Steam is reportedly cracking down on "scantily clad cartoon women" in its online gane platform. Publishers of adult-themed anime visual novels say they've been told to remove offending titles or leave town.
"It's an anime titty holocaust," HuniePot, the developer of HuniePop, a match-3 puzzle game where players also chat up busty anime girls, said in a tweet. Thursday night, HuniePot tweeted that it received an email from Valve, the company that operates Steam, saying that HuniePop, "violates the rules & guidelines for pornographic content on Steam and will be removed from the store unless the game is updated to remove said content." MangaGamer, a company that localizes and publishes several Japanese visual novels, told Motherboard in an email that it received a notice from Valve Thursday morning for its game Kindred Spirits.
Steam is, in other words, panicking and excluding a genre from its platform without expanation. It's allegedly warned at least one publisher over material they don't even publish on Steam.
These seems to be a general unwillingness to directly address two facts at hand:
1. Much of the material in question depicts childlike characters in sexual contexts.
2. Some of the people selling it are misogynists and some of the games and fandoms are tinderboxes of rage and entitlement.
Instead, we have vague objections to vague policies. This enables Steam to push out anything superficially similar, a pattern that could later be used to push out sexual and political minorities and anything else that might make trouble in the serene walled gardens of content.
