"House Party" game removed from Steam Early Access over "pornography".

[Skywatcher]

And Steam has yet to tell the publisher what the offending content is so they don’t really know what needs to be changed.

“I asked Valve for clarification on the offending content, and they haven’t replied yet, but they’ve been very nice up this point and simply told me that they would re-enable the game after testing the modifications requested (forcefully enabling an in-game censor during certain scenes regardless of the user’s preference setting) to ensure there is no more offending content. I know there are many games with nudity, and there are also games with sex scenes as well, including really popular titles, so it’s all rather confusing and I don’t know exactly where the line is or what in particular I should be censoring.”

House Party’s depiction of nudity and sex is far from tasteful, but the sudden removal after weeks of being on sale points to flaws in Steam’s verification process. If Steam has a rule about explicit content, why wasn’t the content flagged before House Party was allowed on the store in the first place? And does its sudden removal mean simulated sex is a no-go, period?

I should’ve bought it when I had the chance.

[Chronos]

I should’ve bought it when I had the chance.

Depends. Was it removed from the Steam store, or was it removed from Steam?

[Skywatcher]

@Chronos

Depends. Was it removed from the Steam store, or was it removed from Steam?

Store. Reportedly those who bought it can still play.

[Skywatcher]

Here’s the Greenlight page for the game, the beta (Win, Mac, Linux) for which is available via the publisher’s website for free although I’m sure they’d prefer a few bucks sent their way. I was going to send a few bucks but it doesn’t like my debit card for some reason.

[Jophiel]

The community screenshots for the game looked about as sexy as mashing a couple Barbie dolls together but I suppose someone has to break the ground and it’s not going to be someone pouring millions of dollars into a AAA-Title sex game just so Steam can ban it. (There’s a “XXX” joke there somewhere)

Amusingly, Steam once pulled a censored version of Seduce Me off Greenlight for content although it’s positively tame by today’s standards of a million erotic visual novels and games like HuniPop (which was actually a pretty good, and subversive, game)

[BigT]

Probably better to have a censored version on Steam with easily google-able results on how to change something to remove the censorship.

I do find it weird that prudery is going up in certain contexts, instead of down. Just put an 18+ section and be done with it. The M rating does exist, after all.