"Steam is a monopoly with very few precedents," says dev of game inexplicably flagged as adult-only by Valve: "As a developer, I'm completely at their whim"
The creator of open-world game Future? No Thanks! says Valve has repeatedly flagged his game as deserving an adult-only rating on par with outright porn games, yet refused to explain its reasoning, reflecting what he calls a "monopoly" on PC gaming that forces devs to comply with opaque rules.
Aftermath spoke to several game developers about the difficult and awkward process of getting games with sexual content rated and approved on Steam. Pedercini's Future? No Thanks! is a comparatively tame open-world game about exploring an "ecosocialist eutopia" as an old man "scheduled for euthanasia."
It's definitely a mature game, but from what I've seen and what Pedercini is saying, it's very far from pornographic. It feels closer to comedy of a Futurama variety. Yet the disclaimer for its Steam demo insists the game contains "implied off-screen sexual activity. Conversations about mature themes such as sex, gender, and death. Depiction of legalized prostitution. Depiction of euthanasia. Drug and tobacco reference sexual innuendos mild swearing [sic]."
Pedercini maintains that the game "has some brief nudity and mature content… but there's no intercourse on screen," and while he's open to adjusting content to meet Steam's standards for a rating which won't kill the game's visibility, he's unsure what needs changing.
"Steam is a monopoly with very few precedents," he says. "As a developer, I’m completely at their whim."
This is something I've heard from many game developers publishing on Steam: the store can be great when it's in your corner, but working against it in any way can feel impossible.
Even after "all the nudity" was removed, by which Pedercini means "putting clothes on the sex worker and the sexbot," the game was rejected again on the grounds that it "contains sexual content that is explicit or graphic and is intended for adults only." However, Pedercini says Valve claims it "can't specify the reasons or point at the content" in question.
Valve is notorious for arbitrarily blocking games with sexual or mature content despite allowing a torrent of actual pornographic games on Steam. There was also a huge stink last year after Valve cracked under pressure from payment processor-pushed censorship and took a sledgehammer to swathes of adult games. Itch.io faced similar issues, which collectively forced countless NSFW games off stores.
The other half of this equation is its alleged monopoly, which is widely argued given its dominance on PC, but is still more contentious.
Games analyst Mat Piscatella commented on this last year, arguing that Steam is not a monopoly simply because of its market share.
"A monopoly is where there's a single seller for a particular service or good with no substitutes and the ability to charge excessively high rates because of this," he said at the time.
One question is whether Steam's dominance is due to Valve actively boxing out competitors, or due to Steam simply being that much better than other PC storefronts and thus eating their lunch passively. Ask Amazon and Epic Games how difficult it is to make a Steam competitor. '
"It's almost as if it isn't providing a shit service," as Baldur's Gate 3 publishing lead Michael Doluse put it.
Valve has repeatedly been accused of, and taken to court over, monopolistic practices on Steam. Earlier this year, deposition from Gabe Newell, attached to a US class action lawsuit mirroring a UK case likewise accusing Valve of abusing its position, emerged. Newell argued that gamers "have enormous choice" and claimed "Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms."
I actually met and spoke to Pedercini earlier this year to discuss another heated topic: why indie devs don't want to use generative AI.