Pulling Upcoming Titles

[blue.baron]

For the second time this month, a game on my wishlist was removed by Steam. In the latest case, just days short of its release. No explanation given. No avenue to question or protest offered. No possibility of appeal.

These were both adult titles. The second episode of Tales From the Unending Void, and the lesbian-themed AVN, Summer in the City.

You may disapprove of sexually explicit games. Fine. If Steam had a policy against such material, I could understand. Yet this does not represent a change a policy. This is not even about the nature of the games themselves. Rather, this is about pressure put upon payment providers to dictate what a group of campaigning individuals believe you should and should not have access to.

Morality is subjective. It's certainly not science. Many a moral panic has targeted video games as the source of social ills. Comic books too. Dungeons and Dragons was the target at one time. All proved to be groundless. Video game violence does not create more real life violence. D&D is not satanic and does not undermine mainstream religion. Comic books do not undermine the morals of youth. And pixel sex does nothing to encourage warped or wholly unacceptable behavior among people in their actual lives.

TLDR: If you allow outside self-righteous pressure groups to determine what games you're allowed to play in any genre, that's a power no unelected group should have. It's obedience in advance. Nothing good comes from that.

[Draug]

Originally posted by KaveMan:

Originally posted by blue.baron:

You may disapprove of sexually explicit games. Fine. If Steam had a policy against such material, I could understand.

There has always been a policy against sexually explicit content. It's time to comprehend it.

No excuses.

Steam had had no such policy.

[The End]

Originally posted by blue.baron:

For the second time this month, a game on my wishlist was removed by Steam. These were both adult titles.

I'm just happy to see that Valve is cleaning up this mess. There are so many other places where lewd games can be sold. IMO. they do not belong on Steam and never has.

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

You know what's ridiculous? They take crazy fee (30%) and give almost nothing in return

The platform Valve has do give a ton of stuff the developer wont get elsewhere. So saying "give almost nothing in return" is simply not true.

/Have a nice day.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

You know what's ridiculous? They take crazy fee (30%) and give almost nothing in return

Except access to the single largest video game market on the planet.

[Draug]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

Originally posted by The End:

The platform Valve has do give a ton of stuff the developer wont get elsewhere. So saying "give almost nothing in return" is simply not true.

For instance? Ads aside

Cloud saves, free access to SDK's and API's, huge player base, anti-cheat and other security, integrated community hubs, and user created content (workshop), access to global payment system, etc...

[HikariLight]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

You know what's ridiculous? They take crazy fee (30%) and give almost nothing in return

That 30% is the industry standard.
Steam is not the only one who uses it.
It also goes to pay for tons of features, some features regular users don't see.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

Originally posted by AmsterdamHeavy:

Except access to the single largest video game market on the planet.

People advertise games on twitch these days too. OFC it doesn't apply to adult content. But Steam isn't the only way to let people know about your game

There are 30M people online now.

There is no other market available to game developers that provides that reach. If they did not see value in the 30% they wouldnt sell their product here.

The reality is that just access to all of those potential customers is worth the 30% before anything else is added in.

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

Originally posted by The End:

The platform Valve has do give a ton of stuff the developer wont get elsewhere. So saying "give almost nothing in return" is simply not true.

For instance? Ads aside
Cause building a website where someone logs in-> pays -> downloads the game isn't a big deal. Especially for 30%

There's a lot of stuff Valve provides in exchange for that industry-standard 30%.

[Draug]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

Originally posted by Draug:

Cloud saves, free access to SDK's, huge player base, anti-cheat and other security, integrated community hubs, and user created content (workshop), access to global payment system, etc...

cloud save is matter of uploading/downloading a file to back-end on shutdown/startup
SDK is nothing if you don't use Steam in the first place
player base is specific to a game, not marketplace
anti-cheat - don't make me laugh
user created content (workshop) - there is nexus for that, for free BTW
access to global payment system - there are SDKs for that. IDK about legislation stuff

The stuff you so easily dismiss, costs money.

SDK's and API's are needed to do many things game wise, or the tools written from scratch (lol) which costs money in the form of time and resources.

[Nev Nev]

Originally posted by blue.baron:

TLDR: If you allow outside self-righteous pressure groups to determine what games you're allowed to play in any genre, that's a power no unelected group should have. It's obedience in advance. Nothing good comes from that.

People do allow it though. Take Youtube videos that draw up hate for a game they see as "DEI" or "woke". Before you know it you have hordes of people on message boards attacking the game's "woke" hurting it's sales and trying to destroy those games for anyone that might enjoy them. Funny thing is it's usually not even true, people are just impressionable.

The self-righteous pressure, as you call it, will always be around. That's humanity. It's humanity to destroy and tear down. They only want to save the path of the side they were led down.

You really want to stop that? Good luck.

[pckirk]

Steam also has over 200+ servers, and they are adding 150 more over the next 2.5 years.

The bandwidth alone for all servers in all countries, not cheep in anyway.... upkeep is not cheap. plus all of the websites and sub domains...

[Draug]

Originally posted by HikariLight:

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

You know what's ridiculous? They take crazy fee (30%) and give almost nothing in return

That 30% is the industry standard.
Steam is not the only one who uses it.
It also goes to pay for tons of features, some features regular users don't see.

I would not call 30% the industry standard. It used to be back when games were sold in stores, then the take was 30% for the store and 70% that was further divided by publisher, developer, console maker (if it was on a console) etc...

These days the big players take 30% (Steam, Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation, Apple store, Google Play store, Amazon, etc...)

while the little fries take a lower percentage in an effort to get people to publish to their platform even though they can't offer the benefits the big boys do. For example like Itch.io takes 10%, Epic charges 12%, etc...

[datCookie]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

Originally posted by Haruspex:

There's a lot of stuff Valve provides in exchange for that industry-standard 30%.

Half of these features can be easily implemented without a marketplace for less than 30%, unless the developers are very small. The other half is absolutely useless for the vast majority of cases.

VAC is a meme

Then make your own platform if it's all so easy to do.

You're reaching for any excuse to hate Steam in any thread you can. The platform isn't perfect, but pretending it offers virtually nothing is hilariously wrong.

[Chompman]

You are placing blame on the wrong company as this is on the payment services that caused this and you need to file complaints there as steam has to follow their rules if they wish to continue to use their service and stay in business.

[Kyrus86]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

Originally posted by Haruspex:

There's a lot of stuff Valve provides in exchange for that industry-standard 30%.

Half of these features can be easily implemented without a marketplace for less than 30%, unless the sales/budget are very small. The other half is absolutely useless for the vast majority of cases.

VAC is a meme

Steam doesn't force any dev to use their platform. They can go to Epic, Ubisoft, EA or GoG.
So if they decide to use the Steam platform they must be fine with the conditions regardless of what you think.

[HikariLight]

Originally posted by Scamdiver:

Originally posted by Haruspex:

There's a lot of stuff Valve provides in exchange for that industry-standard 30%.

Half of these features can be easily implemented without marketplace for less than 30%. The other half is absolutely useless.

VAC is a meme

And Epic is a liar.
They promised by taking only 12%, they would be able to lower prices.

Guess what didn't happen? No savings, because Epic doesn't set the prices.

Epic also has little on the side of features due to lack of funding do to taking such a small cut.