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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores

Difficulty publishing porn on steam? I find that doubtful.

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Jap publishers have more esoteric content like loli and beast, which steam takes down immediately. Ironically I think guro is also taken down on steam, even though you can flip to the next screen and download gore simulator 20000.

So I get downvoted because some Japan tier messed up porn genres, ones I haven't even heard of are.. not allowed on Steam.

Got it.

Not that it matters, but it wasn't me. For what its worth you're right, and the steam rules are, as others have noted, remarkably nebulous. I think there're incest-adjacent visual novels on Steam, and literal nazi dating sims, but those haven't attracted the eye of sauron. It is more likely Steam is reactive than proactive, and it only needs a moralizer to flag a game and put it under review. Look (not so) hard enough and almost all the adult games will have something objectionable.

Steam is so weird about it they even removed a completely safe for work game just because it had art by Muk. There's been feuding review teams at Valve since the old Hatred scandal, so their policy is schizo.

Traditionally for adult Japanese games sold on steam like Muv-Luv and Subahibi they were censored and you had to download a separate patch from an external source to put the porn back in. Maybe Valve has gotten more permissive recently and I missed the memo.

I think there are some games on the store that are straight-up uncensored, no patch needed.