Valve blocks the Steam release of Shining Song Starnova until the implementation of new filtering tools, gives no timeline

[Narcosis]

7 minutes ago, littleshogun said:

Rapelay 3D graphic was quite bad, so in the end it's not interesting to me here so whatever to that. That said, it's too bad though Starnova did suffer the setback because of Steam inconsistent policy. I just hope that they'll be able to find a way to get around the policy.

Rapelay graphics were actually pretty okayish when it came out and modders fixed the rest quickly afterwards

Aren't you all going offtopic, tho.

[SaintOfVoid]

3 hours ago, Narcosis said:

1. You're not limited to Steam as a release platform.
2. VN devs finally need to stop abusing Steam.

I'm not surprised at all they refused to publish Starnova as it stands now - it's meant to be an edgy, weeb-pandering porn game involving idols, lol.

Complaining about this in general - especially as a developer - is just silly. Most devs got what was coming at them.

just when i wanted to state the exact same u already did. totally surprised there´s so much of a riot coming to said title´s delayed approval. and before someone´s starts the usual whitenightening of pioneers, nah, its devs are also totally no doing the oelvn scene any good by going the full weeb way of life, including a fuckfest full of jp tropes, casting jp va´s instead of native ones etc...

Edited July 14, 2018 by SaintOfVoid

[tymmur]

3 hours ago, Dreamysyu said:

Well, to be honest, it's not a situation where quick solution exists. Small companies need Steam because it gives them large extra revenues from people who only buy their games on Steam. Well, monopolies are always shitty by default.

You are basically arguing that Steam is the defacto platform for selling games, giving them a monopoly. If this is the case, they could be hit with an antitrust lawsuit for abusing their monopoly to prevent publishers from getting a fair chance to reach customers. The inconsistency just makes it worse because it gives the impression that they will indeed keep certain title/people out for no objective reasons. The problem is I find it very unrealistic that they will be met with an antitrust. It doesn't come trough as a high profile "we stand with the people" kind of case.

I can find a lot of other reasons, which are more likely to cause an antitrust case against Valve, like you don't own the games you buy. You rent them for a one time fee. This allows them to force changes to you against your will, like 64 bit only updates on 32 bit computers or windows 10 only updates on earlier versions of windows. They kill XP support in half a year or so, yet they have games, which are too old to run on win7. Still no refund. It's also horrible at breaking savegames and mods, not to mention horrible for mod creators. The only good thing about it is the fact that everybody is on it. It sucks in all other aspects. They can also disable accounts, making people lose access to all their rented stuff. There is also the issue of updates breaking savegames/mods, which you can't prevent from being installed. More or less all competitors have better technical solutions and more user friendly. The only reason to use Steam is because they are the biggest. Sure sounds like a monopoly to me.

The worst part: we can't do anything about it. Antitrust laws are designed to prevent this from happening, but even perfect laws are worthless if they aren't enforced.

3 hours ago, Narcosis said:

1. You're not limited to Steam as a release platform.
2. VN devs finally need to stop abusing Steam.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that Valve is a private company and can sell what they want. No because Valve controls the customers. I wouldn't be surprised if VNs on Steam VNs sells 20+ times more than non-Steam VNs even with the same contents. In other words for a publisher, it's entirely possible that getting on Steam is a question of profit or bankruptcy. Moving a VN from Steam to say FAKKU will leave the customers on Steam, which will then buy a non-VN instead. The vast majority will not seek out FAKKU. This is the core issue: Steam is hording most of the customers.

[Hetzer123]

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Edited October 2, 2019 by Hetzer123

[Narcosis]

8 hours ago, tymmur said:

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that Valve is a private company and can sell what they want. No because Valve controls the customers. I wouldn't be surprised if VNs on Steam VNs sells 20+ times more than non-Steam VNs even with the same contents. In other words for a publisher, it's entirely possible that getting on Steam is a question of profit or bankruptcy. Moving a VN from Steam to say FAKKU will leave the customers on Steam, which will then buy a non-VN instead. The vast majority will not seek out FAKKU. This is the core issue: Steam is hording most of the customers.

This is actually irrelevant in terms of niche communities. Steam only raises sales in terms of games that are tailored towards Steam users, everything outside that circle won't see much of a difference in terms of sales numbers. Steam also has no control over those people, either. My best advice is that devs should finally learn on how to advertise and promote their games before the release, instead of relying on Steam storefront. Some of the wildly successful indie titles had major exposition years before the release. It also shows how important it is to blog about your game during it's development; you're building your potential customer base that way.

[Yuuko]

9 hours ago, tymmur said:

That's the kind of gray area I referred to. If you can enjoy something like that, then you build up a tolerance towards rape and even if you don't actually do it yourself, you start to be more indifferent towards it. Unlike rape bad end or whatever, Rapelay sets it as a goal and it becomes a good thing. If you are constantly told something like that, it can stick to even normal people. Look at Germany in the 30s. A group of people were pointed out as bad people and it made other people able to do normally unthinkable things to those bad people because the concept of normal got warped, but I'm sure an ally of Germany (like you) won't admit it lol.

If you really think that and don't understand how the Germany worked then whatever.

I recommend reading this https://fightthenewdrug.org/exposing-the-new-wave-of-extreme-hentai-animated-porn/

[Xykros]

15 hours ago, MaggieROBOT said:

Well, Valve's being Valve again. This time they created quite a sneaky but working way to ban "waifu games" without actually banning then. Say that you'll develop a filtering tool, and release it together with Half Life 3.

I think I spilled my tea. This was pretty hilarious.

14 hours ago, Narcosis said:

1. You're not limited to Steam as a release platform.
2. VN devs finally need to stop abusing Steam.

I have to agree with this one. I think I also saw someone mention that developers should put more effort into advertising their products, and I also wholeheartedly agree with that. While one might argue this might raise expenses from VN companies, especially for the small companies to whom these advertising expenses will be much more material compared to bigger companies, but to be perfectly honest, I don't think it'll really cost that much. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but we aren't exactly a big community. We sometimes get information and news about titles from fellow people in our community. There are also websites and blogs dedicated to bringing such stuff to us consumers.

My point is, vn companies can just release their games through other platforms such as Fakku and Nutaku. While it is true that they may be able to garner to a bigger audience through Steam, but if they've got no other choice, other ways are always present and whatever loss in sales they may suffer, they can cope up with proper advertisement efforts.

 

STILL IN THE END I AGREE THAT STEAM IS SH*T.

[tymmur]

3 hours ago, Kiriririri said:

If you really think that and don't understand how the Germany worked then whatever.

I recommend reading this https://fightthenewdrug.org/exposing-the-new-wave-of-extreme-hentai-animated-porn/

Looks like you completely missed my point. You started to make baseless negative assumptions about me and my reply regarding Germany is based on the fact that Finland and Germany were allies during WW2. Linking that to you personally and your point of views is as baseless as what you wrote about me.

The article is disturbing in multiple ways. It presents a warped impression of hentai combined with horror stories of how bad people are affected. All examples have one thing in common: they are written in a way where we have no chance of verifying the stories. It also touches the topic of the rights of fictional characters. It has all the telltale signs of fanatic propaganda written by somebody on a crusade against whatever. It doesn't matter what they are against, it's about gathering a group of people you can control, hence gain power. It's a decent example of the case I wrote about in the "make VNs popular in the west" for why I'm not sure we want VNs to be popular. It will attract nutcases.

If they really want to protect children from sexual exposure, start with the schools. If some boy (or girl, but it's usually a boy) finds it funny to display hardcore gay porn on the classroom projector to expose preteens to the contents, make the school responsible for avoiding repeated offenses. Right now stuff like that happens and the teachers are like "I told you before not to do it. If you do it again, I will tell you to stop again" and that's about it. Anybody talking about protecting children from sexual exposure, who doesn't start with the widespread forced exposure at schools aren't in the talk for the children, but rather for personal reasons unrelated to children.

 

This is going off topic. Looking back, the trigger condition for the derailment was you calling me a lolicon (or more precisely saying I can't understand issues with lolicon contents). Not only did it come out of nowhere (you didn't reply to any talk about anything loli related), I find the statement both incorrect and offensive. Making an offensive statement out of the blue, which will trigger an off topic reply sounds a bit like trolling to me, though I don't think you actually intended to troll the thread.

[Yuuko]

5 minutes ago, tymmur said:

 

This is going off topic. Looking back, the trigger condition for the derailment was you calling me a lolicon (or more precisely saying I can't understand issues with lolicon contents). Not only did it come out of nowhere (you didn't reply to any talk about anything loli related), I find the statement both incorrect and offensive. Making an offensive statement out of the blue, which will trigger an off topic reply sounds a bit like trolling to me, though I don't think you actually intended to troll the thread.

I'm sorry if me comparing Musumaker to Rapelay wasn't obvious enough.

[tymmur]

53 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

I'm sorry if me comparing Musumaker to Rapelay wasn't obvious enough.

It was and it's rather obvious why you made the comparison. You got something against Musumaker apparently based on assumptions rather than knowledge about the contents and you feel the urge to tell me even in threads where it's not related to the topic. The comparison is farfetched for anybody knowing the contents of both games and making the comparison (particularly out of thread context) makes you look like whoever wrote that blog entry you linked to.

[Yuuko]

4 minutes ago, tymmur said:

It was and it's rather obvious why you made the comparison. You got something against Musumaker apparently based on assumptions rather than knowledge about the contents and you feel the urge to tell me even in threads where it's not related to the topic. The comparison is farfetched for anybody knowing the contents of both games and making the comparison (particularly out of thread context) makes you look like whoever wrote that blog entry you linked to.

So I take it you have played Rapelay yourself?

[tymmur]

6 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

So I take it you have played Rapelay yourself?

I already wrote that I did to see what all the talk was about and then regretted doing so. It was mainly because at the time I haven't really been exposed to the dark themed stuff and with so many other cases where people cry wolf, I wondered what it was really about because clearly it could not be as bad as they make it out to be. Sadly in this case the public outcry is spot on and I wish I could go back and stop me from making that mistake. It does however give me the ability to bash Rapelay with knowledge of what it's all about and it is indeed the most rape encouraging media I have ever seen.

 

And you keep derailing the thread.