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Valve threatening to remove VNs with adult content from steam?


phantomJS

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How curious! Personally, I doubt this is the handiwork of some anti-pornography interest group; I don't think they have the influence to pressure Valve into doing anything. It seems more likely to be related to legislature changes, or, as someone mentioned earlier in the thread, Steam's soon to be released streaming app. I look forward to learning more as new information becomes available over the next few days.

I wouldn't really bat an eye at all if this only affected Huniepop and similar games. HP is the very definition of a pornographic game, with the only objective being to have sex with multiple anime girls, and I can understand Valve not wanting that to be sold on their platform.

Now that it's been revealed they're trying to censor and/or remove Kindred Spirits, I feel a bit puzzled. It is comparatively tame, presents its subject matter in a meaningful way, and is hardly pornographic compared to mainstream games that have sexual content. I wonder how they identify which titles need to be censored? Kindred Spirits has to get axed posthaste but Deep Space Waifu: Flat Justice is fine?¿?¿?

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9 minutes ago, Zander said:

HP is the very definition of a pornographic game, with the only objective being to have sex with multiple anime girls, and I can understand Valve not wanting that to be sold on their platform.

[redacted] 

I actually remembered it wrong, but Huniepop is not really a "pure porn game", it has actual gameplay and was properly censored in the "clean" version - in a way that was widely consider as appropriate in the past (with only bare breasts in the "erotic" CGs and "sex-related" puzzles) but suddenly became "pornography".

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
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3 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

But Huniepop has no porn. It has nude drawings and "sexy" moans. The version without the patch only have bare breasts, which were ok in the past but now are "against the rules". Putting the sleazy narrative aside, it's actually a tame fanservice game. 

Just because the game doesn't have RAW DICKS on it doesn't mean that the game couldn't be pornographic. Even books can be pornographic.

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11 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

Just because the game doesn't have RAW DICKS on it doesn't mean that the game couldn't be pornographic. Even books can be pornographic.

Indeed, I actually forgot about the explicit CGs you get after the "bedroom" puzzles. Still, for the most part it's just fanservice, especially in the Steam version, calling anything in there porn is quite a stretch. And you spend most of the time on puzzles that are completely non-erotic in nature, so calling HP a pure porn game is really not accurate - you could maybe say that about Monmusu, where gameplay is non-existant and a very poor excuse to make you pay for hentai scenes (and it wasn't targeted by Valve so far). 

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
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16 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

Just because the game doesn't have RAW DICKS on it doesn't mean that the game couldn't be pornographic. Even books can be pornographic.

Only if you live in a dystopian book-burning hellworld. Let's try not to become that.

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15 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

Just because the game doesn't have RAW DICKS on it doesn't mean that the game couldn't be pornographic. Even books can be pornographic.

For a second I thought you meant porn involving books, instead of books containing porn. 

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15 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

you could maybe say that about Monmusu, where gameplay is non-existant and a very poor excuse to make you pay for hentai scenes (and it wasn't targeted by Valve so far). 

Oh btw Tropical Liquor by Tentacle Games was targeted btw which is a Huniepop clone.
Quite surprised Monmusu didn't but I guess it was too new release so that they didn't notice it kek

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On 5/19/2018 at 2:49 PM, Kiriririri said:

On puzzles that make the girls feel good and in the end the main goal is to still fuck them

Still, porn without actual depictions of sex isn't much of porn. Making sex a goal in the narrative is a bit too little - and I don't say it to claim HP isn't porn after all, just that defining porn by sex being the main theme is a shitty definition. Plus I don't envy anyone desperate enough to fap to the kind of material that HuniePop offers...

 

On 5/19/2018 at 3:04 PM, Kiriririri said:

Oh btw Tropical Liquor by Tentacle Games was targeted btw which is a Huniepop clone.
Quite surprised Monmusu didn't but I guess it was too new release so that they didn't notice it kek

That's because I'm pretty sure Valve went after anime games with partial nudity (just like the bare breasts in Huniepop and Yurirei) and not the actual porn games that "properly" gate the hentai behind patches, like MonMusu does. 

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
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Just now, Plk_Lesiak said:

That's because I'm pretty sure Valve went after anime games with partial nudity (just like the bare breasts in Huniepop and Yurirei) and not the actual porn games that "properly" gate the hentai behind patches, like MonMusu does. 

???
Do you know what Tropical Liquor is

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1 minute ago, Kiriririri said:

???
Do you know what Tropical Liquor is

Yup, I know, but notice that Valve's request was to censor the targeted games, not just a notice of taking them down because they're pornographic filth - I haven't played this one but all others I know and were targeted had nudity (and not much more, if speaking about Steam versions). If you say that TL was well-censored in its Steam release, then maybe they're randomly going by user tags without looking at the actual content, it's possible that even now I was giving Valve too much credit. 

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2 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

Yup, I know, but notice that Valve's request was to censor the targeted games, not just a notice of taking them down because they're pornographic filth - I haven't played this one but all others I know and were targeted had nudity (and not much more, if speaking about Steam versions). If you say that TL was well-censored in its Steam release, then maybe they're randomly going by user tags without looking at the actual content, it's possible that even now I was giving Valve too much credit. 

Point was just that Tropical Liquor has exact same patch as MonMusu that is free and unlocks porn nothing else.
Though I don't know how censored versions of those game compare I assume they would be pretty much the same knowing the developer and the nature of the games.

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9 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

Yup, I know, but notice that Valve's request was to censor the targeted games, not just a notice of taking them down because they're pornographic filth - I haven't played this one but all others I know and were targeted had nudity (and not much more, if speaking about Steam versions). If you say that TL was well-censored in its Steam release, then maybe they're randomly going by user tags without looking at the actual content, it's possible that even now I was giving Valve too much credit. 

Pretty much, considering they're even targeting tame VN's like Kindred Spirits on the roof (which has absolutely zero nudity).

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1 minute ago, Tyrael said:

Pretty much, considering they're even targeting tame VN's like Kindred Spirits on the roof (which has absolutely zero nudity).

Not true (nsfw), Yurirei is actually a relatively tame 18+ VN with sex scenes and went to Steam uncensored. It might actually be more appropriate target for the purge than most of the stuff that was hit, even if I very much disagree with it being categorized as porn. 

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Just now, Plk_Lesiak said:

Not true (nsfw), Yurirei is actually a relatively tame 18+ VN with sex scenes and went to Steam uncensored. It might actually be more appropriate target for the purge than most of the stuff that was hit, even if I very much disagree with it being categorized as porn. 

My god, I forgot that was in there. I mean, I still stand by my previous point of the whole thing being incredibly tame though :wafuu:

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22 minutes ago, Palas said:

Kindred Spirits got the reddest of the flags though, which is depiction of underage sex. It doesn't explain why it was just flagged and given an advance notice instead of just de-listed like that other one was.

It has come to my knowledge that none of the games affected were rated by ESRB. That, coupled with ESRB no longer providing free ratings for digital games (although devs can still get ratings through IARC) might indicate an overall change in policy for adult games that would explain why bigger games didn't get targeted, although it doesn't explain why non-anime-styled games weren't.

It also doesn't explain why Steam want the publishers to censor content, if it was about the rating they'd state to get a rating  because even if they censor the games even further they still wouldn't have one.

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Just now, Palas said:

 

 

what

That would my fit my theory of the cause being a new algorithm with automated flagging.
if it analyzes discussions, reviews, tags or a mixtrue of those it's likely to mainly hit games which either have uncensore patch or an uncensored version elsewere because certain phrases or Tag are more commonly used in such cases and overlap with statistics from what the code was actually supposed to search for even if the Steam-version is fine. It'd also explain the vague nature of the mails.

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If a new bot or something triggered this, you'd think there'd be a better way to implement it or something.

At least this is (possibly) winding down, so it's all good. And it likely triggered a wave of new interest, so we're actually better off.

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15 minutes ago, sarkasmus said:

That would my fit my theory of the cause being a new algorithm with automated flagging.
if it analyzes discussions, reviews, tags or a mixtrue of those it's likely to mainly hit games which either have uncensore patch or an uncensored version elsewere because certain phrases or Tag are more commonly used in such cases and overlap with statistics from what the code was actually supposed to search for even if the Steam-version is fine. It'd also explain the vague nature of the mails.

So you are saying they made a new flagging system, which triggered incorrectly on a bunch of games and just by chance it hits the games Morale in Media started targeting a week earlier? The timing seems a bit suspicious to be completely by chance. I find it likely they were aware of MIM and having ended up on the dirty list and then they started to check titles with confirmation bias and quickly assumed it's likely correct and acted accordingly. They received a backlash. Jim Sterling and so far 10k signatures is what we know, but we don't know how the affected companies reacted. For all we know one or more started using lawyers due to the possible claim of risk of financial loss due to being kicked based on false info.

Another thing I started thinking about today is the fact that Steam is the big one on the gaming market. In fact one could argue that it's a monopoly. If they start to use their size to cause financial loss for other companies, they start to enter the domain of antitrust laws. The affected companies are quite small, but the signatures is an indication that it has upset quite a number of people and if it is allowed to grow, it might get political attention. Right now there is a guy in the White House, who is unpredictable, very much pro first amendment and sides with the people. On top of that he has talked about using antitrust laws to split up Amazon. If you look at this from Valve's point of view, what they see is that it's unlikely to reach such a level, but not completely impossible and if it happens, it would be bad. Really bad. Since VNs aren't really important to Valve, it would likely be better to just blame a technical issue and kill off the whole thing before it has a chance to escalate. If you think the case is too small for high ups to be interested, remember that the AG once reacted personally to a funded kickstarter campaign, which didn't ship anything to backers.

It's also possible that the backlash and/or feedback from affected companies have reached a higher level at Valve and they want to put everything on pause while they investigate what is going on here.

 

Regardless of what is going on, it looks like things are getting back to normal. They say they will review the titles in question, but I have a feeling they will not find issues severe enough to remove them. Most likely all of them will just stay unmodified.

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