Steam has unveiled the gaming genre with the highest score based by user reviews

This is something funny, because many conservative gamers have problems with hentai games. I actually don't agree when you say that "everyone on Steam is in harmony with hentai games being the ones with highest scores", that's not true, I've seen lots of complaints and people critisizing Steam for letting those games in.

Not me, I even have some h-games, but I don't think it's possible to say everyone's on the same page about those games being added to Steam.

I believe they all have good scores because most of all the only people who play them are also the people who are looking for that kind of content. Rarely someone ends on a h-game by "accident". The only case is when one receives one of those games as a gift from a friend, but this person doesn't have a reason to neg-review the game.

Those things said, I don't believe their popularity is comparable to that of battle royale games or FPS. For example, the game with the highest number of reviews (13.000) on your screenshots, Nekopara vol 1., doesn't even compare to PUBG which has close to a million reviews on Steam. CS:Go also has more than 500.000 reviews on Steam. These genres may not be so positively-rated overall, but they are indeed much more popular than h-games on Steam. Even some B-grade battle royales on Steam have more than 200.000 reviews, so these games have a much bigger playerbase.

H-games are niche at best, at least for now. I believe one game has to be on Top 100 Played Games on Steam to be considered popular (you can look them up at Steam -> Store -> Statistics). Popular games right now are Sekiro, GTA V, CS: GO, Dota 2, PUBG, and so on. I don't see any h-game on that list as for the moment of this post. Even some old games like Age of Empires II are on the top 100.

I think the most accurate thing you may say in this context is that h-games are overall very positively rated by its players, but they aren't popular yet, not the top 100 popular at least.

Someone may argue "some h-games players conceal their library using privacy settings so that users don't see they play this kind of games". This is true, and not having much data about something is a good enough reason to say we can't compare that to other things. For this reason we can't say it's a popular genre. We don't know. Not at a statistics level at least.

I've been playing video games ever since Pong... Damn. I'm that old?

While I'm certainly no prude and not the morality police, I find this move of Steam's more than a little uncomfortable.

Steam has been many a parent's (and grandparent's) go-to for PC gaming and while there may be "content filters" in the Steam client... they are not foolproof. Even I've stumbled upon several games with adult content that were not blocked by the filters and were regularly featured in "featured & recommended" and in "your discovery queue". Manually ignoring each and every objectionable title seems to be the only way to fix that. And now, Steam makes this choice...

Considering how book stores (and variety stores) must by law keep adult content tucked away behind an opaque barrier well out of reach of children, it would be far better for Valve if they created a separate store (Think: "Steam Red Light") and unique client than go this route as I could see a very significant (and ugly) push-back from parents and politicians alike.

Not smart.

Oh no! Now if you put it that way, Steam has definitely done some errors of judgement upon creating the criteria for these games. Definitely not one of the smartest ideas Steam has done !

Thanks for the in-depth responses, very good.

Hentai would have been my first guess lol