For those who don’t know, Steam has recently informed a number of small, independent game creators and companies that they need to censor their games – or have them removed from Steam (I found out about this in this thread on reddit). Games like HuniePop are among them, or Mutiny, which features writing from one of our own community scribes. Many of these folks worked with Valve to ensure they were in compliance with Valve’s policies, going so far as to send art assets to contacts within the company to ensure they weren’t crossing any lines.
I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but I’m hearing that a religious group has taken credit for it – and claimed to have been running a campaign in Valve’s direction for years with this aim. Fuck that noise.
Mutiny’s Devs have put their game on sale for $1 in the meantime. So if you like VNs on steam, maybe support them, and if Valve doesn’t change course – I’ll be trying to compile some alternative stores that are willing to handle risque games like this, even if they aren’t outright porn.
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I am getting so bloody tired of this censorship of h-content on the internet. First Patron gets anal about content, than YouTube terminates a bunch of channels, now steam!
From my understanding, companies like PayPal are largely to blame since they strike the banhammer pretty hard upon the sale/distribution of pornographic content via their service. A significant part of this issue is financial, since refunds/chargebacks happen way more frequently with porn than with other products. But on the other hand, there *is* also a hypocritical faux-moralistic cultural crusade being waged against any/all sexual content in general right now, and it’s always the little guy (aka indie content creators) who get hit the hardest by this bullshit.
The hard truth is that when major transaction joints like PayPal raise a ruckus over sexual content (no doubt in no small part due to the collective incessant whining of grade A prude-tier special interest groups), many outlets such as Steam/Patreon/etc are typically forced to comply to some degree, otherwise they kinda lose tons of money, which in turn hurts their ability to conduct/stay in business.
I don’t like this whole situation anymore than the next person, but still the cultural/moral hypocrisy isn’t the *only* factor in play here. If it were, then railing against it would be much easier for the likes of us. But noooo-ho-ho-hooo~, there’s also billions of dollars at stake in this as well >_>
youtube has a anti concerative bias so a lot of innocent concerative places are getting shut down and silenced in the money category.
‘nother classic case of America fucking the fun up for everyone. :^)
Not America, just a bunch of fucking nosy busybody religious cockknobs who should just shut the fuck up and jump off an overpass.
Just thought of something, and am wondering if anyone knows, but, can Steam retroactively censor a game you’ve bought from them?
I’ve learned to never put *anything* past giant soulless corporations.
I this particular case I don’t think so, since the game is already “censored” when you download it, and the creator gives a free “patch” to revert it to it’s normal, uncensored version, on their own website.
Yeah, I did a bit of looking around after posting and found that out.
Fuck that stupid organization deciding what others buy. Steam should grow a spine.
What kind of kindergarten world do we live in for this shit to happen? Are they going to ban the internet next?
One where a minority on one side and the majority of the other ruin EVERYTHING!
Not okay with this, especially as a woman who considers herself pious. Like, I’m super religious, and I love kinky stuff. A lot. (I also patreon it/am not a conservative frell-wit, so…) Getting real sick of these “religious” organisations acting like they’re the sole arbiters of the rightful and moral.
Real conservatives don’t pull this shit, pseudo-conservatives do.
yea I know and the left in all degrees and froms does this as well if they can tar and feather the right the real conservatives. this is just another one of there attacks to do so.
The entire Republican political machine is increasingly a hostage to its own lunatic fringe which is big into this sort of moral-crusader nonsense so I guess that depends on your definitions of “conservative”.
“Real conservatives don’t do this” sounds like a bit of a No True Scotsman fallacy tho…
National Center on Sexual Exploitation is literally a feminist group mascaraing as a conservative group. They even mentioned the #metoo brain cancer that’s been spreading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Exploitation
You sure about that?
The Republican “fringe” is a myth. The RINOs that are considered “mainstream” are in bed with the Communist Left and have sold their souls long ago. The actual Republicans don’t care either way what you make so long as you do so ethically.
true very true and purge the reds at all cost even if it means putting there entire families in to coffin boxes to send them 6 feet under. do it.
What.
…also you DO realise “so long as you do so ethically” is basically what these MIM/NCOSE dweebs think they’re all about, right?
its not a “religious” group. look up jawbrakers: lost souls and you’ll see what has the nut jobs all woke and worrying. karma is catching up with them for there sins.
I doubt there is much, if anything, correlating the efforts of the NCOSE and Valve’s decision. Rather, it makes them look good to claim “victories” and so any perceived change in their favor is lauded by their media pages and outlets as being a result of their actions.
I suppose we’ll see what comes of these events, but for now, that is my suspicion.
It is also extremely hypocritical of Valve to pull this shit when they can’t even be botheres properly curate Steam Direct.
Okay, i just read the article and this is fucking bullshit. games with minor sexual content get targeted, but games like the witcher 3 : wild hunt and grand theft auto V which have way heavier sexual content get to stay? And Valve doesn’t respond to comments that bring this up either. I mean, what the fuck bullshit are they trying to pull here!?
I’m actually surprised they have Huniepop on notice given the amount of copies they’ve sold.
I think it’s too early to tell if anything’s serious is going on. Some select games received a threathening notification, while other games that have more hardcore content have been left alone. Taking those into account, this could be a simple case of trolling. If these games have followed the guidelines, as they seem to have for the past 3 years, then this matter will settle itself before long.
They better not touch Gal Gun tho.
one can not ignore the trolling part. sad thing is and mr. trump is proving it that you can troll people with anything and they will lose there shit over it. troll the left and watch them blow up with the trump derangement syndrome is funny but at the same time worry some cause of the corrouption the left is doing and protentual leaders down the line from our generation etc may come from over there so we got to take it seriously when the left blows up like they always do.
Not sure if trolling or an actual Precious Bodily Fluids rant ò_Ò
Have people always been such delicate flowers, or is it just that the internet gives them the potential to actually cause trouble over it?
Both, actually.
And another case of if-you-don’t-like-it-don’t-f*cking-look-for-it
I’ll just go dig a hole, get in, spew some pretty colourful curses and pray to whichever entity out there that someday people start looking at things that you actually should complain about
Since you say it like -that-… this particular song comes to mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qSfCjVk6Xc
Seriously, forget about porngames… there are *far* worse matters going on in today’s world right now. Matters that the hypocritical faux-moral crusaders to actually be complaining about. But lolnope, they wanna go after digital sex0rz.
#Priorities
*should actually be
Those matters are generally FAR beyond the terribly limited political literacy of your average Moral Crusader and would require them to invest actual :effort: to understand. (Then they’d find out they can do very little about most of them.)
Nah. Going after easy scapegoats is a far simpler and easier way for them to feel like they’re Making A Difference™ so they can pat each other on the back and feel like they matter and have some control over a reality they find incomprehensible and frightening.
It’s basically a form of magical thinking, a fetish in the anthropological meaning of the term.
“but I’m hearing that a religious group has taken credit for it – and claimed to have been running a campaign in Valve’s direction for years with this aim.”
Is anyone REALLY gonna believe that without any proof? Those people probably didn’t do shit and they’re just taking the credit, like how ISIS kept claiming most of the shootings and bombings were from them when they had zero links to them.
it is what it is this is the left’s way to censor everyone in to silence and blame the right for it.
I mean, I’d rather not get into a political discussion.
But when it comes to moral crusading and ‘thinking of the children’ generally that’s right wing rhetoric. The left tends to be sexually liberal.
Anyone who assumes that some weird extremist group is “just (left/right) people doing what they always do” is a bit of a brainwashed idiot. People need to realize that the people who make the most noise and get attention, are very often in a small minority. Granted, not always, but I just get so tired of seeing people say it’s all down to which party the happen to support. Stupid doesn’t care about your political leanings, it just exists.
These guys sure look pretty conservetive Right, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Exploitation
nothing is safe from politics the left made sure of that. now we must fight the left in all areas and they made it political and personal.
I play some games on nutaku. They recently put out a message on their twitter for anyone who makes or plays adult games on steam or valve to direct them there as all their games are made available free of censorship.
This might be their chance. So far they’ve had a shaky business model with a lot of games that get abandoned by devs or pulled from the site for not making money. It’s hard to tell if that’s because Nutaku is screwing over devs or if it’s because it’s a niche market that can be hard to monetize when you’re getting squeezed by free porn on one side and Steam/GoG distribution on the other.
Yeah Nutaku, MangaGamer and GOG are some of the better sites.
When it’s okay to annihilate many innocents at an airport or see people in excruciating pain in a torture chair, but flip out when there’s a nipslip, you really start to wonder what the world is coming to.
Dammit!! Religion and ruining all our perfectly good smut. We need the Emperor of Mankind to purge all religions and create a unified on instead.
Actually the group started as a religious group, but now seems to taken over by feminists. As the last three paragraphs seem to say, this is the same group that got Cosmo removed from Walmart because it ‘objectified women’
So this seems to be caused by feminists rather than religious folks.
Not that the two could not find a common ground in a mutual scapegoat to throw rocks at.
Or some bible-thumper get canny enough to jump onto the SJW rhetorical bandwagon where tactically useful.
Actually speaking of, that turns up in that Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/8k8qzz/huniepop_team_receives_email_from_valve_stating/dz886q5/
I suppose I should congratulate them for having discovered mimesis; for bible-thumping prudes that’s serious progress.
I don’t buy that they are bible thumpers in disguise, because if they were bible thumpers all the way through then why are they going after things like the cosmo/Walmart thing, trying to pull down ads because they were ‘sexist’ towards women, and joining the whole #Metoo crap because “WOMEN ARE OBJECTIFIED!!”
Those sound like things that an SJW feminist would do.
See “canny enough to jump the bandwagon when tactically useful” – ironically enough the objectives of those two ends of the political spectrum overlap in such matters, so all it takes is a bit of media literacy to co-opt the rhetoric if you think it’s worth the effort.
Just goes to show that the political spectrum isn’t a line but a circle. Go far enough in either direction and you end up in the same place.
While their objectives might overlap at times, I’m pretty sure that their REASONINGS do not.
Plus people’s comments in other articles have pointed out that there is an inconsistancy with the warning/flagging of games.
Valve, being inconsistent af? Say it ain’t so! D:
Anyway all of three minutes of research gave me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Exploitation
Sure looks like a bible-thumper group that had the bright idea to co-opt the SJW buzzwords to me…
not really look what happened with the hours herecy. that did not end well for him and all it did was replace one with another.
Am I the only one who suspects this is just the first step of the Corprate Takeover of the internet? In which they’ll drop the blame on a scapegoat. This happening just after Net Neutrality offically went down too…
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technology/fcc-net-neutrality-date/index.html
You are.
funny thing is as that happened, we here in the eu, atleast sweden, dont follow news that much, got laws / rules about stricter protection of sensitive and private information, i do think as a counter towards internet getting less neutral.
while i do think most of whats said here could be true. i just more believe that they changed head of the division that handles this part of steam, and the new one was just stricter with the rules.
the femenist or religious scapegoat seams just not plausible, mainly cus that an extreme event makes people want to think it has a extreme cause, even if the cause is out of this world or just not even technically plausible at that time. just cause femenazis and extremely religious people hate ecchi anime doesn’t mean that is the cause.
it also depends on how far they can bend the rules, and they could just have bent them so far that they just had to take it back cus it was getting out of hand. i rememebr when indie games and especially lewd games wasnt allowed. then they slowly started comming arround with visual novels and then all of a sudden greenlit happend and it all just exploded and inde games came in left and right and slowly more and more ecchi stuff appeared and now games even have full nudity. even tho the rules doesnt even allow softcore-porn or nudity.
or even sexually suggestive stuff.
…just sayin’ but I do have the Witchers. Full frontal nudity seems to be a-OK long as it ain’t anime tiddehs.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Double standards, in MY rules enforcement?!
well have Atari confirmed that they have not gotten a message from steam? we dont know until later, we know indie devs have gotten the message since they have talked about it in social media, but have the big companies done that?
As if they’d mess with the big-selling AAA stuff. As Reddit posters cynically pointed out even one of those games probably sells more copies than the entire VN section combined.
The most plausible theory on that Reddit discussion is it’s related to PayPal’s (actually fiscally sensible) blanket zero-tolerance policy on the sex industry in general. Why now is ofc anyone’s guess as PP, Valve and similar faceless corporate giants aren’t exactly famous for readily explaining themselves over such matters.
anything from cnn is fake news automadically due to there communist left views and there attacks on health republican conceratives, in all forms so unless this comes from fox news or other places then the fake news CNN and others then anything related to this will be suspect.
Okay now you’re just being too obvious.
well then https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2018/05/19/anti-porn-org-claims-steam-eroge-ban-triumph/
“Anti-pornographic crusaders at the “National Center on Sexual Exploitation” (formerly “Morality in Media”) have taken credit for Steam’s forced removal of eroge from their platform, having long fulminated against Valve in their quest to remove sex and service from video games.”
I agree of course, that the censored thing is bullcr*p , but if Steam doesn’t budge, then the only solution would either be a different platform than steam in which these kinds of games are published and bought, or the indie developers should include a patch to make the games uncensored again. If that can’t be within steam, maybe on their website, or blog. I , nevertheless , am frustrated by this.I’m not pious or anything, but I think this whole “purify the video games from pornographic content” is seriously going to impact the video game industry. If you can’t be free to publish whatever you want, just because some people get offended, well that is clearly a case of freedom suppression right there.
i’m in no position to do anything (other than a written petition I suppose) , but I hope that Steam would go about it in a different way. I’m sure they are also being pressured by this.
The problem with offering a patch, even an “unofficial” one is that it’d cost money to make. So either the dev eats the cost of providing duplicate assets to the customer or they have to charge for a DLC type model…which will peeve both the customers and Steam.
you started out one word your whole post is negated by that one word being started. don’t put it in at all and your post will be fine.
Care to elaborate? I don’t see anything wrong with what I said.
Right, I feel I have to say something with everyone blaming the left here what with my being a liberal, this ain’t us, this is just a bunch of being assholes being asshole with a religious bent, and before anyone cries foul, I back TiTs at the $10 pledge level.
Yeah I’m not sure how anyone can bitch at the left for this. Pretty clearly a socially conservative-minded group. That said, there are voices on the left that bitch about jiggling boobs and skimpy outfits that I fight with as well.
the left is more open on the censor ship in all areas though and do have people in places of power etc that can get that going that’s why the left is beign blaed for it all.
*looks at Trump*
Uh-huh…
trupe being targeted by the left for a frame op of crimes that the left did with Russia etc it is hillery that should be thrown in jail etc. your set up of the post is all that it will take to get the dander up to defend trump at all cost.
What.
I dunno, I think this is a pretty clear example at how, taken to the extremes, the political right and left fringes end up being virtually indistinguishable from each other. Both want to dictate what you think and what you do and both try to do it through manipulative gaslighting.
Does it matter whether they want to censor because boobs make Jesus cry or because it objectifies fictional objects? Both viewpoints are bullshit, both end in the same place.
Pretty much.
Welp, the effects of this stupid decision is that I’ve never known about mutiny, and now i bought and its dlc.
if nothing else but out of spite, but looking at it, i think i’ll actually enjoy it. also turning off autoupdates on steam because fuck you steam
I’m confused by this, some religious group is mad that Valve is selling risque or adult content? Adults can’t buy what they want now? What world are we living in right now….?
*These* guys have been Mad As Hell about pornography (in a very loose definition of the term) for decades. Nothing new about Moral Guardians wanting to dictate what other people get to read and watch of course.
Anyone’s guess if they actually had fuck-all to do with the whole debacle or are just tooting their own horn by claiming credit, however tangentially.
To be fair, there’s a lot of indication that this is because of how PayPal has recently come down hard on anything even remotely sexual because of how often people will pay for a porn subscription/camsite/etc. and then claim their PayPal was hacked and demand a refund. Steam processes a lot of payments through PP…I’m sure you see where that’s going.
A lot of folks think this movement is claiming credit as a PR stunt to drum up donations.
GOD DAMN THEM!!!!
steam has sent emails out to the creators of these games that due to backlash from the community they are not going to censor the games, crisis averted for now.
They’ve sent an email out saying that the games will be subject to re-review, meaning they could still face censorship or delisting.
It smells to me like a stall tactic, but I dunno whether they are looking to wait out the feminist fury over content or the consumer fury over censorship.
Ah… So it wasn’t my imagination when mutiny was reeduced to .99… This is rough…
Religion. Ruining everything since Year -10 000~
tell that to islam. christanity mellowed out a while ago.
You realize christianity was the one behind the very post you’re commenting on, right?
Muslims used to be pretty chill about a lot of things, but seem to have hit their equivalent of the ban-dancing-and-taverns-burn-some-witches-and-heretics Cromwellian Puritan phase over the past half-century or so (international politics have a lot to do with that).
The majority, of course, think the hardliner minority is just as embarassing and troublesome as is the case among Christians.
When the radical Muslims pull their looney-tunes, militant extremist fundamentalism bullshit? The people who suffer the most, are always the Muslim community itself.
fucking cucks ruining my fun…
on the bright side these game makers usually tweet something to get past the censors like files that disable it, therefore they aren’t changing any code in-game: you are therefore you get your porn back :3