this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Visual Novels
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I don't think Valve is wrong to have standards, and these particular standards make sense. My issue is with how they communicate with publishers. See JAST's statement on Muramasa, for example: https://jastusa.com/page/the-state-of-muramasa
It seems like JAST is not entirely sure why Valve is firm in barring Muramasa from their platform. I suppose they could be deliberately withholding that information, but it seems unlikely.
Muramasa is not set in high school and clearly isn't indulging in or glorifying sex/violence/sexual violence, and it doesn't seem like Valve has much of an issue with explicit sexual content given how easily I ran into games like Being a Dik without even searching for it, among hundreds of other 18+, sex-heavy games.
The experience is pretty awful for players. You get releases like Subarashiki Hibi, where 10% of the game is available on Steam, and you need to download the patch from the publisher's website. At that point, why bother buying the game on Steam? Why not just buy it directly from the publisher?
It's unfortunate. Valve could make it easy for publishers for being very specific about what content they do not want to see, and what would need to be stripped out, and whether off-site patches can be offered for the offending content. It seems like publishers are just guessing what might set off Valve's alarms.
Yeah, the real issue is the inconsistency in which those standards are applied over at Valve. I believe it has been at least guessed at that there are more than a few puritans on staff applying stricter-than-required scrutiny on visual novels specifically, but don't remember the source for this claim.
On the one hand, it wouldn't surprise me if that were the case, but Valve is usually known for their lack of action or direct opinions. Either way, it seems unlikely this will change any time soon.
People Make Games covers how Valve feels about pornographic content and other sorts of questionable content in this section of their video and why they are so staunchly against being specific about the content they don't want on their platform: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo&t=35m41s