Ya I sort of feel mixed about it. I mean if Valve spoke out about the thing, then they would be Hippocrates. A lot of companies already are.
We are only talking about what happening in the US but what about other parts in the world? If companies really cared they would also be talking about that as well. I think Activision Blizzard has been talking about what's currently happening but when it comes to Hong Kong they sure kept quite didn't they? All they care about is scoring PR points and making money off the "winning team".
I was told that corporations are soulless entities. What matters more is what the people inside do.
Don't expect much from Valve when it comes to PR since they barely even do it for their own products but yet you have almost every one else spending a lot of time and effort on it (no Riot I don't want to play LOL and all of those other games so please stop showing me ads for those games)
The closest thing that Valve did for the BLM movement was the GC Black Voices page, which was a last minute thing and even then it didn't last very long. It did get a spot on top of steam though (not as a banner but as an imagine I think). They even tweeted about it.
To some that was not enough, and there was even this one person that tweeted about that. The results of that tweet were not good. That person was person was praising Epic for doing way more than Valve (I think Epic did make a statement and even donated some money??), They did a survey to ask if people sided with Epic or Valve. 90% sided with Valve. The real issue how ever comes with what the option for Valve was and it said something along the line of "if you side with Valve you support white supremacist" and that's the side that ended up winning. Had the wording been different I wonder if the results would also have been different. But that wording and the results are of concern.
An area where some on here have had concerns with Valve over and something that Valve themselves have not really done much of, is in regards to the LGBT event. Midboss is doing a pride sale, I don't think that Steam tweeted about that (and I don't recall seeing anything for it on the front page technically. The only way to really get to that page is via VALLA and then you will see the Pride banner on top of that page.
Its possible that Valve didn't do a lot to promote it since it was not going to last very long and because a lot of other stuff was going to come out and be talking the spot light anyway. Since there is a lot of stuff on Steam right now and more in the coming week.
Even when it came to the Steam summer event, that was pushed back and they even emailed people about it, but it would seem that some devs didn't check their emails? Was that a result of the BLM movement? Maybe maybe not? I would think that some companies would want to move their announcements to a date that was not close to the funeral.
At first I thought the tweet was about something completely different and that Valve removed the game (censored it or something) and that's why the dev didn't want to release other games on Steam in fear of their other stuff being removed, which makes sense.
If an indie dev chooses to not associated themselves because of the lack of PR, that's okay, if the company doesn't do PR stuff they may not even talk to you.
2 things companies have been doing are making a statement about how they stand with what ever is currently happening (that's where the Brand meme is being used for) and they are also donating money to charities. The message thing doesn't really do much but donating to charities can help.
From an AMA that GabeN did do a few years ago I think he said that Valve does donate to charities and stuff but you never hear about that stuff. Its possible that that's what they are doing and just don't want to talk about it. One of the bad things about that from what I recall is that they have to vote on it as a company or something like that and that a big portion of everyone has to agree before they donate money (I could be wrong and maybe just don't recall that correctly).
In the past year, what they did for stuff like COVID was limit downloads, but you could just ignore that and manually update things. While everyone else was forcing it on people. As for bundles there were 2 SE bundles (I missed out on one of them) but that was most likely a SE thing.
I don't think Valve organizes charity bundles and often when it happens it's publishers that come together and do that?
