Steam’s capricious pornography rules hurt small game developers the most

Drawing clear lines and definitions around obscenity, pornographic content, and art has always been a complicated business. The current guidance from US Supreme Court on the matter of obscenity is “I know it when I see it,” a standard that relies more on intuition than specificity. For online platforms and distributors, it’s equally murky territory — and one where ambiguity can have real consequences, particularly for smaller creators.

Steam, the largest online distributor of video games on the planet (which puts it in the running for largest distributor, period), is no stranger to these concerns. While nudity is seemingly permitted on the service, pornography is not — a fuzzy distinction that has led to confusion and inconsistent enforcement of their rules for years, particularly around smaller games that feature sexual content.

The latest development came last Friday, when several developers of visual novels, along with similarly aesthetically themed anime games, said they had received email notices from Steam that their games had been reported for pornographic content, and they had two weeks to remove it or the games would be removed from the platform entirely. Several developers expressed surprise, particularly because they considered their games to be sexy, but not pornographic.

THE NOTICES ONLY RAISED MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT STEAM’S IRREGULAR APPLICATION OF VAGUE RULES

Two days later, the same creators received another email, equally as baffling: their content would not be removed after all. Have a nice day. Which raises the question: what exactly is going on over at Steam? (Valve has not responded to multiple requests for comment by The Verge.) The notices and their retraction not only raised more questions about Steam’s irregular application of vague rules, but about their particular focus on visual novels, a genre that is especially vulnerable to this sort of content-based censorship.

Originating in Japan during the early 1990s, visual novels are interactive experiences created from static images and written narrative, often offering choices to the player that shape how the story goes. They are typically focused on interpersonal dynamics, which has made them one of the few places in games where complex romantic and sexual narratives have been able to flourish.

This is a double-edged sword, however, particularly in relation to Steam’s rules and the current perception of visual novels within the games industry. The genre is still very niche in the West, with large-scale localization only beginning in the past few years. Before that, most titles that did come out — largely simple, easy-to-translate visual novels with heavy sexual content — weren’t necessarily representative of the genre as a whole, which also deals in drama, romance, science fiction, horror and many other kinds of storytelling. Because of the erotic bent of the offerings made available in the West, however, the whole genre is often perceived as pornography and not much else.

”There’s a stigma that we’re growing out of,” says Peter “Taosym” Rasmussen, an artist and the owner of Lupiesoft, a Western visual novel development team whose game Mutiny!! received a takedown notice from Valve. “It’s based on what gets translated into English from Japan. Typically those are the games that they expect to sell the best, that have extremely high niche appeal. And porn has extremely high niche appeal.”

The pigeonholing of visual novels as porn isn’t the only perceptual issue facing visual novels; because of their limited gameplay, visual novels are also often dismissed as “not real games” by mainstream gaming fans, an assessment some developers say has been echoed by Steam itself.

“I’M HONESTLY NOT SURE HOW MUCH STEAM KNOWS OR CARES ABOUT VISUAL NOVELS”

“I’m honestly not sure how much Steam knows or cares about visual novels,” says John Pickett, director of public relations for MangaGamer, a publisher of localized visual novels that also received a takedown notice. He says that when MangaGamer first approached Steam to get the company’s products listed — prior to the now-defunct Steam Greenlight system that put indie games on the service up to community vote — their visual novels were rejected “because ‘they aren’t games.’” After Steam Greenlight launched and MangaGamer reentered its titles, “they passed through to full approval relatively quickly (within a year),” says Pickett. “Valve did express their surprise to us when they saw that our visual novels had passed — they never expected people to be interested in them at all.”

While the market for visual novels remains small in United States, with only a marginal sampling of Japanese VNs getting localized, a burgeoning indie scene has emerged in the West over the past few years. In particular, LGBT creators and audiences have been drawn to the genre, seeing it as a space to explore romantic and social dynamics in a non-heteronormative setting.