I'm still not 100% trusting that. Any time a dev comes up with a new feature like this one, they might forget to implement a check if the game is privated (or do the check and mess up properly hiding it).
Exactly. This is like someone I knew who was a CSR blowing off steam at difficult customers by hitting mute and cussing them out. Like you realize that mechanisms fail all the time, right? This dude wouldn't entertain the idea that a mute button could fail. I tried.
I did that when I worked customer support. The only way I could retain the little bit of sanity I had left. But to be honest, we were so understaffed that even if I slipped, they wouldn't have fired me. There was one guy who was so angry with a customer that he wrote their number down, and then over his break called the customer with his private phone to argue with them. Still didn't get fired, lol.
Lol holy shit. I'm sure it's a very frustrating job at times. This guy was a parent and needed his job. I don't think they would've had all that much trouble replacing him
I worked briefly as a CSR and during training they made a point of telling us that people had been fired because of doing exactly that when the mute button failed. That was over a decade ago, but I wouldn’t expect increased reliability today.
More recently, a friend who is a CSR told me that their software mute buttons only prevent the audio from going to the customer, but it’s still recorded and can be grounds for termination if the call was audited. I introduced her to a microphone with a physical mute button but made sure she knew that it could also fail (or most likely, that she might be using a different connected mic, in case the hardware mute would do nothing).
Office conferencing software also has a really bad record with their software mutes. I’ve had experiences with Teams, Zoom, and Webex where I’ve clicked mute, but wasn’t muted.
The mute button should be thought of as a feature for the person on the other line / the other people on the call - you’re reducing the noise so the focus can be on the conversation - not as a feature for your privacy. You can treat Private Games similarly - it’s so you don’t subject your friends to the thought of you playing sexually themed games, not so you’re guaranteed to be saved the embarrassment of people knowing that you’re playing them.
I keep seeing people talking about sexual games on steam. I've yet to see one. I'm sure they exist .. but how common are they? Do people actually play those? Even if I wanted to do so, I would instantly assume because it's on steam there's a chance my friends could see me playing it no matter my settings, and that would be a no-go. It's just awkward.
It'd be like jerking off with the shades open because "well no one is supposed to be in my backyard". Okay but what if some kids are there to get their ball or something? You have to assume unexpected things will happen in life.
Your preferences are probably set to not display games with nudity and sexual themes. They give quite a bit of fine tuned control over this, actually - you can limit only nudity, or only sexual themes, or only outright pornographic games.
For my part, even when I enabled all content, they would only show at most a couple NSFW games throughout the entire front page, but it probably suggests more if you buy them (just like how I got innundated with suggestions of card games after buying Slay The Spire, bleh)