Positive surprise by Valve, albeit still quite flawed

Rarely Valve can surprise positively. In this case, the gesture is appreciated, something encouraging, but in execution still very flawed.

What happened was that in the Terraria community artwork section there were two people heavily practicing art theft. The first one uploaded a flood of other people's character art with many of them being ... age-inappropriate. The second one was someone uploading someone else's piece of art and when called out for it went into a defiant, spiteful rage, uploading three more uncredited pieces from the same artists, this time knowing the source. That one also wrote lots of vulgarities. (Also an observation: It's generally a clichée you cannot deny that when art theft like this happens, most times it's Russians.)

So those I reported. And they kept collecting upvotes for two weeks or so, some of them topping the feed.

Until finally I received this nice e-mail:

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Subject: Thanks for reporting inappropriate content on Steam!
Dear -----------,
Thank you for reporting content that violates the Steam Terms of Service or breaks the rules of the area in which it was submitted.

Because of your efforts, we've removed 4 inappropriate or offensive pieces of content from the Steam Community.

The Steam Support Team
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Smart, isn't it? Giving feedback to show people that their efforts are valued and have results. Even if this e-mail has been sent automatically (very likely), that is sufficient and doesn't detract from the effect.

Well...

The first guy, the spam wave, it seems all of those pictures are still up. Dunno, maybe because they didn't know the sources they couldn't verify the validity of the claim.
But the second person, they uploaded four pictures with all the same source, which was stated. So I assumed those are the ones.

But then I noticed that one of them, the fist picture, with most of the offending comment activity and all the calling-out, is still up. O_o

So in essence this is a very flawed minimum of courtesy, but it's positive (and thus rare), so I considered pointing it out.
(Doesn't change my stance on Valve's under-age gambling scheme though.)

Sometimes spending money is hard

I wanted to get Psychonauts for Steam. Got it from GOG a while ago. So I was looking for a very low price. Was already annoyed when my newly installed browser addon showed me that I missed it on Humble Bundle recently because despite being subscribed to their range of notifications, I missed out on a lot of very good deals for games I wanted to get.
So now I could get Psychonauts for 1 dollar. But I guess it would have been too good to be true. What's happening is that the supposed charity-aimed Humble Bundle business has a special package "E3 digital ticket" in which they basically celebrate the business side of things. Usually I like the feature of choosing where my money goes a lot, but this time I can't direct it to the makers of Psychonauts as I would have done. The only three options are Twitch (= Amazon, a global megabusiness), the ESA Foundation, a pseudo-charity industry-agenda and tax optimization (self-serving) support group or the guys making such a package (Humble Bundle).

Stuff's difficult when you have standards.
I occasionally tried to lower them, but that always turned out to be a big mistake. I have made nothing but bad experiences with charity (and fake ones with a big-business industry agenda behind it are even more of a red cloth), Humble Bundle seems somewhat inept at taking my money as well as focusing on their intended business model, so they give me the occasional sigh, and Twitch/Amazon is basically representing the global corporate buy-up game.

All this combined with seeing the logos of Microsoft and Ubisoft on the offer make me unable to take up that offer.


As a sidenote and futher example of the theme:
As much as I hate Steam, I encountered a game (The Powerpuff Girls: Defenders of Townsville) that I'd actually really want to have on Steam because it's so motivating and combined with the achievements even more and I'd just have liked to have it in my library, but due to typical business idiocy (apparently mainly worries that the consumer might be a helpless, confused sheep), it was taken off the market.

This is a symptom of a corporate trend that needs to be countered. When you want to spend money but can't or are being dissuaded with full force, that's a sign that something is profoundly wrong. And we all know what's wrong with corporate business, so I don't have to elaborate further.
More power to small business / indie dev!