What Steam operators Valve are and aren’t prepared to allow onto their storefront has been a major talking point for the past year or so, especially when it comes to mature or sexually-themed content. Our Edwin’s done some fine reporting on the topic and how it relates to payment processors, as well as delving into individual cases like Santa Ragione’s Horses.
Now, the developers of point-and-click comedy Earth Must Die say things looked “unclear” for a bit in terms of whether they’d be able to launch on Steam, with the platform then offering a thumbs up after reviewing footage of an “alien orgy”.
“Up until a few days ago, it was unclear if we were actually going to be allowed to launch Earth Must Die on Steam, as Valve had told us that they were ‘unable to verify’ the context of the alien orgy,” publishers No More Robots told Painting Collection Gamer. “We were required to record and send footage of said orgy for their verification.”
Thankfully, once that footage was sent over, approval was forthcoming. That said, whether on Valve’s orders or by No More Robots’ own volition, Earth Must Die’s Steam page bears a mature content warning specifying that “there is a puzzle that takes place in an alien adult bookshop, and an alien orgy depicted as a gyrating lump on the floor”.
As much as it’s funny to imagine a Valve staffer examining footage of cartoon extraterrestrials going at it, No More Robots’ retelling of the events paints what’s turned into an amusing anecdote as something that could potentially have thrown a major spanner in the works. If games that dabble in jokey depictions of shagging face that sort of gaze into the void, right up until they’re sure Valve are 100% satisfied, one can only imagine the uncertainty more serious explorations of mature themes might encounter.
On one hand, Valve have a right to apply the rules they decide to enforce on their storefront, even if said storefront’s domination of the PC space makes such calls far weightier than they might otherwise be. On the other, as Edwin’s reported, the matter of credit card companies and payment processors influencing what those rules – and the rules of other storefronts – are when it comes specifically to adult content complicates the matter significantly.
At least in this case, the alien orgy made it through whatever contextual hoops it needed, so that No More Robots’ game about British actors and comics quipping their way through a tale about a martian ruler doing quirky stuff could drop as planned this week.
No More Robots,Action Adventure,PC,Side view,RPG,Single Player,Point and Click,Earth Must Die#Earth #Die #publishers #quotalien #orgy #depicted #gyrating #lump #floorquot #left #game039s #Steam #launch #quotunclearquot1769610360
