[News] Pushing the boundaries of Steam

[Juno]

So the past day or two, there had been a little bit of buzz in the gaming community surrounding a wildly inappropriate game that was set to release next month on Steam. It appeared to be created solely for the purpose of pushing the boundaries on Steam (or at least, some people speculated, because it seems way too fucked up of a concept for anyone to seriously be on board with), ever since they had announced about a year ago that Valve would have more "lax content policies", basically saying anything is allowed on the Steam store and they would stop trying to police content on what is "acceptable" and what is not.

I don't want to link the game or anything, and I believe it has since been taken off the Steam store anyway, but just to give an idea for those who don't know, the game was supposed to be "a visual novel that would have let players "verbally harass, kill people, and rape women" in the midst of a zombie apocalypse", and after some community uproar, Steam finally decided to take the game's page down, and issued a statement:

"Much of our policy around what we distribute is, and must be, reactionary—we simply have to wait and see what comes to us via Steam Direct," Valve's Erik Johnson wrote. "We then have to make a judgement call about any risk it puts to Valve, our developer partners, or our customers. After significant fact-finding and discussion, we think Rape Day poses unknown costs and risks and therefore won't be on Steam."

So that's that for "Rape Day", but it also makes me wonder if actions would have been taken if this particular game hadn't caught people's eye? Ever since Steam adopted their laissez faire policy, there has been no shortage of questionable content in similar veins to this game, but they may be more niche and hidden from plain sight, garnered less negative attention, and they get to stay on the store. What are your thoughts on the whole issue?

 

[gimmepie]

I think it's a tricky situation honestly. Games like that have no place anywhere really but at the same time I see nothing wrong with a game containing adult/mature content being available if it is appropriately labelled and hidden by an age wall and I don't want to see Steam go too far back in the other direction either.

Video games are an art form and there's always a fine line with what should and shouldn't be acceptable there and I think they'll need to review their policy perhaps, but should do it carefully.

 

[hotsushi-kun]

Exlicpt pornographic content should never be allowed there, a lot of eroge games produced there will have their sex scenes removed for steam releases, there is an restoration patch that restore sex scenes on it.

That's an one choice for the people who like 18+ Games with porn on it.