Well, that would be the ideal state of affairs IMO. Steam is not a platform to release porn games and 18+ visual novels. I'm not surprised at all they refused to publish Starnova as it stands now - it's meant to be an edgy, weeb-pandering porn game involving idols, lol.Ĭomplaining about this in general - especially as a developer - is just silly. It's plain hypocrisy and I'm honestly fed up with it. Adult visual novels could easily have more value to them, but so far most devs constantly prove otherwise through their own actions. Guess what - vast majority of 18+ vns don't have that - it's either porn or fan service for the heck of it, despite what community thinks. The non-steam patches are only a half-assed grey zone band aid to circumvent the inconvenience, Steam never really approved.Īt the same time, Steam is ready to actually allow sexual content in vns, providing it has either artistic or intellectual merit. Steam doesn't allow porn, simple as that. There's both Fakku and Nutaku available as well. If they need porn that badly, maybe they should change their market. VN devs finally need to stop abusing Steam.You're not limited to Steam as a release platform.The Rapelay incident was one of them, but Maitetsu has the possibility of being an even worse threat to the community, because lolicon is the one non-violent Japanese fetish that could cause the authorities to move against VN localization companies. When that happens, you suddenly see entire otaku sites go down, DDOS attacks on anything related to VNs, etc. The thing that most people who are new to the community don't understand, not having lived through that period of time, is that periodically, some Japanese eroge catches the attention of someone in the mass media for extreme objectionable content. The contrast with how actually inoffensive the games they blocked are would be quite hilarious if it wasn't depressing. I guess that's one time we should be seriously thankful for how the internet information bubbles work. If it didn't happen already, it might never do though. People often post porn CGs in the Steam community etc., it takes one idiot or one crusader to make it into a disaster.

Yeah, the fact they didn't at least decide to make the Steam version exclusively all-ages is scary. Then they can go back to not caring what people what people upload on their storefront - that way they'll at least not actively screw over decent developers. It seems that SolPress' Newrin is in the same situation, although that company didn't invest their last two year into this one project and can probably live with an indefinite delay.Īll in all, Valve is a f***** shitty company as always, I at least hope they won't wait another year to implement those filtering tools and that they'll actually make them useful. I guess long, because the tools will most likely go live as beta feature and stay like that for a while before they're fully implemented. The tools might arrive next week, or next year and devs that put the work and marketing towards their releases this summer might get stuck in limbo for who-knows-how-long. The problem is, they don't give even an approximate of when that might be. After a month of keeping the release build in review (SSS was made by Sunrider's developers, Love in Space and is published by Sekai), Valve said that it will not let the game on the platform (even though it seems to have a proper all-ages version and an adult patch, just like Maitetsu, released at the same time by the same publisher) until their new filtering tool, basically the way to make the waifu games invisible for those that are scared of them, are implemented.

This is something I've posted on Reddit earlier, but I thought I might as well spread the awareness of Valve's BS here too.

Let's not play rapelay