Calling it a metroidvania though would be pretty dishonest for two reasons;
- Metroidvanias usually have very little storyline, much like the original Metroid games
- Metroidvanias are, at their core, about getting upgrades to equipment to backtrack to earlier areas where you couldn't go any farther without those upgrades; in our game, once you beat a level, you can't go back to it, and none of the upgrades (powerups etc.) you get allow you access to areas you couldn't previously access, as you can access any area in any map with whatever abilities you've gained up to that point just by naturally going through the game
This list seems to be missing a lot of use cases, putting aside copyrighted materials as one, I can think of a few examples that don't really fall under this.
(Where are you quoting these rules by the way? this feels more like a thumb in the air feelies thing)
Oh, to be clear, I was talking about hentai games, of course things like copyright come into play.
However, for copyright issues, that isn't
Steam that will usually be an issue, it's the
company themselves; if the company doesn't file a DMCA, you're actually in the clear, but they'll file it 99 times out of 100 if you're on steam with it, sooo...
As far as the rules themselves, Steam has went on record saying those things effectively; here's a screencap for it.
There's another screencap that specifically lists this out in the rules, but I've searched for it for 20 minutes now and can't find it, unfortunately.
You could argue Rapeday is a Troll or For-shock value game but Valve's own statement doesn't suggest that -
It simply says, and I'm quoting here:
"Yea fuck this dumpster fire - peace yo" -
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240304050758
I dunno, it makes it pretty clear to me that they said "they don't think they can help the game out" aka "they can't really be a good sales platform for it", plus the "unknown costs and risks", both equate to them seeing it as a game purely made for shock value and not a game meant to be a
game, etc.
But I have to think that if the puritans came for your game, I doubt your RPGCodex post about "Actually when you get fucked by the tree alien it's only dub-con" would appease the media or twitter mob. I can picture all your famous voice actor's running for the hills denouncing this game as well.
If the puritans came for my game, there's countless other forms of media that are widely accepted in the mainstream with far, far more brutal and violent sex scenes than anything in our game (especially since again, there is literally no violence coupled with the sex anywhere in it).
Orange is the New Black and Game of Thrones for two examples; both of them contain multiple sex scenes far more "rape" than anything our game even comes close to, and people have no issue with those.
The big difference here is that much like GoT and OitNB, you can strip all of the NSFW content out of those shows and they would still function as shows; the core factor isn't the NSFW.
The same goes for our game; we'll have a SFW toggle in the game that completely strips out all the NSFW content, and it will still function just fine as a regular game, given that the sex content isn't the core, sole focus (it's only about 5% of the content in the game, despite 100+ animations).
With Rape Day though, the sex content and violent sex
was the focus of the game; it's in the title, even.
And I mean, even on Steam as it is, there are far, far more extreme games; there's games where women get beaten unconscious then gangraped repeatedly, there's games where women get impregnated and sold into sex slavery for breeding, etc. and they've been up for years as best sellers making 6-figures and getting mainstream attention in online magazines, so if those games aren't cancelled by now, I'm pretty sure we'd be safe given the radically lower amount of extremism in ours.
(TL;DR - Game with zero nudity or sex but depicts real people instead of 3D / 2D graphics)
At bare minimum you'd need to update your best-guess-list - or do you differentiate between ban and a "will never be accepted on store - stop asking" ?
I
really should have specified I was talking about hentai games, haha.
This is all a result of just working in the industry and a lot of "common sense things" for people working in it, you forget to make blatant in your posts.
It's like if you were a cook, it would just be common sense for a chef to say, pre-bake this or that item so they may leave it out of the cooking instructions when telling someone how to make something, etc.
But yeah, real life pornography and real life nudity has always been banned on Steam and most other platforms similar to it, for one major reason; there's a ton of legality that goes into effect when you're dealing with real people's bodies.
Steam also notes this in their ToS too, because there's just far too much problems that can arise; for example,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guy_Game#Lawsuit could happen. Wasn't a huge deal back when it happened, but can you imagine the headlines nowadays?
Even if they're just in lingerie, the possibility is real, and the legal risk is massive.
Those looking for interesting gameplay + relatively vanilla content are a trully oppresed class. But some day we will eliminate all degeneracy and enjoy a Vanillareich of a thousand years.
Keep an eye out for one of our games coming after we're done with Future Fragments called Eroding Ego. 100% consensual scenes, relatively vanilla, no monsters, no demons, no crazy things, just a sci-fi plotline with a male protagonist, 5 women to possibly get with, and a mystery plot.
The gameplay is a combination of the mines in Stardew Valley (top down, 2D pixel art) with an adventure/investigative mode (isometric, 2D still) and around 40 or so endings too.
