Plenty of people were shocked last June when US company Valve announced it was changing its rules regarding which video games could be sold on Steam, the world’s premier digital storefront for PC games.
The reason for this is that Valve said it was switching to an “anything goes” policy, meaning extremely violent video games and even adult games featuring sex could soon be sold on the Steam store.
This has opened the doors for games like Negligee: Love Stories, an adult visual novel which is now available for sale on Valve’s platform.
Of course, when Valve announced it was allowing this sort of content on Steam it also said that game developers would have to ensure compliance with different countries laws, so as not to inadvertently violate regional guidelines.
And the truth is that the store’s first uncensored sex game has run into a roadblock already as dozens of countries worldwide have banned the game including Japan, Germany and Australia as was recently reported on Kotaku (via PC Gamer).
Of course, it’s clear Negligee is a strictly adult game, as it features “themes relating to adult sex workers” and also “themes relating to abusive marriages and adultery” according to its authors, so it’s not so surprising it’s been hit with the ban hammer in 28 countries so far.
These countries censoring of Negligee could also be seen as a sign of disapproval of Valve’s “anything goes” content policy, and perhaps a wish that the US company would return to its old ways regarding what’s acceptable or not on the world-conquering Steam store, which is likely frequented by millions of minors worldwide.
However, Negligee makers Dharker Studios have also looked at the possibility of censoring its game to allow for release in some of these countries, but reached the conclusion this won’t be possible as the game has been designed to offer an adult experience from the ground up.
“In the past most of our games have stories and then the adult content is created in addition to the main story”, said the studio on Steam’s community website.
“This is not the case for Negligee: Love Stories, the stories themselves are adult in nature and style from start to finish. If we censored this game so that everyone could play, it would remove 90 percent or more of the content, unfortunately that means this isn’t really an option for this game”, added Dharker Studios.
But no matter how much some people disapprove the appearance of adult-only games on Steam, it’s likely many more games like Negligee: Love Stories will emerge on Steam in the weeks and months to come, so hopefully those who are interested in this sort of content as well as those who aren’t can have as good an experience on Steam as they have had until now.