It already is a unique art form. This is not defined by the commercial availability, and this game wouldn’t be the first art piece that understands controversy as part of its essence.
Y’all need to read what CSAM is. Questionable or objectionable art isn’t CSAM in the same sense that drawing a murder isn’t murder and drawing Noncon isn’t rape.
Depiction isn’t harm, if it was damn near all literature would be in the same category.
Let’s not go down that slippery slope.
Books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume would be considered abuse material on such an asinine slope.
Y’all need to read what CSAM is. Questionable or objectionable art isn’t CSAM in the same sense that drawing a murder isn’t murder and drawing Noncon isn’t rape.
it’s literally legally defined as CSAM in most western countries. and I probably wouldn’t be arguing otherwise, since it looks like the other dude who did that got all his posts deleted by the mod.
drawing a murder isn’t murder and drawing Noncon isn’t rape.
Drawing people having sex isn’t sex, but it is porn. Verbally attacking someone isn’t assault, but it can be abuse. Drawing a comic where someone tortures and then kills the president of the United States isn’t murder, but it will get the FBI knocking on your door.
content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor
I’m assuming they don’t mean a suggestive camera pan, but actually something problematic on screen, in which case, I totally support the ban. Devs were given the opportunity to change it, and they said no. Ban away imho. The fact that this is considered controversial is pretty disturbing to me.
The devs were not told what needed to change even after asking, so they tried to remove anything that they suspected could be taken the wrong way, asked for reconsideration or clarification, but receive no response.
They submitted to steam, who asked for a preliminary build of the game (one would assume due to concerns about the content). The build provided included a small child reading a naked man like a horse.
Steam denied the game based on the inclusion of CSAM, and advised the devs directly of this decision in what the devs call “an automated email”, as if steam is out there personally hand writing rejection letters for every failed game out there.
The devs claim to have changed the scene, but it seems that Steam has a zero-tolerance policy on games that feature CSAM. And, I mean, Fair.
It seems a stretch to call (at least as far as I understand it), a naked (fictional) underage character riding a horse CSAM? Sure, it’s definitely not in good taste, but… CSAM?
CSAM is child abuse, there are no children here. Is there a clear line between someone drawing and actual real child abuse? Because, IMHO, there definitely should be.
I agree that steam shouldn’t allow such content, we don’t want it, but I definitely disagree with the semantics here.
You are, it wasn’t a horse in the build they sent to Steam, it was a naked man. If you have a naked girl on a horse I think that qualifies too, you have an underage character that’s naked.
Someone who claimed to have played the game said the privates were sensored.
The game concept feels very political, not sexual from what I am hearing.
My guess is the AI just flagged it, and noone actually reviewed it. Now that it is news, they don’t want any bad press, so they are standing by the ban, when otherwise they might have reversed it.
Like the other user said, porn implies some level of consent which children cannot give. Calling it csam ensures there’s no confusion about it being abuse.
Anything’s possible but I wouldn’t assume it was planned unless something else came up. I think he’s just riding the accidental publicity, which I don’t really blame him for, though the dishonesty of his spin kinda pisses me off.
I’d like to hear epic’s explanation on why the clean version was still too much.
It might not be what they planned but they’re now using it as an opportunity for more publicity to get something out of it especially now there are some potential sales they won’t be getting anymore.
Does being naked make something sexual? I would argue that for content to be sexual it has to have intent to cause arousal.
The fact that it vaguely resembles fetish content does not in and of it’s self make it fetish content.
The trailers i have seen for this game do not seem to intend to cause arousal, they seem to want to make the player empathize with the plight of domesticated animals
I can believe the the dev in that it wasn’t intended to be sexual. But should intent excuse otherwise unacceptable content? Valve says it depicts a sexual interaction, though that seems to be debated a lot.
My own opinion is that it’s too close, and that this is the kind of boundary shouldn’t be pushed. Despite intentions, the dev really should have known better than to send in anything that could be interpreted as even remotely pedo content.
It’s been about sexual abuse. I’m going to call it universally unacceptable.
Does it count? I find it just kinda sexually icky, and I think it would be harmful to the child. If you think it’d be fine, not even in the gray area, then I guess there’s no argument there anymore.
I was talking about your comment, not the quote. Weird that you assumed otherwise
“I’m assuming they don’t mean a suggestive camera pan, but actually something problematic on screen, in which case, I totally support the ban. Devs were given the opportunity to change it, and they said no. Ban away imho. The fact that this is considered controversial is pretty disturbing to me.”
Devs were not given the opportunity to change it as it wasn’t there in the first place
Based solely off the trailer I can see how a big American storefront would err on the side of caution here. There is very little to gain from carrying a game decidedly built with controversy in mind, but a lot to loose.
With the publicity around it and sales still possible through alternative stores maybe things will turn out alright for the developer in the end. “Banned” media is always in demand, after all.
Unless it unexpectedly sells gangbusters, the dev says they’re likely to shut down as not having the massive steam audience to sell to won’t net them enough to continue. And people are stupidly loyal to valve for some reason.
That's because Valve is privately owned and this has largely resisted the enshittification that largely plagues public companies and private equity frims.
I mean, he released the communication he’s received. It’s not super clear. And the things he thinks it was isn’t even in the current version of the game
If they had to scratch their heads trying to figure out what parts of the game needed to change to not include allusions to that, then they have bigger problems than not releasing on Steam.
They’d be as well carrying on. Its in a pretty unique position as being a game that people are talking about before its even finished, which is pretty uncommon for most titles, and can be “the game they tried to ban” which did wonders for Manhunt, GTA and Postal.
Valve is pretty upfront about being a business first and foremost. Their customers are loyal because they consistently provide high value at reasonable prices, even though they are in a dominating position in the market. They’ve taken unpopular decisions in the past, but never any that seriously alienated a meaningful chunk of their customer base.
Like for instance, when epic came out with their exclusive access titles being a part of their business plan, valve could have responded with their own exclusive access system and had a good chance of killing off epic and others in the process. Instead they just ignored it and people like me continued using them and didn’t even consider epic even when their anticompetitive actions switched to ones that would have benefitted me (free games), because I could see the shithole they wanted to bring gaming to if their platform achieved dominance.
Making the matter even more frustrating is the fact that Horses is apparently quite good—or at least, it accomplishes what it sets out to do. The content is decidedly uncomfortable but reviews and reactions on social media are largely positive
Horses is not low-effort, throwaway trash, but rather a game that genuinely seeks to provoke consideration and conversations.
The game being banned for a misunderstood piece of placeholder concept art in a Steam approval preview build, which was both removed, and explained. Then Valve refusing to reconsider it and rejecting all attempts to clarify their objections.
I know. It’s not Valve’s fault the developer fucked up and gave them the wrong build to review. But that has literally nothing to do with this article unless you’re somehow trying to insinuate that Valve influenced other storefronts.
if one of the builds for your game contains CSAM, then I don’t really give a shit what alternative builds you have, I don’t want to play anything made by you. kudos to Valve for not dealing with pedophiles.
What I get from reading about that scene, it is just one of many examples in that game that was supposed to show how animals are abused on farms by replacing them with humans and letting other people doing „normal“ things to them like marking them with a branding iron or, like in that scene, riding on them. How any sane person reads anything different into that than: this is supposed to show animal abuse really blows my mind.
That is some very black or white, us or them, red team vs blue team thinking. It’s very interesting that you immediately jump to that conclusion when I am not even from the US at all. The answer to your question is absolutely not, and the fact that it’s a “world economy” doesn’t and shouldn’t mean any people are obligated to do business with and accept the controlling interest of literal monsters fueled by oil and oil money. Ethics must also be allowed to control the economy, not just money. The world’s financial systems have consequences beyond just the economy.
I don’t want them to buy it. But there isn’t anything illegal with investors purchasing a company line this no matter where they are from. It’s just business, it really doesn’t matter who owns them, they suck no matter what
I think its more there is a certain level of baseline public investment in most corporations and it seems dumb to maintain the fiction that people’s livelihoods should be sold as a commodity, especially to a bunch of despots
I’d think we’d be far more concerned about critical resource companies before we got to worrying about gaming companies, but we can’t even do that so I’m not surprised.
You seem to be under some misconception regarding who actually writes our laws. Hint: they’re called lobbyists to get people to ignore the rampant bribery.
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