TLDR: There was a scene in a prerelease version of the game that depicted a young girl riding on the shoulders of a nude adult woman. Valve interpreted it as sexual, devs say it wasn’t, that the young girl model was a placeholder, and removed the scene entirely from the release build, which still can’t be published on Steam due to their ban policy.
There’s already been extensive discussion about this already; the whole thing stinks of the dev trying to get extra publicity because the fucked around and found out.
Not merely as sexual, but as “sexual conduct”. Valve already hosts a huge number of games depicting full nudity and sex, and before the payment processors complained, that included games with r*pe in their description.
It’s a game where people are put in animal masks, chained up, and ridden around naked.
what the studio calls “grotesque, subversive imagery” of a ranch where nude human beings in horse masks are treated as animal livestock.
To pretend that said “grotesque, subversive imagery” is not in this case functioning on it’s proximity to sexual degradation, is disingenuous imo. I don’t blame Valve for not wanting to wade into an “art vs shock-sploitation” debate.
I don’t understand how this scene, which is only sexual by implication, is not allowed, but Fear and Hunger, in which you can drag a little girl through a dungeon full of monsters that sexually assault you, through orgy scenes, etc., is fine. Like I’m not saying that F&H should be removed, but I am saying that based on what is currently on Steam, it does not seem like this would be over the line.
Assuming you’re referring to F&H 1, that came out five years before Steam reviewed this game. It’s possible they simply became more strict over time and never revisited F&H because it never came up.
Also, Steam’s rules (or any other private platform’s rules) are not law. Precedent doesn’t really matter. They can decide arbitrarily when rules apply and don’t apply (so long as they don’t violate anti-competition laws and so on). One would hope they are consistent, but being an organization with likely multiple reviewers, it’s unlikely they are always in sync, especially with decisions separated by years.
A different question to ask is whether the scene you described would have passed review in 2023. I haven’t played F&H, but based on your description, it seems unlikely.
Did we really need an article saying “I think this other bit of text might be written by a robot”? Of all the things you criticise Microsoft for, that’s the one to go for? Or perhaps it’s the other side of the coin, Microsoft unusually did something quite nice so the author had to find something about it to criticise?
It sounds like a few sixty year old engineer(s) got some managers to sign off the release of the source code and decided to do the most out of the lack of resources they had available. I have no problem with them using AI to write a press release. No one is going to read it anyways in a few weeks of time - but the release is there forever (within reasonable limits).
Well, the game uses portable bytecode for the ‘Z-machine’ interpreter, and there are dozens of third-party interpreters for it. You can run these games on your phone, no need to compile them.
About the LGBTQ part: she was working at EA when she transitioned, and she recounted acceptance and support for trans people was codified in her workplace, in a time when transitioning often meant discrimination, rejection and even job loss.
People don’t always remember that EA were the “good guys” before they made bank with Sims and CoD.
pcgamer.com
Gorące