My impression was it all started with Japanese dating sims and then people in other cultures realized they enjoyed masturbating to those things also and picked up on it. But I haven’t actually looked into any of this too closely because it’s icky.
I don’t have a moral objection to games with that sort of subject matter. Real people aren’t being hurt so they should be legal. That said, I certainly don’t blame Steam for blocking them.
Some people are blaming FOSTA for this, which I basically think is bullshit.
I guess my point is that if Steam really wants to go after this very questionable content, then they should go after the bad poser model games rather than the Japanese ones, regardless of where this sort of thing started. If Steam is mostly going after Japanese dating sims then they are doing it wrong.
Although it might be that Steam only really has the Japanese dating sims on their platform for nudity and not the really bad ones. I don’t know… like you I also don’t spend a lot of time on it. It’s just fascinating, like watching a documentary on Jonestown is fascinating. The culture is so weird and broken. Same reason I think some of us were talking about incels in that other thread. Weird shit to observe. Also it’s good to know about these things when you have children who are quickly getting to the age where they might start to get exposure to some of this stuff.
Japanese visual novels and dating sims that glorify incest, rape, pedophilia, or child abuse are an extreme minority, and are effectively nonexistent among commercial titles for the same reasons the ESRB’s AO rating is mostly unused here - stores don’t want to carry that stuff, and consumers don’t want to buy or even see it. Pornographic content in these games in general has been on the downswing for many years now, as games continue to find success with audiences that don’t want porn and on platforms that don’t allow it.
This is probably one of the best events they have ever had, making you play games you probably already own and that are lost in the void of the great backlog.
Yeah I remember getting The Orange Box in October of 2007, at Circuit City of all places, and being just shocked at the quality of games for the price I paid. I lost over 2000 hours of my life to Team Fortress 2, made some good online friends while playing it too.
They sort of did that with the scavenger/treasure hunt events in the past. I much preferred that approach to “this is a sale also some trading cards I guess” more recently.
Bought through Steam? Interesting thought. That’s entirely different.
Looks like for me it was:
Audiosurf (Feb, 2008)
Darkstar One (Mar 2008)
Unreal II: The Awakening (Mar 2008) (Wow, I’ve still never played more than 20 minutes of this)
Prey (Mar 2008)
Civ IV Complete Pack (Apr 2008)
Everyday Shooter (May 2008)
Shadowgrounds Survivor (May 2008)
Titan Quest Gold (Jul 2008)
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (Sep 2008)
I have to shake my head at that list. I haven’t played any of those games extensively except Titan Quest Gold. Literally none of the others. I played through Prey on the Xbox 360 instead, so I’m not sure why I thought double dipping a PC version was a good idea back then.
I’ll get to Civ IV one of these decades. All the rest are crap I think.
Edit: Wow, going through the rest of this list, there’s only 4 or 5 games I’ve purchased from Steam that I’ve played. Everything else just goes into the backlog and then gets eliminated later. I really should stop buying games from Steam, is my main takeaway from looking at this list.
