“Whosoever sells their games on Steam, if they contact Valve, shall possess the power of BAN.”

Yo jurors! Are you tired of cheaters plaguing your multiplayer games and ruining the experience? Well, Valve thinks they have a solution to help mitigate this. As explained here, here, and here Valve have implemented a system where developers can enforce bans in their own games.

The basic idea is that developers can police their own games and then contact Valve when they have a cheater caught. Valve will in turn ban the offending player from being able to play the game in multiplayer. This ban will not prevent players from playing offline and will not prevent players from playing their other Steam games.

I’m of two minds on this one. On the one hand, screw cheaters. It’s for the weak and I have no sympathy. On the other hand, I’m concerned this will be abused by unscrupulous developers. We’ve already seen incidents with game such as The War Z (now rebranded to Infestation: Survivor Stories), Day One: Garry’s Incident and The Slaughtering Grounds where the developers used any means they could to try to silence criticism of their games upto and including issuing bans on legitimate players. I’m not convinced that history won’t repeat itself with this arrangement, but time will tell.

What say you jurors? Excited about the developers have the power of ban? Or this too much power for one dev to have? Let us know in the comments.

For more news on this and other gaming related topics, keep Pixel Judge unbanned from your browser. This news is adjourned.