Interfectum
Gold Member
You're right, it shouldn't be... but it is. And until more of society thinks like you Valve is going to have to act accordingly. They have a lot more people to worry about than just what you or I think.
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Valve removes sexual games from Greenlight.
- Thread starter injurai
- Start date
You're right, it shouldn't be... but it is. And until more of society thinks like you Valve is going to have to act accordingly. They have a lot more people to worry about than just what you or I think.
Delusibeta
Banned
No. Largely because as far as I can tell Desura lets petty much everything onto their service that's not outright porn (so Seduce Me is still out in the cold). Ditto Gamersgate, come to think of it.
R_thanatos
Member
Chairmanchuck
Member
The question for me is, what is considered "erotic"? Is it straight up porn, or would something like the implied Sex-scenes from Witcher be considered erotic or like the "action" in God of War?
I just think a lot of Visual Novels, who arent just made for Hentai, like the Type-Moon Ones, Nitroplus-Ones or Overdrive Ones handle the scenes pretty well and maybe you could say "mature". And the sexscenes arent the ones why people buy the Games, I think.
If they cut the scenes, the VN will still be a good one.
Yes, i understand their choice from a business perspective and i've said as much.
That doesn't mean i think it's the right choice though.
Are you seriously arguing that a shop has to sell porn or they are comitting censorship?
Or is your argument that porn games can't be sold for a profit unless steam sells them?
since they sell quite a few games with sexual content it's pretty obvious they are opposed to games where the sexual content is "the meat of the game".
R_thanatos
Member
you need to kick starter this one !!
Interfectum
Gold Member
Probably case by case basis. Neither The Witcher or God of War are based around sexually explicit material. While it may contain some, the games quality allows that stuff to be accepted/tolerated.
SteveWinwood
Member
I just want full on penetration.
Hellsing321
Member
The sex scene writing in most visual novels is laughable at best, especially Type Moon games. Most VN Companies already make All Ages versions of the the games with the sex scenes removed because the rest of the game is usually far stronger than the hamfisted sex scenes with cringe inducing dialogue.
who are you to say what people should do and what not? valve?
they are based (espcially the last one) on killing. thats fine for us it seems.
Felix Lighter
Member
Valve isn't telling you to not play these games. They're just telling you, you'll have to get them elsewhere.
So you expect every store to sell porn? Or just Valve, considering their rich history of selling porn?
Hellsing321
Member
What? I'm saying that if you want anything to change with a business as a customer you need to vote with your wallet and get other like minded people to vote with their wallets too. I don't give a shit what you do, personally.
SteveWinwood
Member
I don't remember them telling you what to do.
Lets be honest here. When you are watching a violent movie or playing a violent game, you are there to experience the media. When you are watching porn, or playing a pornographic game (and I mean a game where the explicit sex scenes are the point, not softcore throwaway stuff in something like the Witcher), you are there to jerk off or spice up sex between you and a partner. Porn is a means to an end. Even if they have great narratives, porn games are always going to have a hard time rising above smut in the eyes of most people, since the majority of users are playing to arouse themselves/get themselves off. People are uncomfortable around explicit sex and porn when it's public because sex and personal sexual desires are private things (for most people). Most of us enjoy pornographic material, but I doubt many people would want to go through their porn collection with their mothers. In fact, most of us like to keep our porn habits neatly tucked away until we have need of them.
Violence is not the same, and lacks the privacy aspect that surrounds sex. Equating sex and violence doesn't really work since sex is personal and violence is not. It doesn't matter how many arguments you make about sex being more positive than violence, a lot of people don't want reminders of pornography in their life outside of the occasions they choose to seek it out in their bedrooms. I know that Europe is more liberal with non-sexual nudity, but I don't remember hearing about hardcore sex being mainstream fare that is shown on daytime television, and projected in (non-adult) theatres next to showings of the Expendables 2 and The Dark Knight Rises over there.
I have no doubt that having pornography on Steam would turn off more people than it would bring in, and I am sure it's not entirely a US thing. Video games are already fighting with the same stigma that comics have in that the medium was heavily aimed at children and teenagers in its early years. People are just starting to except soft-R levels of sexuality in their games. Littering the largest digital store with pornography will do more harm than good in expanding the acceptance of videogames as mature media. Steam has the right to look out for their self interests, even if it is at the expense of some indie games getting greater recognition.
Violence is not the same, and lacks the privacy aspect that surrounds sex. Equating sex and violence doesn't really work since sex is personal and violence is not. It doesn't matter how many arguments you make about sex being more positive than violence, a lot of people don't want reminders of pornography in their life outside of the occasions they choose to seek it out in their bedrooms. I know that Europe is more liberal with non-sexual nudity, but I don't remember hearing about hardcore sex being mainstream fare that is shown on daytime television, and projected in (non-adult) theatres next to showings of the Expendables 2 and The Dark Knight Rises over there.
I have no doubt that having pornography on Steam would turn off more people than it would bring in, and I am sure it's not entirely a US thing. Video games are already fighting with the same stigma that comics have in that the medium was heavily aimed at children and teenagers in its early years. People are just starting to except soft-R levels of sexuality in their games. Littering the largest digital store with pornography will do more harm than good in expanding the acceptance of videogames as mature media. Steam has the right to look out for their self interests, even if it is at the expense of some indie games getting greater recognition.
i didn´t say everywhere.
well i give up. its steam´s right to censor, and the right of people to defend it. no matter how stupid it is.
again, explain why steam not selling porn games is censorship yet other stores not doing it, isn't?
did i say it isn´t?
Yet there are movies like Shortbus or (as i said earlier) Amer, that are focused on sexuality (in Shortbus' case explicitly) without being lowbrow wanking material.
I get what you're saying, but i also think erotism is broader and more complex than "wank or not wank" with a lot of grey areas that can be artistically explored, even through game design.
Something can be kinky and stimulating without requiring you to unzip mid session and so on.
That said, i think there are a lot of games i wouldn't want my mother to see me play.
So you do expect every game store to sell porn games.
Fine, i can live with that opinion.
we have games on steam that deal with erotism even if it isn't their focus. So far the only games turned down were of the wank material sort.
so forbidding sexual games and in the same time allowing games with, i quote, the fun of killing humans will help?
and this is wrong but in the same time their right. get used to complaints about this
Well their statement:
"Steam has never been a leading destination for erotic material. Greenlight doesn't aim to change that."
Seems to be quite broad.
And i think the game in the OP looks decent enough to be more than wanking material, even because if you are there to rub one off, do you really want to go through some puzzlegame of sort? Ofcourse what people do and do not wank to, is highly subjective.
perryfarrell
Member
Good. There's enough smut on the internet as is. I mean, if 2/3rds of internet traffic is porn, these games would probably top the charts on Steam once they were allowed. And that would not be because of any amazing game play or storyline. Steam obviously made the only sane decision.
I'm not saying people are not allowed to complain but i think equaling a store not selling a particular type of product with censorship is silly.
As urbanrats pointed out most people don't play a game while masturbating.
I doubt that the average porn game will ever become mainstream. There's no lack of them and there's no lack of places that sell them. So far they are still rather niche.
Lol, let's say i speak for myself there.
Maybe one day they'll do a Wii-like console with a vibrator and a fleshlight controllers.
kurtrussell
Banned
Unless the term censorship has come to meaning something different in recent times, I don't see why it shouldn't be considered censorship?
I see it as censorship, but not as 'bad' censorship as others here are claiming it to be.
Because they aren't suppressing anything?
Eh, I consider all censorship bad.
Project Greenlight has been pretty exciting to me, in concept, I love the idea of various communities coming together and surfacing games that otherwise would be quite overlooked.
I noticed Manga Gamers' "Go Go Nippon" its a clever little Visual Novel about an American visiting Japan, I rather liked it, voted for it and I hope it gets a little exposure. My hope for this program is that more Doujin style games and Visual Novels get more eyes on them. I think that things like Type-Moon games would go over pretty well if more people got to see them.
I noticed Manga Gamers' "Go Go Nippon" its a clever little Visual Novel about an American visiting Japan, I rather liked it, voted for it and I hope it gets a little exposure. My hope for this program is that more Doujin style games and Visual Novels get more eyes on them. I think that things like Type-Moon games would go over pretty well if more people got to see them.
Steam doesn't suppress porn games, they just don't sell them.
If steam was somehow dominant in that market or if it was impossible to have success with these games without steam you might have a point but there are more than enough sites that sell porn games and have been doing so for a while.
Having to use another shop does not equal censorship.
CadetMahoney
Member
bullets not doing it for you anymore.
Yet there are movies like Shortbus or (as i said earlier) Amer, that are focused on sexuality (in Shortbus' case explicitly) without being lowbrow wanking material.
I get what you're saying, but i also think erotism is broader and more complex than "wank or not wank" with a lot of grey areas that can be artistically explored, even through game design.
Something can be kinky and stimulating without requiring you to unzip mid session and so on.
That said, i think there are a lot of games i wouldn't want my mother to see me play.
Some games deal with sexuality/eroticism without being porn as well. It didn't do the greatest job at it, but Catherine comes to mind. You can craft something that deals with sexuality and erotism without explicit sex. Movies do it all the time. Some, like Shortbus try to blur the line a bit, but the fact that those types of movies are seen as controversial, and are lucky to see release in 50-100 theatres (when something like TDKR is shown in over 4000) shows that even in movies, people aren't comfortable with explicit sex being on display.
Steam is no different than the majority of large retailers who stay away from explicit sexual content (unless it is in print, which is given a pass for some reason). They want to expand their businesses, and being associated with pornography is still counterproductive to that in modern society.
Interesting. I respect your opinion, but I think such sweeping statements about such a widespread issue is misguided. But I guess that's another topic in itself.
It doesn't matter if they're dominant or not. They are not suppressing creators' right of freedom of speech to make a "sex" game nor to publish it.
That assumes that absence of censorship alongside the presence of freedom of speech leads to chaos. Something I don't subscribe to. But yes, that's another topic.
Interfectum
Gold Member
I don't think you know what censorship means in this context.
Hellsing321
Member
Hell why don't we take Evilore to task for not letting us post pictures of porn here? We are the gaming industries guiltiest pleasure after all.
Interfectum
Gold Member
Yeah that shit is hilarious. NeoGAFers pissed at Valve for not allowing porn games, yet posting screenshots from some of the porn games out there would be a bannable offense on here. So... boycott Steam and NeoGAF?
CrazyArcadia
Member
Unfortunately, no recent ones, but.. I always thought Knights of Xentar/Dragon Knight III was amusing. It wasn't really a sex game per se, it was just a Japanese RPG with lots of sexual content, nudity, dirty jokes and what have you but it actually was fun. It wasn't groundbreaking like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games of its time but it was fun. There are still similiar games being produced but most of them aren't getting a translation - actually, in Japan there are quite a few PC only-releases in the tactical strategy or RPG genre that feature kinky stuff yet aren't worse compared to what is already selling on our market in translated form. Also, not all Visual Novels are crappy one way text-with-porn-pics-games - some feature good entertaining storys with many branches and replayability. Then you had old simulation games like Biing! which was a satirical take on managing a hospital with lots of sexual content yet it was fun to play. Nowadays you sometimes get games like Catherine which don't feature real sex scenes or anything but are prominentely featuring sexual themes - if someone would make a game like that and it would feature nudity and more graphic sexual scenes, it would fit as well.
The point made by many in this topic stands, though. Without any means to "push" videogames with erotic content in a larger market, there won't be good games with that kind of content. Why would we even need this? Well...
It usually doesn't just start with the great mature and deep work about sexuality to get the topic moving within a new medium.
Read up on the underground comic scene in America after the 50s. Way before more mature sexual content was released within critically praised mainstream comics, you had to have people pushing the genre forward, and the first step was to be extreme in your content. Many of those old underground comics where quite hardcore in nature, but they paved the way for an understanding that the medium could feature more content than only stuff that's also readable by kids (not topic-wise but in what is shown and what is hidden). Many great artists worked on sex comics in the scene, later getting famous for other stuff; The same with the Heavy Metal comic magazine which helped to push the medium to where it is now.. Yeah, we also got tasteless stuff that way and it opened up the floodgates for all sorts of wank materials, but it also helped the medium getting out of their puberty whereas videogames contentwise are still trapped in the 40s/50s of America in that regard, also still seen as "just entertainment" and sexual content of any kind a scandalous drama. Problem here is that for creating a game, you can't just rely on one gifted artist but you have big teams that need funding so it's more difficult I guess. Of course, sexual content shouldn't be the only content pushed here and sadly, many games still are only able to portray a basic childish fight between good and evil with the most used interaction being to kill said evil. But sexual content and topics might be enough of an important puzzle piece in the maturing of the genre to not just purely shun it off as "wank material".
We know it does, but we still prefer to act like it doesn't. It's still always pushed into the corner here in the US. If they released a retail version of this game how many stores in the US do you think would actually stock it?
This.
Or just be reasonable? As many people surf/lurk Gaf from public systems, family computers, and/or work, they are just being responsible. This thread is evidence that anyone can be offended by anything or any moral position. Reminds me of this:
Steam is only strong in DD.
Amazon sells the games for example. That is a dominant distributor.
Interfectum
Gold Member
Great points all around but I'd like to address this specific issue. I would argue that if Valve did open the Greenlight flood gates to sexuality explicity/porn games that it would do more harm than good in getting these types of games to the mainstream. There would simply be too much trash to wade through not to mention a lot of them taking things 'too far.'
I think it will take injecting 'normal' games with more mature, sexual content and easing the public into it. Unlike comics and things like Heavy Metal magazine, gaming will need more than just pretty erotic pictures... it needs good gameplay.
Interfectum
Gold Member
Actually its mainly because of advertising. I don't think Google will support a site that features pornography. So boycott Google as well.