Valve's new policy means that any sponsorships that result in adding games to your curation list must be revealed; additionally, developers can now pick which curators show up on their store page.
Last week, Valve introduced a new Steam Discovery system designed to offer players better game recommendations -- in part by allowing Steam users to curate lists of games. Popular journalists, YouTubers, and others quickly created lists of recommendations. Now, Valve has updated the terms of its service and said that curators who have been paid to put games in those lists must disclose that fact. The rule reads, in full:
If you’ve accepted money or other compensation for making a product review or for posting a recommendation, you must disclose this fact in your recommendation.
Coincidentally, this comes hot on the heels of an announcement by Twitch that paid-for promotional streams will be marked as "sponsored" moving forward. Also, according to Gunpoint developer Tom Francis, developers can now themselves curate which curators appear on their game's store page. When the update first launch, Steam spokesman Alden Kroll told Gamasutra that this was not the case, saying, "The list of Curators that appear on any given store page will depend on the user that is viewing the page." Trying to get a bead on what this store update means for devs? Andrew Spearrin shared his early results; Lars Doucet peeled back the curtain even further, and Gamasutra spoke to a number of other developers.
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