Exactly. Steam is so laissez-faire about adult content that removing one game, without elaborating, and allowing so many others sounds exactly to me like it violates or risks violating a law somewhere, and so they’re covering their asses, maybe even preemptively. I’m not a lawyer, but their advice is often to just shut the fuck up. Epic sure was excited to host it when Steam declined and then did the same thing. For all I know, the reason GOG can host it but the other two won’t is that maybe GOG doesn’t operate in a country where some law makes that game a problem for them.
Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 days agoGo on then. Talk about it. Which other games besides Horses (the feature adult content) have been removed from or not allowed to launch on Steam? Because that platform is full of porn games and the Horses thing was about sexual themes involving minors.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They did elaborate though. They explained that the game had depictions of children with adults in sexual situations and the game developer removed one scene and paid some lip service about how they were just small adults. Steam didn’t buy into that and wouldn’t allow the game on the platform which is a reasonable take.
Would you like to give the names of specific other porn games involving children in sexual situations? I would like to see that list because I’m pretty sure it violates the law in several places.
You seem to be suggesting that Horses got treated differently for invalid or incomprehensible reasons and that isn’t true from literally every article I’ve seen reporting on the situation.
GOG is based out of Poland, and I’m sure Polish law absolutely does cover children in sexual situations in media.
But we also don’t know what the developer went on to change in the game since it was submitted to Steam with acception of the part highlighted by Steam specifically when they denied it.
This developer may have gone on to change several things that clear the bar in Poland but not everywhere else.
In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn’t validate that claim.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn’t validate that claim.
Quite the opposite. The reason I suspect there’s something legal behind behavior like this is that it is so laser targeted to this game. Especially when it was immediately followed up by their competitor eager to host the game (which had already removed the content named in Steam’s initial reason) and then changing their mind at the last second.
What I see in common between Horses and Github is that it appears that they see it as a bad idea to explain publicly why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that smells like a legal reason to me.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Microsoft went and changed the TOS for GitHub intentionally to remove this content. Valve hasn’t made changes to the TOS to exclude sexual content. They specifically never allowed sexual content that included minors in sexual situations.
Those are not the same thing.
ech@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
polygon.com/steam-visa-mastercard-paypal-censorsh…
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Again. This wasn’t on steam it was on the literally payment providers who forced the issue. If steam can’t accept payment for your game, of course they’re going to delist it. That’s not what he said. He said steam is trying to clear porn games.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
No, I didn’t.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
With this sentence you basically implied that Steam is removing or not allowing porn games.
You never in any of your comments mentioned payment processors. If that’s what you meant, that’s what you should have said.
You also claimed nobody was talking about it when literally everybody everywhere was talking about it when the news first dropped. So much so that Mastercard made a statement about it.