CYBERSPACE—The video game retail platform Steam appeared last week to be pulling back from its reputation as what the pop culture site Bleeding Cool called “a lawless corner of the gaming internet,” where racy, even explicit games may find a home. The site reportedly notified makers of four Japanese-anime-style games with some adult themes and visuals that they would be pulled from the site.
The makers of the games Hunie Pop, Mutiny, Tropical Liquor and Kindred Spirits on the Roof reportedly received notices that their games had been “flagged” as containing porn, and that the developers had two weeks to either alter their games to remove the supposedly offending content or be deleted from the site.
In a Twitter posting last week, the developer of Tropical Liquor called the potential deletions of the risque games “an anime titty holocaust.”
As AVN.com reported in December, last year Steam deleted a game entitled Virtual Reality Girls because the dancing VR girls in the game came with a “nude option,” allowing viewers to watch the animated dancers go through their routines without clothing.
But by Monday, Steam had apparently backtracked on its decision to remove or censor the anime “porn” games, with the developers who had received warnings last week now being sent new messages from Valve, Steam’s parent company, saying that they “will be provided with specific feedback if there are concerns about the game's content.”
The move to issue warnings about the anime games caught the developers off-guard, after the four games had resided on the Steam site for several months, with developers cooperating with Valve to be sure that the racy content of the games stopped short of being classified as porn.
So what happened? Though there has been no confirmation of the claim, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media) posted a message on its web site claiming “victory” after news of the impending deletions was reported last week.
The technology news site Geek Wire calls Steam “the world’s most powerful PC game distribution platform,” and reported that the gaming “app store” site claims 67 million monthly active users.
Image via HuniePop Screen Capture
