Valve has recently made a few moves delisting games for various reasons, which has, once again, sparked accusations of censorship. However, a peep at the Steam storefront reveals a different picture, one completely incompatible with Valve’s recent decisions.
Valve has always been a rather liberal company when it comes to what it allows to be hosted on its store. Just taking a look at what’s new and trending on Steam is proof enough. There, you can find both serious titles, indie outputs, various attempts at greatness, but also borderline pornography, hentai games alongside stuff featuring full, uncensored nudity and sex as core “gameplay” mechanics.
As I’m writing this, I have the tab open, and the likes of Fetish Locator: S&M Studio or Girls, I just want to get paid! are there, in plain view of anyone old enough to use the platform. Opening their respective store pages does prompt you to select your age (which you’re more than likely to answer untruthfully), and voila: you’re given complete, unrestricted access to very mature content and “games.”
And these aren’t the only examples. There is a literal “franchise” of games called Sex With Hitler, with several installments all readily available on Valve’s storefront, with not a single modicum of censorship to be found, even if most European countries would, I wager, take offense at these titles and their content (and especially their name).
So, one could gather that Valve is by no means a restrictive company, nor that Steam is prone to censorship and “artistic” limitations. But that appears to be far from the truth. Recently, Valve has blocked an indie arthouse horror game called Horses, where players on a farm ride naked human horses. It’s much deeper and more disturbing than that (which is by no means a bad thing), but that’s about the gist of it. And Valve seems not to have liked that concept one bit.
One scene supposedly involves a child riding a naked “horse” woman, which Valve took offense at. It blocked the game from appearing on Steam. Per PC Gamer, this decision was made all the way back in 2023, when Valve told the developers that it does not allow “content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.”
The developers claimed the scene in question, which may have triggered Valve’s response, had “since been changed,” and that it wasn’t even “sexual” in nature to begin with, but Steam remains by its stance and will not ship the game. Valve’s own judgment here seems to be the only thing that matters, which, in my opinion, does not always result in the most accurate assessment of any given game.
Sure, Horses is rather disturbing, but that is not grounds for removal. A lot of games, movies, books, and so on, great ones in fact, deal with disturbing, uncomfortable, and borderline disgusting themes and subjects. Dealing with these topics must be done, and art is probably our only means of doing so.
The fact that games I’ve mentioned above (alongside countless others, especially the hentai ones that sometimes have rather dubious characters whose age is indeterminate) are allowed to sell thousands of copies and rake in a ton of cash, providing little more than pornographic gratification, feels wrong to me. At least it does because games, whose subject matter is grim and disturbing, are banned, even if they’re trying to artistically (and critically) approach their content.
Whereas earlier we had Valve banning games when pressured by payment processors (which does constitute actual censorship), this time around it’s Valve itself making value judgments. And that’d be fine, if it weren’t for games that are far and beyond more “harmful” flooding the platform day in and day out.
One of them literally lets you own a pornography studio, i.e., to be part of an industry that has hurt and ruined too many lives to count. How does that, on any moral compass, point in the right direction?
It gives the sense that Steam is a dice roll: you can publish almost anything, but if a review board gets wind of it, anything can also happen. You can get published, get rejected, get censored, because your artistic vision could be taken the wrong way.
And that just doesn’t sit right with me.
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