Steam is one of the most respected and beloved gaming services in the world. After all, it’s a place where you can get a large plethora of games and titles on your PC, and it helps indie developers reach a potentially vast audience for a somewhat low cost. As long as your game meets certain requirements (i.e. effort taken to make a game and such), you’ll be in and allowed to live your gaming life in peace. However, that process has apparently changed for some developers.
This started with the developer HunieDev, who is infamous/famous for its NSFW game HuniePop. On Twitter, the dev posted this:
I’ve received an e-mail from Valve stating that HuniePop violates the rules & guidelines for pornographic content on Steam and will be removed from the store unless the game is updated to remove said content.
Following this, several other game devs with similar titles and “appeals” got the same notice. Censor your game, or get taken down.
Now, on the surface, this may seem fine. After all, they’re clearly only going after NSFW games, right? Well, that’s the problem though, they aren’t. They seem to be targeting specific games, and as noted by many who have actually played these titles. While they are NSFW, they only go as far as nudity, not the other accusations that’s been hurled at them.
This is a problem, as many, MANY other titles that aren’t of the visual novel style (which the two games above were) have nudity and much more “visual’ elements. Including, but not limited to: Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, certain Grand Theft Auto games, and more. So why aren’t those games getting censored and threatened to be taken down?
Adding to the curiosity, an equally NSFW visual novel called Ladykiller in a Bind, which features BDSM, has not received a notice at all about getting taken down.
The question of equality is being raised here, and while an unusual circumstance this most certainly is, you can’t deny that they have a point. If you do it for some, you have to do it for all.
