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"It's extremely frustrating and also f*cked up" - one of the world's best indie studios is facing shock closure following confounding Steam ban [Eurogamer] (www.eurogamer.net)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

This seems dumb. Give it an X rating or whatnot and limit it to adult purchases.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Even rating it X/AO/Whatever, calling a sequence where a young child rides around on a naked masked person who is forced to comply "contentious" is putting it mildly.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    yeah but thats the point of X. its not R. I mean clock work orange is all kinds of effed up but its a great movie. X means graphic sex, or violence, or worse. I think they had another designation at some point that was like super X but I think folks never really paid attention to it.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Have an X rating doesn't absolve you of criticism or protect you from backlash when you include a sequence involving a naked adult and a child.

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  • [–] -3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    yeah but it should be on the author not the distributor and those people wigging out are more the issue.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Sure but you must realise that if Steam were to platform a game featuring a child riding a naked adult in a horse mask, a sequence that the devs have removed in order to have the game on any platform for sale at all, Steam would face a significant amount of backlash and potential legal action for doing so. Why should Steam be obligated to publish a game?

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I don't think obligated as much as they should not be concerned and there should be no backlash to them for stocking it as long as its separated appropriately. Video storms had porn rooms in the back of the store with some signage and people seemed to be able to handle it and get its an adult thing. Heck maybe even have a second but related steam.XXX site where you have to do bullshit verification to peruse. Then require any game that goes over some threshold of whatever to only be visible there. people can login with their steam accounts and have them connected provided they jump the additional hoops. these things are not impossible to work with.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Whether you believe a platform should get backlash for platforming something in questionable taste and legality is entirely separate to whether they actually will.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    well of course. if the state said take it down it would be different but this situation does not seem to have any legal issues.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    The majority of countries where Steam sells games have strict laws regarding the depiction of minors in any kind of situation which could be considered sexual, whether it's a real child or not. It's a very strange hill to die on when the devs clearly identified that was the issue and removed it from their game.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Im pretty much always against censorship. As described it does not sound sexual as its just nudity and this riding thing. I mean nobody talks about lady gadiva like she fucked a horse. The hill to die on is weird to me to use in this situation. Its one conversation about something that neither of us has any ability to effect.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Not wanting to sell a product isn't censorship of the product. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what censorship is.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I think the misunderstanding is with you.

    Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically inconvenient, or morally questionable by an authority or group.

    In this case the group is steam. Government censorship is not the only kind. You can have corporate and even self.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Most stores choose not to sell X rated (later NC-17) movies.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    They were common enough in movie stores when I was in high school and college. I feel our society has gotten just that much more prudish in the new millenia.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago*

    I don't think society is actually more prudish; you couldn't have had 80% of the shows that are made now, 50 years ago. I think there are just several things that combine to make it appear otherwise (note that these are all 100% my opinion):

    1. Corporatism has run rampant, and corporations detest liability. Independent movie stores didn't have to worry about being noticed by political groups, but big chains did, and big corporations' shareholders only care about stock prices are much more reactive to 'threats'. And big corporations killed most independent stores, even before digital took over. Digital is all big corps.

    2. The US has sanitized violence in media to such an extent (e.g. superhero movies where logically thousands of people die, or where all violence is 'bloodless' but not cartoonish) that I think sex has become the only metric by which to delineate 'kid' vs 'adult' media for a lot of people. That has a feedback effect on large media creators, who will be less likely to depict sex in anything not squarely targeted for adult consumption, which in turn makes any sexual content in e.g. young-adult media stand out even more, which will get it outsize attention by the wannabe morality police types.

    3. Prudish political groups made a lot of strategic inroads into positions of policy influence by using "protect the children" rhetoric, with sex being the #1 thing they actively demonized. It's much less common to see pro-sex groups making any kind of public messaging or policy impacts, so it can seem like the prudes are the majority.

    WRT the current thread: Steam doesn't ban sexual games at all; at this point it's one of if not the largest adult games distributor just thanks to its user base. They even implemented a 'private' feature for games so people could buy adult games on their Steam account but hide them from others, to encourage people to buy adult games. This particular game is really just an unfortunate case of edgy content accidentally running up against a legitimate guardrail. I won't be surprised if Valve does walk back the ban soon based on the amount of media coverage.

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