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Steam bans adult visual novel months after release, raising censorship fears

Patterson

Member
Not comparable at all. Murdering someone can be justified. The other? Fuck no. You can see the error in your logic right?
Good point.

Like I said, I’m trying to look at it objectively, but I think this is a good distinction.
 
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GreenAlien

Member
It's pretty silly when you think about it tho, like what's even the point of having the game altogether if it's censored THAT hard. It's not even the same product anymore at all.
A lot of adult visual novels.. are just porn..
However, there are also a lot that are more like real novels with the occasional spicy scene.
 
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JSoup

Banned
This is going to effect other adult games that aren't VNs as well. Castle Succubus was cleared for a steam release after years of fighting with them and having to sell on a platform that ensures they won't make a dime.
 

Bkdk

Member
US does have some very irrational law considering sexual fiction, that's why business usually just don't wanna deal with this at all. It's very sad and pure hypocrisy as dismembering is totally fine.
 
Ah yes, just make your childish faced high school freshmen have huge knockers and suddenly it's totally not about fucking kids.
Someone is having trouble with differentiating between fiction and reality... still have yet to hear from you about non-anime games that have minors having intercourse...

Or could you be having some sort of agenda against the anime genre, in general, that anything anime = Pedophilia?
 

Guilty_AI

Member

Worst part of this is that other higher profile platforms won't even accept them. Epic made their stance very clear and GOG has a strange selection proccess. Theres itch io, but they're not a good marketplace for visibility. Honestly, it would be for the best if valve just got their shit together, but i doubt it considering this immediate rejection towards anime stuff seems to be a deep-rooted thing within some americans, as we can see in this very thread.
 
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Ah yes, just make your childish faced high school freshmen have huge knockers and suddenly it's totally not about fucking kids.
The game was available on Steam for close to 8 months and contained no fucking at all.

Not comparable at all. Murdering someone can be justified. The other? Fuck no. You can see the error in your logic right?
Murdering someone may be justified in some cases, but there is no shortage of games where it definitely isn't most or even all of the time. How many of the people you kill during your average GTA playthrough are guilty of something that would have justified their murder in the real world? Not that many, I'd assume. Games like that are deliberately designed to make players participate in acts and behavior that wouldn't be okay in real life under any circumstances. I mean, that's the entire point of GTA: being a criminal who commits crimes and then gets rewarded for it. But there's nothing wrong with that. Not because killing someone is sometimes justified, but because neither the crimes nor the victims are real.

Also, if you really want to stick with the real life analogies, even the uncensored version of Bokuten only features relationships between characters who are roughly the same age. Even if you assume they are all underage, it still wouldn't constitute a crime.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
What's next then? Wanna ban Persona too?
The game got banned because they included pornographic content of these characters in the game files.

If they hadn't done that, they'd have been fine.

So go clutch your pearls somewhere else. Nobody is calling for the banning of all games featuring dating and high school kids, luckily for you.

I absolutely love how your argument started with "this can't be a pedo game because the teenagers have HUGE knockers" to "the game has no fucking at all" lol
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
All of this is highly irrelevant.

Fictional depictions of sexualized minors shouldn't be banned anyway. Unlike with actual child pornography, there is no victim involved. It is a reaction based purely on emotion rather than logic or reason.
And no store should be forced to sell sexualized depictions of minors.

So what you said is highly irrelevant.
 

Happosai

Hold onto your panties
I'm not sure why people get so emotional about censoring a visual novel doujin or whatever style on Steam? Just a suggestion, but rather than complain...People could use that rage to make their own.


This will require some ambition. But yeah, make the story as frivolous or crazy as you want.
 
The game got banned because they included pornographic content of these characters in the game files.

If they hadn't done that, they'd have been fine.
The publisher has said that this isn't true, and I'm willing to believe them, considering that Valve have leveled the exact same accusations at two of their earlier games in the past, and they turned out to have been wrong both times.

I absolutely love how your argument started with "this can't be a pedo game because the teenagers have HUGE knockers" to "the game has no fucking at all" lol
You were the one who said it was a game about fucking children. Why wouldn't I point out that the game doesn't contain any fucking?
 
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Kdad

Member
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies."

It is censorship, they're allowed, but it's still censorship.


A company choosing what to carry in their store is motivated by profit and what is best for their own business....making economic choices for your business is NOT censorship, it is economics. The definition you quoted, private institutions isn't refering to retail businesses, it is referring to pressure groups and lobbyists.

I can't get a copy of <insert any book/album/videogame/movie> or a homemade buger froma local cook at Burger King...is BK censoring or merely making economic choices...its no diffrent than Valve not carrying certain games. Again, if Valves implementation is haphazard and inconsistent, developers have a problem with that and it should be addressed...but it isn't censorship.
 

YCoCg

Member
Lot of suspect motherfuckers in this thread "oh so violence is ok but pedophilia isn't?", ...of course, that's the way society is, crying about not being able to play weeb pedo games isn't a good look and questioning why it's treated different to violence just makes you look a tool. Why don't you also cry about how unfairly pedophiles are treated in society or in the prison system?
 

Sophist

Member
This isn't really new though, steam has had this bipolar relationship with VNs for some time now. I guess its just a cultural issue, i notice americans in general tend to be really sensitive towards anime stuff.

Funnily, USA were the only country with Austria to defend Japanese's lolicon against the united nations.

 
S

SLoWMoTIoN

Unconfirmed Member
Uh, no? Murder does not mean kill. Murder is never justified.
Semantics. What you may call self defense at the end of the day others may call murder. The point was clearly that there is absolutely no way to justify the other action even when compared to taking a life.
 

GreenAlien

Member
I can justify "fucking" virtual highschoolers or family members or furries or even unwilling participants the same why I can justify killing&torturing innocents. It's not real, no one was harmed, so why not.
I don't need to justify it in real life, because I'm not doing anything of the sort in real life. I can do all that stuff in games and still think people doing it to real humans are disgusting criminal scum.

I think there might be a point where graphics & AI get so realistic in VR, you will have to be seriously worried about the mental health of people that keep messing with innocent NPCs, but we are generally not there yet, especially not with anime-style games.

until then, just keep doing your thing.


(just make sure you feel guilty afterwards and log in to the internet and tell people how evil and morally corrupt they are, otherwise you are doing it wrong.)





--------------
anyway, turns out they did have some left over nudity in their game files and Valve wasn't making it up.
 
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Guilty_AI

Member
Funnily, USA were the only country with Austria to defend Japanese's lolicon against the united nations.

Funny indeed. I didn't expect this considering people from the states tend to pretty vocal about this stuff. For example, here on GAF i know an user who got perma banned for voicing pretty much the exact same arguments presented by these countries as indicated on the article.
 
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https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2020/08/bokuten-why-i-became-an-angel-unbanned-from-steam/114141/

On July 29th, 2020 Valve banned the all-ages version of the visual novel Bokuten: Why I Became An Angel from developer Overdrive and publisher MangaGamer. No actual reason was given for the ban initially, but later Valve’s PR rep, Doug Lombardi, explained why it was banned and it was due to some H-scenes still being left in the files of the all-ages version of the game, even though you needed third-party tools to access them. This led to MangaGamer working with Valve to patch Bokuten, and now the game is back on the Steam store.
 

Tremmy

Neo Member
I'm happy to see it was unbanned. Having actually read Bokuten, it definitely isn't the child porn fest this thread would portray it out to be. Its a real shame to see it just chalked up as such when its nowhere even close. Its actually defined as an utsuge and its basically a story set out to make you cry and be depressed. The porn is barely a factor at all in the long run of it all. There are plenty of shameless loli titles out there that deserve scrutiny, but bokuten wasn't one of them.
 

Wonko_C

Member
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