I don’t think Valve has a strategy here, I betcha Gaben just likes their games.
So … Half Life 3 is going to be a walking simulator?
To be fair that’s how they made most of their games.
I mean, would that be so bad really?
Too soon you bastard!
Added Switch controller support:
Looks like the latest beta tonight has turned on the Big Screen gamepad interface for the ingame-overlay even if Steam is run in desktop mode if a gamepad is connected.
Valve cracking down on visual novel porn:
I just wish they would fix the need to enter your date of birth all of the time. Steam used to remember, then an update broke. Such a simple quality of life thing, why don’t they fix this?
It’s deliberate. There’s a message every time, “we only use this for verification purposes and won’t store it” and I’m like “fuck you, store it. What do I care if you keep a random date I entered because you keep bugging me for this dumb bullshit?”
“First, they came for the weeaboos, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a pervert.”
They can try to blame governments all they want, but what this really boils down to is that Valve is officially taking the position that 3D waifus > 2D waifus.
What I’ve read suggests this is a PayPal issue where an advocacy group brought the games to PayPal’s attention for being against policy.
The apparent suddenness does seem like it’s in response to something new, and probably external like that. I think recently Patreon did something similar with clearing out explicit content before they went in for a round of new VC funding.
Explicit content is ok, it was gross explicit content like incest, underage stuff, etc.
A bunch of patreon porn games (incest is huge in that space, dunno why) suddenly went from “It’s so wrong to love you like this, sister!” to “It’s so wrong to love you like this, roommate!”
Reports coming in from the various publishers affected that Steam has sent out new emails saying the titles in question are being re-evaluated and there’s no two-week deadline for anything.
Does it mean that The Witcher will get censored?
All they need to do is create a private section on steam for adult games. Optionally, allow someone to set an additional password to be allowed to view these games. That way little timmy can play steam games all day without seeing this adult content. If big daddy wants to play these games, then all he has to do is type in the password.
I do not understand why this is so hard.
Because that’s not good enough, at least not for the American political hand-wringing that would occur if Steam openly allowed AO/18+ games. At minimum they would have to do real age verification - like with an ID. Even then, America’s repression engine would likely end up in full gear and I’m sure Valve doesn’t want to deal with any of it.
I don’t see the nudity and sex as a major blocker in of itself.
The real problem is that lots of those Japanese-style dating games treat incest, rape, and child abuse with great enthusiasm. That sort of thing is much more accepted in Japan.
Yeah, I mentioned this about patreon above. They didn’t care about the nudity, they cared about the underage stuff, incest, and rape. It’s not a Japanese game problem though, let me tell you. On patreon where the spread of games from 4chan/8chan?/(I don’t know I’m not really into this stuff) is big, there is a wayyy more explicit and graphic and probably illegal things going on that they decided to start blocking, and most of it is churned out from Eastern Europe and America and isn’t anything like “Japanese-style” games.