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[Dunki]

It looks like the Steam happy days are over for Anime like games with more lewd content. Just now a multiple of Developers of these games have received notes that they need to censor their games or they will face removal. One more well known one is Mangagamer and its LGBT VN Kindred Spirits.

It is with deep regret that today MangaGamer is forced to announce that they have received notice from Valve threatening to remove the popular title, Kindred Spirits on the Roof, from the Steam platform. This game has been largely celebrated in the LGBT community for genuine depictions of romantic relations between lesbian and sold on the Steam storefront without issue for over two years now. MangaGamer has cited to press that Valve's reason for threatening the delisting of this title is:

"We've discovered pornographic depictions in your product: Kindred Spirits on the Roof. This is a violation of our rules and guidelines for content that can be distributed on the Steam platform. We won’t be able the product on Steam as long as it includes pornographic depictions."

As many may remember, Kindred Spirits on the Roof received major attention as it signaled a positive shift in the gaming industry and the dawn of era where games with tasteful, mature romantic content could be found on the Steam platform alongside the excessive violence featured in many popular titles. This threat of removal represents a huge leap backward in the progress made for expressing sexuality in video games.

We went to great pains to run the game's content by Valve representatives––including sending along every potentially questionable graphical asset along with advanced builds of the title––to ensure that that feeling was mutual. The game would have never appeared on the platform if we had not confirmed with Valve representatives that they did not feel the content was pornographic and was appropriate for the platform."

http://blog.mangagamer.org/2018/05/18/regarding-recent-inquires-into-steam-content-policy-notices/

Further the Press Director stated this "

This is terrible news for everyone in the visual novel industry and the gaming industry as . We followed every guideline provided to us by Valve to the letter, so there is no reason for this title to be cut off when it has to the standards provided. The sexual content present in Kindred Spirits is no worse what can readily be found in titles like The Witcher series, yet those remain unaffected. When we launched Gahkthun of the Golden Lightning on Steam, we took it through the ESRB rating system because it featured content that was slightly more explicit than that of Kindred Spirits, and that passed review with a Mature rating, not AO.

It is dangerous for every small, indie development team when a major entity can just cut off the revenue streams they rely on like this, even after they have followed all proper procedures and conformed to the standards and guidelines provided by the retailer. Especially when no clear guidance or notice is provided when new standards are being implemented.

If this is more than just a major short-sighted error on Valve's end, it could be disastrous for visual novels and the advancements in expression within gaming made in recent years."

More English Developers Huniepot (Huniepop), Lupiesoft (Mutiny!), and more have publicly confirmed that they have received take-down threats for similar reasons.

Even more ridiculous is that games like GTAV and Witcher are totally fine but Anime and VN which sometimes even have better writing are not. This is a HUGE disaster for Japanese VN on Steam and I really hope Gabe Newell will overturn this decision like he did with Hatred.

EDIT: It seems there was not change in policy at Steam but for some reason they are mass flagging these kind of games right now. Maybe it is really some lunatic. It was a Lunatic

It looks like people found the cause of the mass flagging

BREAKING NEWS! Steam, the Walmart of online video game distribution, with over 35 million users who are children and teenagers, just contacted several videogame developers asking them to cover sexually graphic content in their games on Steam or face delisting. This sudden action by Valve, parent company of Steam, comes after a two-year aggressive campaign by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, including the listing of Steam on the 2018 Dirty Dozen List.

https://endsexualexploitation.org/a...exually-explicit-violent-videogames-platform/

 

[DeliciousDoc]

Fun police is on the prowl again. Guess they are done with kotaku.

 

[InterMusketeer]

Well that's a shame. I hope they reconsider their stance.

 

[B_Signal]

I've nothing against these games appearing on Steam, it's up to Valve I guess, and I've had a few shitty looking VNs appear on my suggestions because I played Doki Doki Literature Club that I'm really not interested in, but each to their own and I'm not going to take a shot at the people that want them

That said, trying to draw comparisons between something like Witcher 3 and (for example) some block puzzle game where the women get naked as a reward is disingenuous. There's a difference between nudity and porn, it's hard to quantify sure, but we all know there is a difference.

But like I said, I don't really have a problem with either being available on steam. And I'm not saying any of the games mentioned are porn, I've not played them to say

 

[OH-MyCar]

Steam continues to have the worst customer support in the business (do they even technically have customer support?) yet all of the "work" I see is always towards silly things like this. Getting rid of anime boobs and shovelware you're not required to buy is somehow always more important for consumer protection. Have account problems? Lol deal with it.

 

[Dunki]

I've nothing against these games appearing on Steam, it's up to Valve I guess, and I've had a few shitty looking VNs appear on my suggestions because I played Doki Doki Literature Club that I'm really not interested in, but each to their own and I'm not going to take a shot at the people that want them

That said, trying to draw comparisons between something like Witcher 3 and (for example) some block puzzle game where the women get naked as a reward is disingenuous. There's a difference between nudity and porn, it's hard to quantify sure, but we all know there is a difference.

But like I said, I don't really have a problem with either being available on steam

In the Witcher you also have sex and in Witcher 1 you got cards as a reward as well. VN have some kind of scenes but they are still images nothing else. I do not see a big difference to movies in which many also cross the line between nudity and porn and which are still considered art. Like Monsters Ball for example. Also it is for games that were cleared years ago. In the case of munity they even went to Valve to clear it and now they have two 2 weeks to censor their games.

I really hope Gabe will overturn this decision with enough outrage like with Hatred. My guess is that some asshole employee tried to play boss at Valve again.

 

[Strife In a Teacup]

But like I said, I don't really have a problem with either being available on steam

Neither do I. My problem with Steam right now is all the shovelware. Looking at the upcoming games list is some serious...I don't even know.

Plus the sales have been lackluster for years.

This just seems misguided.

 

[PixyJunket]

Brutally Murdering Humans = Awesome! Let's make money from this!!

A Woman's Bare Breast = BAD EVIL BAN THIS SICK FILTH AND MARK EVERYONE THAT LIKES IT.

 

[Kenpachii]

That comparison picture and comparing Kindred Spirits towards witcher 3 is just ridiculous.

These pedo's are sexualizing kids and tag some garbage story towards it in order for them to not been straight up accused for being pedo's.

They got away with it for so long is beyond me. All of those games need to be removed from stream and the creators need to be permanently banned from it.

Steam should be slammed hard by the EU for this also.

Zero tolerance for this garbage

 

[Dunki]

That comparison picture and comparing Kindred Spirits towards witcher 3 is just ridiculous.

These pedo's are sexualizing kids and tag some garbage story towards it in order for them to not been straight up accused for being pedo's.

They got away with it for so long is beyond me. All of those games need to be removed from stream and the creators need to be permanently banned from it.

Steam should be slammed hard by the EU for this also.

Zero tolerance for this garbage

Even if you want to go against these kind of games i still makes no sense that even games like Huniepop are threaten by it. It is on sales for years was on sales awards as well and they never had a problem with it. Also games that has been hit do not have your so called pedophile content as well. Are there some in there? Yes no doubt but this hits EVERYONE despite your claim.

 

[Masatshi]

I don't get the Americas.... blowing someones head off with an AK showing brains and guts flying is fine but sex - the most wonderful and natural thing in the world - is not ok! .... the lulz!

 

[Zog]

I don't get the Americas.... blowing someones head off with an AK showing brains and guts flying is fine but sex - the most wonderful and natural thing in the world - is not ok! .... the lulz!

Well, brains and guts are natural too.

Anyway, everyone's savior (Valve) is becoming more PC all the time.

 

[Zaffo]

I dont care about the adult content, to each his own i guess, what really annoys me are those really low quality VNs with high school level anime art, bloating my search every time i sort by user reviews.
I get it guys at some point if you pick the right line the anime lady shows you some badly draw boobs, but come on i'm trying to look at games on sale over here.

Leave the porn games be, but give me some better filters.

 

[Dunki]

I dont care about the adult content, to each his own i guess, what really annoys me are those really low quality VNs with high school level anime art, bloating my search every time i sort by user reviews.
I get it guys at some point if you pick the right line the anime lady shows you some badly draw boobs, but come on i'm trying to look at games on sale over here.

Leave the porn games be, but give me some better filters.

You can filter out 3 tags for this already. Just use the filter function?^^

 

[Zaffo]

You can filter out 3 tags for this already. Just use the filter function?^^

It's a hit and miss kind of process, wouldn't want filter out jrpgs or actual decent VNs, it's those cheap, badly drawn, VNs that somehow manage to get overwhelmingly positive reviews by virtue of having a couple lude pictures in the package, that i dont want in my search results.

 

[Dunki]

It's a hit and miss kind of process, wouldn't want filter out jrpgs or actual decent VNs, it's those cheap, badly drawn, VNs that somehow manage to get overwhelmingly positive reviews by virtue of having a couple lude pictures in the package, that i dont want in my search results.

Then you should maybe still filter and try to get recommendations from other places to visit the store page manually.

Recomendation: The Grisaia Trilogy which is currently 40% off

 

[Two Pikachus]

Well, brains and guts are natural too.

Anyway, everyone's savior (Valve) is becoming more PC all the time.

Censorship of nudity and sex for lewd reasons is not a PC thing. PC culture supports sex-positivity. Sexual censorship because it's sex is a conservative 'think of the children' thing.

People you might consider to be part of the 'PC crowd' want to censor sex when they consider it to objectify women. That is wholly different from wanting to censor sex because it's sex.

For the record, they're both awful occurrences.

 

[jshackles]

Valve still seems to be struggling to find it's place - incidentally a lot of companies like Valve typically go through growing pains like this albeit earlier on in their lifespans. So at the very least, Valve has allowed this kind of stuff to exist on their store for longer than most especially considering how big their platform is.

I've been saying this for years, but this sort of thing really comes down to them not having any sort of age verification in place to handle this type of content. D Dunki mentioned filters that users can put in place, but these filters are wildly ineffective in filtering this stuff from the store. Combined together (proper age verification, proper filters) I could see this sort of content staying on Steam without any issues. As it is, Valve is assessing their risk in being hit with potential legal issues as ultra-conservative parents might accidentally expose their children to these sorts of games and try to hold Valve legally liable. They're also doing risk assessment on whether or not they want to lose "that kind of customer" for good if something like that were to happen.

But there are a few false arguments in this thread already, and I'd like to refute those. 1) "This game's been on Steam for two years, so why is it just now a problem?" - just because something has been up for sale for a while doesn't mean it's immune to changes in Valve's policy. And Valve is free to change their policy any time they want. Hell, they could decide to just throw everything in the dumpster and go back to just selling Valve games again if they wanted to. 2) "How come games like GTA and The Witcher get a pass even though they're more lewd then Doki Anime Senpei Panty Adventures?" - it seems painfully obvious that the primary goal of most of these games is to see naked women / 1000-year old dragons in human bodies. GTA gets a pass because it's not a game about sex - it's a game about violence, theft, and the Tony Soprano lifestyle which is typically A-OK in American culture. I see OP's picture of Hunny Pop and it's clear that the goal is to titillate, and that's about it. I've seen R rated movies with more nudity and sex in them than some pornos - it doesn't mean that all porn should be available at my local Walmart store next to Bluray copies of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, does it?

 

[Spheyr]

Valve buys SJW developer, suddenly goes on SJW rampage, who knew

 

[Bwesh]

What the hell is happening to Valve? Next they'll censor words and Pepe in Dota streams ala Overwatch.

 

[Manus]

Lol really? We can mass murder people that's fine in games. But anime tits and ass that's a no go?

 

[Dunki]

Another one I have not played the game so I can not say that much about it but the most lewd stuff I have seen from it through google did not even had nudity.

 

[-MD-]

So really it's just all the big titty anime games? Zero cares here but they could just change it so they can't show all the T&A on the store pages and put an adult label on them or something instead of censoring the games themselves.

 

[MayauMiao]

Wish these anime titty decs can form their own Steam like service. Valve is really going SJW.

 

[Dunki]

Wish these anime titty decs can form their own Steam like service. Valve is really going SJW.

They have like Mangagamer and Fakku but it has not such a huge potential customer base. IT is like saying if you do not like Facebook make your own. The sales loss will be huge and it will not help with censoring their games because these people especially watch out for ANY censorship.

 

[kunonabi]

Good thing I rarely use steam. Might just finish up that clock tower successor and delete my account.

 

[Strazyplus]

"If a game has anything remotely sexual, even sexual jokes, then Steam has threatened removal"

I think that is extremely exaggerated.

 

[Hoya Destroyer]

I just hope a compromise can be reached, where customers can get uncensored content for games bought on Steam, via off-site patches. I think Agony is doing this.

 

[Phoenix RISING]

Outrage culture.

Nobody cares about these stupid anime games.

Agony will be released by the end of the month, and will have the nudity patched in. Console

Spoiler

plebs

won't have nudity at all.

If you want to raise hell, pun intended, you might have a case for your nipple-less succubus.

 

[BANGS]

WTF, these aren't even AO rated games... it's just tits and stuff...

 

[Dunki]

next one Karmasuta by Top Hat Studios

this seems to be quite correct

Nobody cares about these stupid anime games.

great thinking about censorship. You do not have to like the games but to support this just because you do not care is pretty weak. Kind of like this.

"Nobody cares about these stupid gay people so I do not care"

Also since this is new Agony could face the same example if they do not only target Anime games as well. These are mostly games of which developer actually went to steam to get clearance and it hits them like anyone else. Even if the game was just accepted by Valve

 

[hikarutilmitt]

Outrage culture.

Nobody cares about these stupid anime games.

Agony will be released by the end of the month, and will have the nudity patched in. Console

Spoiler

plebs

won't have nudity at all.

If you want to raise hell, pun intended, you might have a case for your nipple-less succubus.

Are you kidding me with that giant image?

 

[LOLCats]

Are you kidding me with that giant image?

What are you dial up?

 

[hikarutilmitt]

What are you dial up?

No, but I dunno if I care to see a giant image of a female demon with bare chest and nipples in my office.

 

[pretty done]

If TW3 and GTA5 were showing underage girls I'm sure they'd be removed too

 

[Dunki]

If TW3 and GTA5 were showing underage girls I'm sure they'd be removed too

It is not about this isue as I said before. There are games on this purge that have no underaged or underaged like girls in there.

 

[RokkanStoned]

If TW3 and GTA5 were showing underage girls I'm sure they'd be removed too

It's not about that. HuniePop only has adults and it makes it pretty clear. If it only happens to these japanese-style games, and not western games like The Witcher and GTA, I'd say you can argue that Steam is currently engaging in digital western-cultural imperialism. If they only view western games as passing, that would most certainly be a thing to rally against them on the basis of, as it would be a display of cultural bias.

Things like these just makes me really open to a Steam competitor. The problem is that most competitors have glaring flaws, leading Steam to be the best option in most cases. Then again, things like this just adds to the reasons to choose something else than Steam and further makes on cautious in regards to what Steam might choose to do with other games in the future.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

It's not about that. HuniePop only has adults and it makes it pretty clear. If it only happens to these japanese-style games, and not western games like The Witcher and GTA, I'd say you can argue that Steam is currently engaging in digital western-cultural imperialism. If they only view western games as passing, that would most certainly be a thing to rally against them on the basis of, as it would be a display of cultural bias.

Things like these just makes me really open to a Steam competitor. The problem is that most competitors have glaring flaws, leading Steam to be the best option in most cases. Then again, things like this just adds to the reasons to choose something else than Steam and further makes on cautious in regards to what Steam might choose to do with other games in the future.

This is the main issue I see with it. IIRC no games on Steam (as they come) are actually pornographic and some feature nudity. Obviously the games with clearly underage characters shouldn't be there, but from what I've seen most of the games being talked about already aren't like this. Heck, there are a whole lot of Japanese VNs that have nudity normally but no actual or implied sex and they still get censored when brought to Steam for some reason. It's like somehow drawn nudity is more taboo than polygons.

 

[Kadayi]

Things like these just makes me really open to a Steam competitor. The problem is that most competitors have glaring flaws, leading Steam to be the best option in most cases. Then again, things like this just adds to the reasons to choose something else than Steam and further makes on cautious in regards to what Steam might choose to do with other games in the future.

Valve have a monopoly at present, but I could easily Amazon coming in one day and just eating their lunch if Jeff Bezos was so inclined.

 

[Soodanim]

Ugh, "Option to murder strippers". That sounds like something Jack Thompson would say. You have the option to murder pretty much anyone in GTA5, and we all know you can. To single out strippers hurts your point more than it helps.

 

[TaroYamada]

Can we get a NSFW tag in the title bros?

 

[KiteGr]

How nice of Steam to offer incentives for other platforms to offer games on PC...

 

[Dunki]

I think its great how people stick together about censorship. Many developers also big ones in this genre talking about it already.



Not everything is lost

Also:

I’ve updated this title to reflect new information I was given. I guess there was no policy change, Steam just decided to mass flag content for whatever reason.

http://operationrainfall.com/2018/05/18/mangagamers-kindred-spirits-steams/

So they did not even change their policy it is some kind of mass flagging maybe some lunatic.

 

[DryvBy]

I don't like censorship but I wish VNs weren't on Steam at all. To call them games is a stretch. That would be like calling Depression Quest a game.

 

[KonradLaw]

Seems the way to do it is just censor the hell out of those games and then provide restoration patches offsite.

 

[Dunki]

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM It looks like people found the cause of the mass flagging

BREAKING NEWS! Steam, the Walmart of online video game distribution, with over 35 million users who are children and teenagers, just contacted several videogame developers asking them to cover sexually graphic content in their games on Steam or face delisting. This sudden action by Valve, parent company of Steam, comes after a two-year aggressive campaign by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, including the listing of Steam on the 2018 Dirty Dozen List.

https://endsexualexploitation.org/a...exually-explicit-violent-videogames-platform/

 

[TheShadowLord]

I just hope a compromise can be reached, where customers can get uncensored content for games bought on Steam, via off-site patches. I think Agony is doing this.

i am not sure where you can find common ground. Other than using a credit card to get access to such content

 

[synce]

I assume after these lunatics are done with their anti-sex crusade they're going to start flagging all the violent games as well? I mean why stop at sex? Videogames must be the root of all evil.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM It looks like people found the cause of the mass flagging








https://endsexualexploitation.org/a...exually-explicit-violent-videogames-platform/

Oh FFS, why is this a thing...

 

[michaelius]

Is there any way of sendind feedback to Gaben?