“The issue is, [Valve] isn’t going to remove The Witcher or Grand Theft Auto or anything like that from Steam [despite their sexual content],” says Rasmussen. “We’re the smallest kind of demographic without any kind of lobbying power. We can’t influence Valve to leave us alone.” While we still don’t (and may never) know exactly why Steam sent and then retracted those takedown notices, it has left many visual novel creators even less confident about what sexual content is acceptable on the platform, and more concerned that their work will unexpectedly be categorized as pornography. That’s going to hurt visual novel developers the most, but it’s going to make things worse for the vitality and diversity of gaming at large, too.
Being Dutch, America’s obsession with trying to curtail nudity, sex, and pornography, all the while allowing the most grotesque forms of brutal violence without so much as batting an eye, will never cease to amaze me. Steam is filled to the brim with overly violent video games with the most realistic rendering of gore, yet it’s the cartoon-style content with boobs everybody seems to stumble over.
It’s just sex. Nobody’s going to get scarred for life from seeing naked women and men, so stop obsessing over it, slap an 18+ label on it, and be done with it.
Seems you forgot the link…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17417790/steam-pornography-rules-g…
Neither The Witcher nor GTA have what could be called hardcore pornography. I respect Valve’s decision not to include such content, simply, it is bad for business. Visual novels cannot even be called games.
And because of snowflakes like you everybody else has to suffer.
Well done!
Thousands of other places you can go to for pornography, pumpkin pie. Not having it on steam shouldn’t make anyone suffer much.
Edited 2018-06-02 20:18 UTC
Most visual novels aren’t hardcore either, but have nudity scenes censored by Steam, still there is a tradition of having a content restoration patch linked in the highest rated comment.
Edited 2018-06-03 10:57 UTC
Check the dictionary, JRPG’s and visual novels absolutely fit the standard first definition of a ‘game’ (quoting direct from Merriam-Webster: ‘activity engaged in for diversion or amusement’). Just because there’s no mechanical skill involved (although this isn’t always the case) does not mean it isn’t a form of interactive entertainment.
Totally agree.
I am getting tired of the American violence industry exporting their stuff to Europe.
This reminds me of a forum comment I saw years ago…
“Wait – in that scene where he’s using a chainsaw on her and her two kids – is that a nipple? That’s going to be a problem…”
Also, it’s pretty much the only place in the western world that’s into ritualistic cutting of male genitalia, because reasons…
Makes it harder to masturbate, don’t want the kids to get hairy palms do we?
Maybe. But I suspect it’s related to what Thom said in what I quoted abovee – generally speaking, genital cutting is practiced by somewhat ~violent societies…
(and I remember something I LOLed at a long time ago – some artist posted on his blog a nude drawing of female fantasy characters; so only to be fair, he then made a nude picture of male fantasy characters, on which (correctly…) only the orc was circumcised …which resulted in plenty of comments from confused Americans wondering why is that, why such “civilised” thing would be practiced only by orcs
; thing is, it’s not civilised at all…)
> It’s just sex. Nobody’s going to get scarred for life from seeing naked women and men, so stop obsessing over it, slap an 18+ label on it, and be done with it.
that really depends on the type of sex being shown there.
there are some visual sex novels i’ve come across in my youth, that were downright disturbing or at least questionable in terms of sex presented there.
mistakes were made and i regret ever seeing those.
Edited 2018-06-02 17:15 UTC
Most of the Hentai games had patches to make them X-rated that was provided by the companies that made them. This was going to cause a problem in a lot of countries.
You can’t be this thick really Thom?
There couldn’t be an age rating on the game because there was well known patches that could circumvent that and was advertised by the devs … not some randos on the internet.
If you do a search of KEK (the nazi/white supremacist fake deity) on steam, your jaw will drop, but they don’t ban those accounts, at all, and their owners post insane things and Valve really doesn’t care.
Nudity and sex? Now that’s terrible to them apparently.
“Online interactions are not rated by the ESRB” and all that. Should be obvious to anyone with a brain