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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
8 
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On the other hand, I am also sure they have it somewhere in their greedy little contracts that the game cannot operate this much outside their system.
Then again, it is Conan Exiles. Nobody will remember it even exists in a year. It already struggles to have even 1000 players.
Anyway.
If we're talking about avoiding criticism, It's a pretty dumb move.
As long as the game have problems or break its promises and there's forums, people will complain.
If not on Steam, then on officials forums, on Reddit, or why not on Youtube assuming the guy really want to rant and have the time to do it.
So, I'm not sure that's all there is about it.
The game is also getting released on consoles on May 8, so it's not that strange for them to want a centralized, non Steam dependant forum.
From there, closing the Steam forums make sense... somewhat.
They could have left them open and just never come there, but I suppose they don't want to have a community mod cleaning the mess an angry mob could make on release date.
As for the broken promises, it's Early Access ! It's time people learn their lesson.
Even big names can fail to do everything they wanted to, and supporting those games is and will always be a gamble.
Back in the days, lots of games didn't made it past half the development, or were released without some features because of time and money constraints. We just didn't knew.
It's the same thing now, except it's now public and with customer's money.
Cheers.
The "customer's money" part is the problem + the fact that they (devs, pubs, storefront) use / allow content and features that are not and may never form part of the title in order to market it and make a sale, which equals misleading advertising.
These are serious issues that need to be addresed.
The Early Access blue flag is not a shield for such shameless bullshittery, even if Valve pretends it is.
There needs to be some darn accountability on the part of the developers / publishers and storefront when such shameless misuses and abuses of the platform take place.
And obviously, customers need to stop giving their money away on false promises....but the fact that we live in a poorly educated consumerist society doesnt preclude the storefront and developer / publisher from having some basic decency and honesty in their advertising and offerings.
Back in the day, Publishers had control on their investment (IP rights, exclusivity, royalties, control over the product depending on the contract, etc..) and stood to make returns...the gamble could actually stand to be lucrative. On Early Access, the customer opens the wallet and always loses money...regardless.
Except they were pretty honest about what won't be in there on release day and why, and they're not advertising those features anymore in the store page.
Again, bumps in the road happen.
It's not like they're running away with the money and delivering half a game.
EA isn't about enabling scams, sure, but everybody buying such a game is warned the final product may not fullfill all its promises.
That is part of the problem, and that explains part of the backlash.
There is a difference between "bumps in the road" and bait and switching or misleading the community about the content of a game in order to create a purchase under false pretenses.
Complexed by the the moderation abuse when these complaints are brought up, the alleged picture becomes clearer.
The game is playable but, allegedly, many features that were marketed and used to sell the game wont make it into the final release....and people that bought the game because of those advertised features are complaining.
Oh, and allegedly (by numerous accounts) current trailers on the Steam Store of the title do not accurately depict the current content of the game nor the expected final product.
Plenty of developers already play tin-pot dictator on their Stean community pages without the slighest oversight or concern from Valve. They can delete individual posts or entire threads, ban users temporarily or permanently, enforce whatever rules they decide, empower their own moderators, and (as far as I know) all appeals go directly to them for their own decisions.
Valve seemingly provides the bare minimum support and only as a check against posts in violation of their own community standards (ie making sure you aren't linking pirated material or whatever), but that seems about it. I've never heard of them caring at all about even blatant censorship or providing any help with the things you might be concerned about.
They don't need to respond to Valve or care about best practices in community moderation on their private forum. Theyd have nobody to answer to and could clean the slate and pretty much do whatever they wanted unimpeded and without Valve having a record of it (or the resulting community moderation message evidencing the ban of the player.)
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/community_moderation
I suddenly remembered seeing you post this a few weeks ago. I had not actually been familiar with these specific guidelines and I think this will prove incredibly helpful to me both now and in the near future.
I've recently been trying to take developers to task for the growing trend scamming bundle purchasers by revoking unused keys after a few months. Just moments ago I was perma-banned from the "TREASURES OF A BLIZZARD" forum for "spam," upon linking my review critical of the game as a source of additional information in a topic specifically wondering why their key wasn't working. Incredibly un-ironically, the post I was banned for also warned that the dev was conducting an active censorship campaign and their thread would soon be deleted too as part of their active censorship campaign (which, of course it was).
Thank you so much for the information and the link.