Steam's first uncensored adult game has been approved
Back in June, Valve announced that it was no longer going to police what could and couldn't appear on Steam, removing games only if they were illegal or "straight-up trolling." This, we speculated, meant that Valve would be ending its rule disallowing "pornography," and that appears to be the case.
After adding new filtering tools which allow users to opt in to seeing "Nudity or Sexual Content" and "Adult Only Sexual Content" on the Steam store (those are two separate categories), Valve has approved Negligee: Love Stories for release this Friday, a game which was previously held up while those tools were being developed.
"I am happy to confirm Negligee: Love Stories has completed the steam review process and will be our first every 100% uncensored game on steam, no patch needed," writes the developer.
Negligee's Kickstarter page includes censored images of the game's "adult" scenes, and it's clear enough what sort of game it is—though Valve still hasn't removed "pornography" from its list of disallowed media on Steam.
Sexual content is hardly new to Steam. Popular mainstream games such as Mass Effect 2 and The Witcher 3 contain sex scenes, though only the most conservative would call them 'pornographic,' and censored or relatively tame visual novels have mostly been welcome. That was until Valve seemingly cracked down on such games in May, but the company rolled back the warnings, saying the games were being re-reviewed.
Not long after that, Valve announced its new 'anything goes' policy. "If you're a player, we shouldn't be choosing for you what content you can or can't buy," wrote Valve. "If you're a developer, we shouldn't be choosing what content you're allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable."
Before that happened, though, Valve wanted to develop the filters that are in place today. Navigating to Negligee: Love Stories' Steam page for the first time, I was greeted by a new warning informing me of the nature of the game. It features a description written by the developers, which all developers are encouraged to include as part of Valve's new content filtering system.
