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MangaGamer: Valve Rejected The Expression Amrilato Game's Steam Release

A lot of you are ignoring the huge amount of VNs and games w/ sexual content that are already on Steam.

A female cyborg performs fellatio on a bald man who wears panties on his head

invalidname wrote:

Have heard rumblings from VN friends that Valve has effectively imposed a de facto ban against the entire visual novel format. The Kickstarter-funded Muv-Luv photonflowers went out as a beta in March and should be ready for sale to the general public, but still hasn’t been released; one source tells me it’s because Valve won’t approve it.

A de facto ban isn't the case, as several vns have been added to Steam in June.

That said, Valve is not very consistent with sexual content, and does seem to have double standards. Big name AAA games can get away with basically anything, but an indie game will get banned for mild stuff sometimes seemingly at random, and visual novels in particular do seem vulnerable to that. So I wouldn't be surprised if Muvluv in is in fact being held up by Valve. Because again, Valve is inconsistent and seemingly random at times.



Regarding the VN talked about in this article, I've seen some screenshots on Twitter. Apparently it has no sex scenes, but it does have at least one bath scene with convenient steam censoring. This is (most likely) what got it in trouble with Valve.

It's no worse than a lot of anime hot springs/bath scenes involving highschoolers (in fact, far more mild than many) though, and I'd bet there are plenty of other games on Steam already with much more extreme content. But with Valve you can't really predict what will happen.

It's also frustrating to me that so many of the seemingly arbitrarily decisions Valve makes just happens to restrict visual novels with LGBT content. That might also be playing a role, as LGBT people are often inherently scene as sexual just by existing, so anything involving us might get an extra layer of scrutiny.

Sure, there's those games, but again, I see anime-style games with "Sexual Content" and "Nudity" in their tags show up on the "new and popular" list on Steam constantly; some are VNs, some aren't, many are very explicitly and openly sexual. There is a very large quantity of these games. Most of them are not "famous" VNs like those, they're mostly forgettable games.