Valve Removes a Game All About Rape from Steam

Okay, so, heads up, this whole story is kind of gross, so if you’re triggered by gross stuff, the TL;DR is that a super gross game tried to get on Steam by exploiting their new “hands-off” policy on games with violence and sexual content, but it didn’t work and now the game is banned.

So. The longer version is that a few days ago, a new “visual novel” appeared on Steam as a pre-order, and it was called Rape Day. This game was about you, a psychopath, killing, torturing, abusing, and raping women in a post-apocalyptic world. And the images of the game displayed on the Steam page made it pretty clear this was not a guy who was keen on restraint because it was all very, very overt. Also kind of ugly because the 3D models were terrible, but that’s beside the point.

The long and the short of it is that by Steam’s new rules, that game should have been okay to sell. It was marked as adult, there weren’t any scenes that involved or promoted child abuse, and it wasn’t “illegal” or “trolling,” so technically it could have been sold there. However, after a lengthy review process and getting attention for just how awful it was, eventually Valve stepped in and removed the game from the store. Someone had finally tested their new policy, and it sort of failed.

Valve's Erik Johnson explained their reasoning:

"Much of our policy around what we distribute is, and must be, reactionary — we simply have to wait and see what comes to us via Steam Direct. We then have to make a judgement call about any risk it puts to Valve, our developer partners, or our customers. After significant fact-finding and discussion, we think 'Rape Day' poses unknown costs and risks and therefore won't be on Steam."

So the question you have to ask is if this is a good or a bad thing? I guess that depends on if you value common sense content control vs free speech. I’m not going to answer it for you, but it’s certainly a question worth… considering.