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Steam has banned Chaos;Head NoAH from their store, unbans the game after successful community-driven campaigning


HataVNI

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This morning the visual novel community was hit with a shock when they first noticed that the elusive Chaos;Head NoAH which fans have been waiting years for has been banned by Steam in an act of immaculate inconsistency. The news got known, because people started to notice that the assets and data were leaked onto the steamDB site. There has been no statements made by Valve as to why the game needed to be banned, but it can be assumed that it is a combination of blood & gore and occasional flashy/horny scenes that Valve in combination with school uniforms might deem as abusive to children. 

Unfortunately, one can only speculate and refer back to familiar cases where the same problems arose when trying to get this game on their storefront. The kicker this is that Steam banned a game rated PEGI16 and the Nintendo Switch allows it to be sold as well as distributed in storeslogo.png

This feels like a bad joke, honestly.

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This game doesn't even have h-scenes, what the fuck?

Don't worry, Valve will approve an orgy DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 while we can't have a regular VN that doesn't even have any kind of explicit scene. This is just cultural prejudice.

Edited by Frost51
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They're actually quite consistent and clear on this. Their policy explicitly states, even if your game does not feature H content, characters that appear underage put in "provocative" situations will get the game banned. Porn on steam is not an issue at all, far from it. They literally have an adult section for a reason. It's the school uniforms and underage chars in romance/ lewd settings that gets you the hammer.

Not saying I agree with this policy, btw. I agree it's fucking dumb. But people saying this comes out of nowhere with no warning are wrong. Steam has this stuff in their guidelines for devs.

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No, they're not consistent.  If they were, they wouldn't have let Persona 4 onto Steam; it ambiguously implies MC-kun has sex with his girlfriend(s) if you max her (their) S-links.  And they would have updated their "we will allow anything that isn't trolling or illegal" statement to clarify what else they will ban for, since clearly that is not true.

Instead, they have attempted to reap the benefits of appealing to the no-censorship absolutist crowd by claiming anything goes, when it's not actually true.  They have Standards & Practices (just like every other publisher in existence), they're just lying about it.  They'd get flak. First, for merely openly saying they have S&P, the anti-censorship crowd would get all up in arms.  Second, the particular standards they have chosen are pretty hilariously inept to boot.  They would bar a video game adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or the Bible, in a society where American Pie makes a quarter billion dollars.

They want to have their cake and eat it too.  They've refused a handful of Western developed games too, like that Pickup Artist "game".  Their public "statements" attempting to "justify" their actions, in light of them pretty obviously doing something they made a commitment not to do, are nonsense.  They want the benefits of censoring things that might hurt their image, and the benefits of taking an absolutist no-censorship stance.  So they have chosen to be dishonest.

Edited by Nandemonai
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They are just being inconsistent and biased. They just look at VNs and ban them because they are VNs, at least if they bear some resemblance to bishoujo games. Hope GOG keeps growing in terms of market share.

The guys who are paid to curate this should research more on Japanese culture instead of just swinging the banhammer at games like Chaos;Head. For fuck's sake.

Edited by Frost51
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On 8/19/2022 at 5:57 AM, Dergonu said:

They're actually quite consistent and clear on this. Their policy explicitly states, even if your game does not feature H content, characters that appear underage put in "provocative" situations will get the game banned.

This is not "consistency", this is just a free pass to randomly ban literally 90% of the Japanese games ever released. The guidelines that broad are no guidelines at all.

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  • 1 month later...

Very late for this, and honestly speaking I can only say that maybe the reviewer was felt scared because of some disturbing contents. Or perhaps seeing that in Chaos Head we can have the route with Nanami (Takumi blood related sister), the reviewer decided to ban it because of blood related sibling route content alone (If we based it on how Shiravune need to cut Konatsu's route in Ninki Seiyuu (Another blood related sister character) just to have it released on Steam). Of course though, in the end my reasoning here is a hypothetical one, and the only one who can answer why Noah is banned despite that it's all age VN (Technically speaking because it has no sex scenes) are Valve themselves.

Edited by littleshogun
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On 8/18/2022 at 10:57 PM, Dergonu said:

They're actually quite consistent and clear on this. Their policy explicitly states, even if your game does not feature H content, characters that appear underage put in "provocative" situations will get the game banned. Porn on steam is not an issue at all, far from it. They literally have an adult section for a reason. It's the school uniforms and underage chars in romance/ lewd settings that gets you the hammer.

Not saying I agree with this policy, btw. I agree it's fucking dumb. But people saying this comes out of nowhere with no warning are wrong. Steam has this stuff in their guidelines for devs.

I'm playing Yakuza 0 (on Steam) and there's literally a side-story where a ring of high school girls (led by a bully) are selling their used underwear.  There's another side-story where an elementary schooler solicits the adult main character to be his girlfriend, and says she'll "give him her precious thing".  And yet another where some punks try to sell a mother and her elementary-school child into prostitution.  So, uh, yeah.

Keep in mind: Sony NA is giving some of these titles a pass, while Valve isn't.  So yes, Valve being stricter than Sony--while simultaneously carrying actual porn--is headline-worthy.

Edited by sanahtlig
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6 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

I'm playing Yakuza 0 (on Steam) and there's literally a side-story where a ring of high school girls (led by a bully) are selling their used underwear.  There's another side-story where an elementary schooler solicits the adult main character to be his girlfriend, and says she'll "give him her precious thing" (and the protagonist reacts assuming the whole thing is sexual).  And yet another where some punks try to sell a mother and her elementary-school child into prostitution.  So, uh, yeah.

Damn... I actually never paid attention to the sidestories wow.

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14 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

So yes, Valve being stricter than Sony--while simultaneously carrying actual porn--is headline-worthy.

Yeah... Recently, when I was reading PSVita version of Hoshi Ori Yume Mirari there were numerous scenes where I thought "No way this could get a pass on Steam under current guidelines" ;)

Edited by adamstan
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  • HataVNI changed the title to Steam has banned Chaos;Head NoAH from their store, unbans the game after successful community-driven campaigning
3 hours ago, HataVNI said:

Here we see the new trailer for the double pack. The voice acting really could be better, honestly. Feels a bit lackluster especially when she reads out the titles at the end. But the trailer here starts with the acknowledgement of all the SciADV games in some random order? Like it starts with the newest Anonymous;Code and then shows Occultic;Nine which we have never gotten and is also incomplete. Kinda of strange for a trailer.

The song bangs though.

You can get the game here on Steam: CHAOS;HEAD NOAH
You can get the game here on Switch: CHAOS;HEAD NOAH / CHAOS;CHILD DOUBLE PACK - COMING TO NINTENDO SWITCH™ OCTOBER 7, 2022

Is this really English Dubbed?? I hope this is not going to become a thing for future visual novels in general. Anyway, I am happy this is getting a PC release for those that were really looking forward to it. People are getting sick of censorship and their voices are being heard.

Edited by Erogamer
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8 minutes ago, Erogamer said:

Is this really English Dubbed?? I hope this is not going to become a thing for future visual novels in general. Anyway, I am happy this is getting a PC release for those that were really looking forward to it. People are getting sick of censorship and their voices are being heard.

Nope, only the trailer video there was English dubbed (and quite badly). The game itself is full Japanese dubbed.

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