Indie Devs Pull Games from Steam to Support #BlackLivesMatter

The protests rage on, and while the boys in blue have gotten the lions share of the hate, on account of them being the ones, you know, killing people, many people in the country are also targeting their righteous anger to those who are complacent with the status quo – specifically, companies that lack the spine to take a stand in favor of change.

One such studio is Valve, the PC gaming behemoth behind Half-Life and Steam, who has a longstanding record of being pretty quiet, probably since they know as long as they don’t offend anyone, Steam will continue to generate them an insane amount of money. But since this is a situation where silence is almost as bad as tweeting #bluelivesmatter, a lot of developers have started protesting Valve the best way they know how: pulling their games from the storefront.

Now, this is far from a large majority of developers – so far only a handful of lesser-known developers have pulled this move, such as Julian Glander, the developer behind Art Sqool, Ghost Time Games, the folks behind Test Tube Titans and Jettomero: Hero of the Universe, and Dean Sanderson, the guy behind the horror game First Winter.

Of the three developers mentioned, Julian Glander probably articulated his reasoning best of all.
 

"Over the past few weeks, Steam and Valve have chosen not to address the Black Lives Matter movement, failing to make even a broad and generic statement about social justice. It's than ever that the owners of this platform feel beholden to a base of angry white male gamers. Obviously as a company you guys can do whatever you want but I find having my games associated with the Steam platform to be embarrassing and a little nauseating,"

It would be optimistic to assume any plurality of developers will follow suit, or that Steam would take notice of a few higher-quality indie games leaving the storefront, but doing something, however small, is a whole lot better than doing nothing. Like what Steam is doing.

So kudos to all involved.