These days, anything goes on Steam, but not anything anything. If games are "illegal, or straight up trolling," Valve says it'll send them packing. In the past, that's meant low-effort games with titles like Big Dick and MILF, achievement spam, and certain sex games.
Now, according to some developers, Valve is going after games that feature themes of "child exploitation," which it seems to define, at least in part, as games with sex scenes or nudity where the characters are in high school.
Over the past few weeks, the company has removed the store pages of several visual novels, including cross-dressing yaoi romance Cross Love, catholic school adult visual novel Hello Goodbye, "story about the love between siblings" (yuck) Imolicious, and cat girl game MaoMao Discovery Team. The developers of these games all claim to have received similar emails stating that their games could not be released on Steam.
"While we can ship most titles on Steam, we found that this one does feature themes of child exploitation," read the email received by Top Hat Studios, makers of Cross Love. "Because of that, the app has been banned and cannot be reused."
There are a couple ties that bind the games in question: 1) Cross Love, Hello Goodbye, and Imolicious feature school settings, and 2) all four of the aforementioned games contain adult elements and center around anime-styled characters who appear young—in some cases uncomfortably so. However, their developers have taken to protesting the bans on social media, saying that their games have been misunderstood. They all claim they've reached out to Valve since receiving their bans, only to be met with silence.
Cross Love's developers say they've taken great pains to ensure that their game demonstrates, on multiple occasions, that its students are of age. This includes scenes where they peruse 18+ manga and are ID-ed before being allowed into an adult bookstore.
"These scenes aren't there to be artificially shoehorned in, and while they do exist as further proof of characters' ages (beyond the disclaimer in the beginning that explicitly states them as being 18), the real reason they're there is to further many of the themes in the story," said developer Top Hat to Kotaku in a Twitter DM, pointing out that it's tried to contact Valve with this information six separate times, to no avail. "A large chunk of the story is about accepting who you are, being comfortable with yourself, and altogether similar themes within a type of coming of age-style love story, which isn't really seen in most yaoi games."
Which brings us to the heart of the matter: It's Valve's store, and what it says goes. If someone at Valve decides characters look too young, then they're too young. Top Hat, however, believes there's a double standard at play here, not unlike the one some developers felt they'd fallen victim tobefore Valve officially allowed uncensored sex games on Steam. Other games that feature young-looking characters, school settings, and romantic/sexual themes, like Nekopara Extra, Sakura Sakura, A Piece Of Wish Upon The Stars, and Material Girl, are all still on Steam, Top Hat pointed out.
"Steam is a major service, and we had hundreds of players looking forward to buying the game there upon release," Top Hat said. "The game had wishlists in the thousands, and the community group had several hundred people in it. This is a very large userbase to lose out on, and it hurts us pretty bad. It's not world ending, but it is quite the end of the year blow."
Much more at the link.
https://kotaku.com/steam-is-banning...m_source=Kotaku_Twitter&utm_medium=Socialflow
