Indie game dev Robert Yang has a novel approach to re-releasing remastered versions of his queer experimental games. First spotted by PC Gamer, Radiator Forever is a project Yang calls “gay as a service,” a cheeky (heh!) twist on “games as a service” where instead of releasing the updated games with their own individual store pages, he’s bundled the titles together and made them free with the promise to periodically update the package with new content. The problem, though, as he writes on his blog, is that with Steam’s inconsistent and under-explained crackdown on adult games on its platform, hardly anyone interested in the kind of art Yang makes will be able to find it.
“Unfortunately, Valve has tagged my game as ‘frequent nudity and sexual content’ and now hides it from most Steam users,” Yang wrote on his blog. “While I was careful to avoid explicit nudity, compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor.”
If it were up to Yang, he’d bypass Steam altogether. But he wrote that with the way itch.io has stopped hosting adult games on its platform due to pressure from payment processors that was driven largely by anti-porn advocates, “it’s time for me to go crawling back to Steam.” It’s the number-one platform for PC games, with a reach several times larger than itch.io. But just like itch.io, Steam is beholden to its payment processors like Stripe and Paypal. Eager to avoid a scenario in which payment processors might yank their services, Steam implements an overly broad content review process that hides Yang’s games from the majority of Steam’s users. “Steam content reviewers have decided the game’s general ‘nature’ was just too gay, regardless of my good faith efforts,” Yang wrote.
Yang argues it’s an arbitrary and hypocritical system, one that punishes indie games with something to say like while more popular games (i.e. the AAA money-makers) don’t get such scrutiny. “Valve loves it when Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 throw customizable genitals at you in the first five minutes,” Yang wrote. “But of course I can’t, because I actually have something to say about genitals!”