SEX DOESN'T SELL

STEAM draws a line on steamy content in games

- Rich Stanton

The major digital storefronts have faced reckonings in recent years, and haven’t always come out of them smelling like roses. This is partly because they have kicked certain decisions into the long grass, but are now being forced to come down one way or another. The other side, sadly, comes down to political pressure to de-list games that certain regimes, in this case the Chinese communist party, don’t like.

Recent months have seen some of these issues come to a head when Valve, notoriously reluctant to intervene in the content available on Steam, refused to sell a game called Super Seducer 3. SS3 is a full-motion video offering that uses multiple-choice dialogue for the player to go through dates with women.

These are, in other words, rather shoddy FMV games about ‘pickup culture’ and are fronted by one La Ruina, who, representing the developer, posted various communications with Valve about why the game had been refused by Steam. Valve’s reason was, “Steam does not ship sexually explicit images of real people.” La Ruina contends that, with 61,000 Steam wishlists for the game, he is “ready to take a butcher knife to the game” and that it would be “easy enough” to edit it to be as “safe” as other FMV games on Steam, removing the explicit imagery in question. In response, the Valve representative reiterated the company’s decision to neither “sell the game or re-review it”.

BACK FROM THE GRAVE