'Valve isn't interested in a nuanced conversation' says indie dev suffering from Steam censorship

Indie creator Robert Yang—who makes good, funny, incandescently homosexual videogames—has an ongoing project. Radiator Forever is a free megabundle/remaster of Yang's experimental, short-form games that includes titles like Hurt Me Plenty (description: "consent, negotiation, spanking, and aftercare"), Succulent ("juicy cheek physics and demonic possession") and Stick Shift ("autoerotic night-driving, manually pleasure a gay car").

I'm sure we both agree that this news piece would have been worth writing just to get a chance to tap out "manually pleasure a gay car," but there's more: in a recent blog post on the experience of putting together Radiator Forever, Yang shone some light on the ongoing fallout from last year's purge of "adult" material from storefronts like Steam and Itch.io, for which right-wing anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed credit after putting pressure on payment processors, as well as on the impact of regional censorship laws like the UK Online Safety Act.

With indie storefront Itch.io forced to more-or-less shadowban adult games on its platform, projects like Yang's are impossible to find on there, driving him back to Steam. "Of course I will continue using and supporting Itch as a much-needed alternative to Steam, but the cold fact is that Itch reaches a lot fewer people these days," he writes.

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But even on Steam, these sorts of games continue to run into problems. "Unfortunately Valve has tagged my game as "frequent nudity and sexual content" and now hides it from most Steam users," writes Yang. "Since no one changes their default settings, this amounts to a delisting / shadowban from 99% of the Steam user base.

"While I was careful to avoid explicit nudity, compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor, and the Steam content reviewers have decided the game's general "nature" was just too gay, regardless of my good faith efforts." Yang points to Steam's no-appeal ban of Horses to suggest that "Valve isn't interested in a nuanced conversation or in admitting any wrongs in moral judgment.

"If video games are a form of protected free speech, I do wish there was a bit more hand-wringing over blocking access to my games that were designed directly to be political speech," says Yang. "Valve loves it when Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 throw customizable genitals at you in the first five minutes, but of course I can't, because I actually have something to say about genitals!"

It's an eminently understandable frustration, and a reminder that—though the discourse around last year's censorship of online storefronts has died down—the reactionary crusade against adult content continues to impact creators.