I personally always find it weird that killing hundreds of people is okay but nudity requires scrutiny.
That being said this derives from stripe threatening Valve in the near past (which is why their previous games didn’t face this scrutiny). This is a known thing that any game developer, especially one developing mature content, should know. And the content in that game is definitely mature, if the screenshots of the game were shared without context I would think it’s one of those sex simulators, which I get this is not and those are just small parts of the bigger picture of the game, but that’s just like saying “this chocolate bar shouldn’t need to be classified as containing peanuts, it only has 1 peanut”.
I personally always find it weird that killing hundreds of people is okay but nudity requires scrutiny.
Just Christian moral panic and puritanism, which has fucked us up mentally and psychologically for centuries now.
Rather than put us against invented enemies, I like to think a lot of Christians actually don’t care much about these subjects, and that the push specifically comes from Christofascism (rich people without a soul in their body using religion as a weapon to restrict and control people)
Which is weird because “thou shall not kill” comes before adultery in the commandments, and go forth and procreate is also somewhere in that book.
I didn’t say it made sense.
If the problematic content isn’t crucial part of the game, they can try to go for the “official 18+ patch” like some VN re-releases, which would be like adding a peanut in a separate box
Absolutely, have the game without it and a free (or with a stupid price like 10 cents just to ensure legal age requirements) DLC that’s parked as adult only. But I think in this case it might be too engrained to the core of what the game is, that they can’t, and if that’s the case it makes sense to mark the entire game as adult IMO
Meanwhile, there are “all-ages” anime visual-novel games on steam with official patches hosted by the developers off-site which turn them into full-on pornos - which is the version of the game they are actually trying to sell and what people are buying it for.
And not a peep from Valve on that because it’s off-site.
Must be very frustrating to developers of mainline games that by being honest and engaging with valve openly, they face far more hassle than groups who designed their game specifically to circumvent the rules.
Steam is OK with porn games. Banks are not. Banks have the power. Steam has to not get debanked.
I fully expect to have to download a patch from the dev when buying a porn game because of the censorship. If its not on Steam or a few other trusted platforms I won’t bother paying.
The user adding the “optional” content after purchase make it not Steams problem while getting past bank censorship.
Stupid question - since I have adult mode turned on in Steam, I get weird hentai games like “Slut Goblin” and “Big Tiddy Blackjack”.
I’m guessing the games they’re promoting are not adult games, but include sex, which is what’s causing a issue? They want their game to not be behind that setting?
Is it possible to create a Adult mod or “Directors Mod” to bypass it? Something that a player can choose to get it if they want the more explicit scenes?
Yeah, but it makes it a double edged sword. Why can Cyberpunk, which has a ton of sexual content, be a front page game while this, which is far more tame need to be locked behind the adult section?
Because the latter doesn’t have a massive team of lawyers available to sue over it.
Unless your game actually has adult content (and lots of it!) you don’t want it hiding behind some adults-only flag where few people will see it.
Basically a death sentence for your game.
The issue is that they don’t want the game to be flagged:
If the game remains flagged this way, it will “have very serious implications on its accessibility and visibility,” says Pedercini.
They should’ve sold the game on JAST or DLSite. They find sexual content to be perfectly satisfactory.
it’s about market access.
you wouldn’t make a product and go sell it at the local bait shop, you would try to sell it through Walmart for maximum market saturation.
everyone who you want to sell a game to has a steam account, but only 40-70% of them have JAST or DLSite access.
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If Walmart hates you and won’t let you sell with them, then you had might as well sell at a local shop anyway to get some return on investment, yeah?
ok.
It’s shocking that a commercial game developer didn’t consider this possibility at all. The article’s complaints about capitalism and the identity of the artist feel more like trapped in a box instead of thinking.
They probably thought since it’s nowhere near the level of some games that were allowed to go without the tag, they probably didn’t need to worry about it.
