hope that this would be the way to get it resolved.”

One of the reviews, published in 2023, read, “cringe game, made by a liar”. The other, a review of Lawhead’s game Blue Suburbia posted in 2024, said: “A women [sic] who seeks to destroy other’s [sic] career made this. It’s very poorly put together. She also probably has dual Israeli citizenship with how pointy her nose is.”

Despite Steam’s code of online conduct and community guidelines prohibiting “abusive language or insults”, public accusations or “discrimination”, moderators initially cleared both reviews after Lawhead reported them.

Steam does not allow cleared content to be reported again by the same user unless it has been edited. So Lawhead asked others on social media to report the reviews, which prompted Steam to remove the antisemitic example. The other, however, was passed again. “We aren’t in a position to verify the accuracy of statements made in user reviews,” reads a response from Steam sent on 9 January 2026, “and we don’t try to moderate reviews based on accuracy.” Removing reviews, the response claimed, could be seen as “censorship”.

“Crushing,” is how Lawhead describes Steam’s missive. “The implication seems to be that I must prove my sexual assault [to Steam] if I want to be protected from harassment over it,” they say. “I am hard-pressed to see where the misunderstanding might be. They had all the information regarding the situation. It’s an obvious stance. It’s a choice.”

The remaining review was finally removed, but only after Lawhead personally approached an employee of Steam’s developer, Valve, outside the moderation ecosystem. “This was too much work just for two obviously unjustifiable reviews,” they say, describing having to resolve the issue outside the usual channels as awkward for both parties. “I think this entire process of moderation is broken.”

While Lawhead was able to call on public support to help get reviews removed, that is not an option for every developer: not everyone has enough of a following. Others who have gone public with Steam moderation issues have received further harassment, and have asked to speak anonymously or be identified by their first names only.

Some games have been targeted by Steam curators. Ethan, the developer of Coven, a first-person action-horror set in the 1600s, says he has been targeted by “CharlieTweetsDetected”, a curator devoted to recommending games based solely on whether their developers are perceived to have correctly mourned the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.

CharlieTweetsDetected’s review of Coven, a first-person action-horror game set in the 1600s, read simply “Celebrated Sept 10th on blue sky [sic]”. This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game). “I even mentioned it to Steam support,” Ethan says, “how it stemmed from that curator list, but they weren’t interested.” Instead, Steam support claimed that “off-topic” constituted “a recipe for cookies, or something completely unrelated to video games that is clearly trolling.” Reviews referencing Kirk, including one reading simply “RIP Charlie Kirk” alongside a negative rating, did not fit that criteria according to Steam; all remain in place today.

Elsewhere, campaigns chase games that include trans or LGBTQ+ characters. A trans developer included on a curation list titled “NO WOKE” cites frequent discussion threads, including one that referred to them as a “transvestite” and asked whether their game included “woke faggotry.” Plane Toast’s Émi Lefèvre points to reviews and discussions of Caravan SandWitch, a sci-fi action-adventure and driving game, which frequently approach its queer characters negatively. “Too LBGTQ [sic] … There is no future or continuation for these sad gays and lesbians,” reads one among many that remain visible on the game’s store page.

“For sure, the ‘anti-woke’ curators brought insincere negative attention to the game,” Lefèvre says. “Valve’s refusal to moderate any of this is making Steam reviews and forums the battleground for some kind of culture war, and is making them unsafe for marginalised people and regular gamers trying to simply enjoy the game they bought.”

Thanks to this influx of bad actors, and the lengths that developers need to go to in the hopes of getting hateful content removed from their pages, often without success, many report feeling held hostage by the platform. Steam has become essential for developers. It brings in millions of daily users – last month it had almost 42 million concurrent players – and billions of dollars. “No other storefront has the clout that Steam does,” Lawhead says. “Publishers don’t take you seriously if you’re not on it.”

That level of success results in hundreds of thousands of support tickets every week. Details about how Valve, a company that has been reported to employ fewer than 400 people, handles its moderation load are elusive. Online consensus, including among those formerly involved in Steam’s volunteer moderation programme (retired in 2022), is that the process must be outsourced. The Guardian reached out to Valve on multiple occasions, through multiple channels, for more information and for comment on why moderators clear so many apparent violations of Steam’s guidelines. Valve did not respond to those requests, nor has it made any public comment that the Guardian could find on Steam’s moderation issues.

Developer Phi endured an identical process to Ethan and Lawhead upon releasing Heart of Enya in 2021. After escalating a support ticket over transphobic reviews, Phi received the following response from a Steam agent: “It’s much better to continue working on the product, while letting the community use the helpfulness feature to surface reviews that they agree with or find to be uninformed.” (This exact wording was in Steam support’s response to Lawhead five years later.) “Most of our moderating decisions come down to a yes/no criteria … that’s a frustrating line to walk, and I think it inevitably leaves content that would be considered offensive.”

The agent suggested the issue would be discussed with their team, but after five years little appears to have changed.

“To us, it seemed that in Steam’s [view], hateful comments about an individual is abuse – but targeting it towards a group of people is totally fine, that’s welcome speech,” Phi says. “We had no other choice for what to do about transphobia in our reviews. They’re still up there today.”

Recourse for developers is limited. Some are looking into their own security, shoring up protections for developers on their team against being doxxed or hacked by trolls. Or, in the case of the developers of Caves of Qud, paying their own moderators to handle forums and the hate that spills out of Steam. Others push bigoted comments into public view in an attempt to cajole Valve, such as No More Robots head Mike Rose, who pushed back against racist reviews of its game Little Rocket Lab last year. “Woke game. Also has muslims,” reads one negative review; “please never, ever play any of our games ever again,” reads Rose’s response.

Others are just trying to roll with it. “Brown space lesbians trying and failing to contain a simple fungal outbreak” is, despite its original derogatory intent, “the hardest line in all of our marketing copy”, according to Ambrosia Sky developer Christina Pollock.

It is increasingly easy, however, for the average consumer to log on to Steam and encounter abuse, bigotry and hate, much of which has been cleared by moderators. And because reviews affect a game’s visibility on Steam, a single negative rating can mean the difference between success and failure. Lax moderation doesn’t just create individual harm but has profound professional and economic implications for developers across the platform.

Many of them say they feel forced simply to endure it – unable to walk away from Steam’s near-monopoly on PC gaming. “If I am to continue existing on Steam, I am under the impression that I will have to go through this exhausting ordeal every time I want to report abuse,” Lawhead concludes. “This shouldn’t be normal.”