So according to Twitter, Valve is apparently yanking 100% content-compliant non-pornographic visual novels from sale on steam because they now suddenly are violating the content guidelines. Needless to say indie visual novel devs are highly distressed. Story is still developing

UPDATE:

UPDATE 2: In related news, two of the publishers whose games where threatened have now announced they are bringing their catalogs to GOG.

I dunno how this could be shocking to anyone really. I don't remember the last time Valve made a good decision regarding Steam and it's practices. It's been all downhill for quite some time now.

I mean I feel like there are a lot of badly disguised porn games on Steam but once again Valve has chosen a 'solution' that is ages too late and needlessly heavy handed.

Well that's a shame. It took that kind of stuff for Visual Novels to get a foothold on Steam. Without the more risque stuff we probably wouldn't have gotten completely tame amazing games like Clannad and Root Double.

I'm gonna post my extremely spicy take and say: and nothing of value was lost.

My gift giving game has never been stronger and now Steam turns around and spits in my face.

Yeah theyre compliant but cant people go to their website and get the non compliant patch?

My point being, thats kind of a shady loophole.

Sure but that's been going on the whole time and the product they sell on Steam itself is censored for the platform.

Set these guidelines up in the first place if you want this kinda stuff out completely.

Couldn't care less about what happens to the visual novels.

...The ones with actual gameplay on the other hand...

mah dream daddies!!!! :'(

oh man, how will people get their hentai now?!

i do wonder though if there's ever a game that has explicit sexual content but isn't itself a pornographic game, if that would fly on Steam and on consoles.

I’ve been on this planet nearly 40 years. I’ve never understood cartoon porn and have always been pretty disturbed by the whole furry / anthropomorphic thing.

This all especially puzzles me given that porn is inescapable and hook-up apps are everywhere in this day and age.

But hey, if you want to play a match three game while ogling fictional, underage, cartoon cat-girls, just do it far, far away from me.

I hope shit like this keeps happening to spur people, consumers and developers both, to stop being so reliant on Steam. It's largely a good service, I know, but incidents like this...I mean...Valve can do whatever the fuck they want. They're gonna lose what amounts to some spare change for them if they cut these games, whoop-de-fucking-do, but it's not like anyone is gonna boycott them or jump ship anyway because how the fuck can you when they're the only place to get most of the games they sell?

Don't get me wrong, this is hardly the end of the world and personally, I couldn't give a shit about these game. Also, I'm absolutely not giving Valve a pass just in case that wasn't clear. My point is just that Steam essentially has a monopoly on the PC market, soooo... so what? fans are gonna get mad, post to reddit, twitter, and youtube, but so what? Valve doesn't have to give a shit.

This is the future we all chose!

With the anount of absolute shit from various genres already on Steam I wonder what spurred them to suddenly do this.

Weird timing considering House Party of all things was on the front page just 24 hours ago.

Sucks for the devs.

Aw, cmon. Where did this even come from this time. It was refreshing when Steam allowed these games to begin with (although censored) and now they go back on it? Just let people have their stuff! Anyone who went to a website to get the patches are still going to find a way somewhere else, this isn't actually stopping people, it's just making it harder on these niche devs to get their games legally sold instead of pirated.

If Valve is worried about floating sexual games to minors or in general, they can just change the front page algorithm to exclude the tags and make an opt-in 18+ section....

It takes this long for Valve to start giving a shit about the content on their service again, and they decide that softcore porn Visual Novels are the games worth going after. What am I supposed to ironically gift people now?

I have less than no interest in these games, and it is thier store so they can do what they want. But man, fuck Valve.

@theht: How are you defining "explicit"? Because, for instance, Tender Loving Care, with its FMV late night cinemax-level sex scenes complete with female nipples, is up on Steam. But I wouldn't call that game pornographic.

I played some of those "Hunie" games there ok. But still "Anime is for jerk's".

I mean, the supposed pornographic element of Hunie Pop is maybe the least worrisome part of that game.

As always, the violence and gore present in just about every game on steam is fine, but as soon as there's mention of anything sexual it's the devil's work...funny work we live in.

I'm not a lawyer, but I have to imagine that this has less to do with Valve acting as some self-appointed moral arbiter and more customer complaints from concerned parents or maybe even threats of legal action. It's much easier and more reasonable to expect Valve to paint with a broad brush on sensitive content than for them to have some kind of content expert to hold every game carefully to the light to see what's okay and what isn't.

I can see why they would do this, but I wish they would prioritize removing the actual scams over something like this. They already have age gates for those games, don't they?

@ataxia: So, porn films often have stories. They’re garbage stories, but they’re there, even though everyone is there for the porn.

Is it fair to say that something like Huniepop has game mechanics, but they’re garbage mechanics and everyone is there for pictures of naked cartoon ladies? To soften it from porn (I really have no idea how far these games go...I assume far), is it basically a Cinemax late night movie in cartoon/game form?

I guess I can see where Valve is coming from if what’s probably describable as smut is burning up the charts and taking room on the front page.

Cinemax doesn’t advertise their light night stuff. It’s there, but they want the focus on more openly mass-market stuff. They want you to know they have Fast and the Furious or Transformers or whatever, not Busty Cops 2 (which is real and the name always makes me laugh).

It seems like Valve is picking the wrong battles. There are thousands of shit games that are asset theft money grabs and odd Russian trading card scam generators that Valve is slow to act on. More people are complaining about these things than any maybe hentai game but its like the powers that be don't want to put in the work to go after the main threat to their store front. Yeah they might get rid of one or two devs who fake reviews or have been proven to be scammers and thieves but it seems like they are few and far in between that them deciding "anime girl might be hentai" just makes the company look stupid.

At least Achievement Hunter 53 is still available. Gotta get those cheevos and sell those cards. P.S. Sex is bad.

Someone should make the "Steam for visual novels".

Back to itch.io with you, perverts!

This is dumb. I'm trying to run through the reason they would make this move. If you don't want the front page spammed with VNs and such then figure out a better solution. Maybe do something about the actual scam games first. Put a better age gate in front of this stuff.

I don't know, makes me wonder if something else is coming around the corner and this is working up to that.

Hopefully it affects the ones that need to be taken off, the whole loophole of downloading a patch outside of steam is shitty.

They are not my thing but I don't get wiping them out. You can cut up, strangle, shoot, blow up, and eat people in dozens of other games, hell you can genocide and end entire civilizations of people, but don't fuck em, that is just too far I guess.

Fine with me, as long as they make sure all the asset flippers and barely functioning games go along with them.

@andythemez: I like how your two cents is backed up by absolutely zero knowledge of these games and just seems to assume they're all child porn (like... what?). One interesting thing about games that are 99% text, is that you tend to have to tell at least an okay story or the entire point of your visual novel is screwed. I don't play many of these games, but I have no reason to say people are lying when they say a VN has an excellent story. Look at most of the trash-ass stories in games in general. Most recent VN I've played was Doki Doki Literature Club, and that affected me WAY more than any "real" game I can think of recently. Alternatively, if you don't have a great story, you have to have some interesting gameplay hook (which brings me to HuniePop).

Edit: You're also talking about this on a site where Jeff has done multiple creeper cam videos playing those terrible looking Gal Gun games. I bet those devs aren't getting this email from Valve, even when it sells a US$90 dlc item to make it so you can instantly see the girls underwear.

So HuniePop is actually a really great match 3 style game. It's basically a Puzzle Quest sort of game, but with the dating game there to lead the progression versus whatever story they throw into Puzzle Quest X.

Good

Why are people in here acting as if they are removing visual novels, instead of just ones that violate the cartoon porn one.

On behalf of everyone at Giant Bomb I'd like to thank you for your detailed addition to this discussion.

Because they ARE going after games that were totally allowed up until this very moment.

There are games that have made it onto Steam that are deeply troubling, but once again Valve has forgone any sense of nuance to an issue and instead someone is just opening a door and screaming to get all these anime titties outta here.

In a lot of cases these developers have been in contact with people at Valve to make sure their game content is okay prior to releasing. Lots of the translated from Japanese games are already self-censored so they CAN appear on Steam, and until now the word from Valve has been that what they have is fine. In some cases these games have meant developers can make more/other games. HuniePop is a great example of that, with the studio working on two other games at the moment. And as much as I hate to say it, this probably wouldn't have been possible without Steam because realistically you NEED your game to be on Steam to make money.

Edit: And I think to a lot of us it seems like crap that they haven't told people what they need to change to make their games alright again. It also seems like kind of the wrong target to clamp (pun intended) down on when their store is littered with garbage asset flips and achievement/card spam games.

In concept, I'm more than fine with Steam getting rid of the HuniePop games and any other games where the content amounts to nothing but a thinly veiled excuse for their audience to look at naked / highly sexualized anime girls. In reality, I don't trust Valve to handle this well at all because they always take the quickest, laziest route to solving all their problems, often only making things worse in the long run if any difference is made at all.

I don't trust them to be able to draw a line between nudity and blatant pornography. I don't trust them to not accidentally take down completely unrelated games. I don't trust them to moderate new releases because they very, very clearly do not do that. I don't trust them to be proactive about taking down less popular games which violate these same guidelines. Last of all, I don't trust them to want to moderate most pornographic games because the "Popular New Releases" tab makes it clear that such games often rake in cash.

In short, I'm all for the concept of Valve putting more restrictions on what they allow on their service, but I do not for a second believe that they'll enforce these rules all that often nor do I believe that they'll enforce them correctly.

Valve as a company seems to hate putting any time, effort, and especially money towards self-moderating their service, so this will likely all amount to a bit of moral grandstanding, a few slapped wrists, maybe one sacrificial lamb, and then almost completely unbroken silence on the matter going forward.

@vamino: Okay...I’m not going to pretend to be knowledgable about what makes a great match three game either.

I’m just ignorant enough that explaining these to me will be challenging.

All I know is the stuff that pops-up in an image search gets dicey. That said, a search for Overwatch images quickly gets dicey, so maybe it’s more the Internet than the game.

Thanks for taking the time, I might just be too far removed from the genres at this point in time, but I’ll keep reading the thread out of curiosity and a general interest in competition and storefront censorship.

It's always been deeply irritating to me that HuniePop was actually kind of a rad game to play.

Yeah, the difference with the Overwatch image search is that that's purely fandom versus what is available in versions of HuniePop (I'm assuming, I'm guessing there's also fanart for HuniePop, but no denying there are 'sexy' pics in legit HuniePop). Chances are any harder stuff you're seeing aren't in the Steam version by default. It's not difficult to change that, but it still requires fiddling with game files. The default Steam edition has like bikini and underwear pics at worst (I think).

As for what makes a good match three game, well yeah that's tougher and up to different tastes. Some people just want a basic Bejeweled and that's all well and good. Things like Puzzle Quest then made each colour gem essentially different kinds of mana to use for special powers (like... Remove a whole row/column, or something like that). HuniePop was more along those lines than basic Bejeweled. I legitimately think HuniePop's gameplay would do really well transplanted into a game that didn't turn off a ton of people (by way of art style, 'humour' or the basic concept of it being a game where the goal is to bed all the women).

Let people have their porn. I haven’t seen much, but some of the stuff I have seen is tamer than all three Witcher games. Hell, some of the cards you get in the first Witcher are racier than HoneiPop. Are they going to ban all of CD Projects games? What’s the real point of this?

Porn games exist in their own little niche world, where the people that covet them tend to dwell without affecting anyone. For the most part, people don’t even know they exist. Just make it harder for people to accidentally stumble on the shit, and let people wank in peace.

Puritanical bullshit

Of the many problems with Steam, between total lack of a meaning-full curration system, to the mass influx of broken asset flips, to an empty customer service department because everyone wheeled their desks out the nearest window when asked to help people troubleshot their PC, you would think that soft-core porn would be very low on their to-do list

Explicit as in visible penetration and such, not just nudity and implied bonking. And I guess I'm talking about something even besides a game like Tender Loving Care, but like if there was ever a sex scene in a weird artsy game or an action-RPG or something. Like not porn levels of fullscreen balls in your face obviously, but something like the sex scenes in the later Witcher games, but where you could tell it wasn't like actors pretending to bone in a movie.

There are non-pornographic movies that dabble in explicit depictions of sex acts, and I wonder if there was ever a game that elected to portray sex similarly, whether or not something like Steam or the major consoles would push back against it.

First they came for the Sakura Clicker...

@supersambo: no kidding

That may be true for the titles featured in the first post but the thing is that non-pornographic VNs like Kindred Spirits are also being removed from Steam, which has no shady patches and has been on Steam for years now. I believe the game does have sex scenes but from what I understand they are very tame when compared to other titles on Steam like The Witcher 3.

I just want those cheap games that only exist to earn cards gone...