Steam Rejected My Upcoming Visual Novel for Having âAdult Contentâ That Doesnât Even Exist
Banning random eroge from the platform wasnât enough, apparently.
Hey, yaâll. My name is Jacob Cumiskey and I make Higurashi inspired visual novels about how much living in Florida sucks. The answer, of course, is very much, but thatâs not why weâre here today. Those in the community that know about Sirenâs Call: Escape Velocity already know. What matters for today is that I make visual novels and, hey, maybe you do too. In which case, I love you. And because I love you, I donât want you to get crushed by the giant boulder thatâs rolling towards us. I donât want you to get hurt.
Cause this shit hurts bad. Really bad.
Even though Iâm furious at Steam right now, please remember what Iâm about to say here comes from a place of love. Not love for Steam and how they seem to ban games from their platform for seemingly no reason (CHAOS;HEAD NOAH two months before it was set to come out...cough...coughâŚ), but love for you as a developer or you as a fan of the medium itself. Thank you for believing in visual novels and letting them change your life for the better in the same way theyâve changed mine.
Now, please, learn from these mistakes of mine as my lifeâs work gets crushed by Steam into complete vaporware.
A few weeks ago, I completed the beta for my second full length game, Sirenâs Call: Second Wind. I was thrilled; play-testing had been going well and the general verdict was that it improved upon the mistakes of my first game, Escape Velocity, considerably. Other than writing the script, it was significantly easier to make Second Wind than game #1, as I had really learned the engine I was using inside and out. As such, it only took two years to make and 11,000$ (thank you assets from the first game) as opposed to Escape Velocityâs five years and around 25,000$.
I donât like talking about those gross game development numbers typically, but I feel like itâs important to mention them so that the weight of this boulder rolling towards us can be felt properly. Perhaps your game cost less to make financially. Perhaps more. The money doesnât really matter that much, other than me no longer being able to justify to my in-laws this âcareer pathâ of mine. Cash is just a means to an end, that end being making more visual novels. I need to make more visual novels. Itâs a compulsion. To quote someone I love very much, âI gonna keep writing until I die!â Or, at least, I want to.
What matters more than the money, to me at least, is the time spent making the game itself. That time spend making a game is the crystallization of your soul. Your love.
But does any of this matter to an AI Steam Chat Bot?
Of course not. Sirenâs Call: Second Wind got flagged for having adult content that doesnât exist. Even though Steam spent a median time of 36 minutes playing a 10 hour game.
Please note that in Siren's Call: Second Wind, there is not a loose nipple to be had. No sex scenes. Nothing of that ilk. And no, that doesnât mean Iâm âagainstâ eroge or anything stupid like that. Aoi Tori in particular might be one of my favorite visual novels of all time (Judith looking main heroine + religious overtones sold me immediately), I am just famously bad at writing sex scenes and have more fun making games without them.
Maybe it was the mature looking, all adult-aged cast that did it though? Or the fact that itâs a story about marriage and all that entails? Yeah, maybe itâs just a little too âadultâ even though there is no nudity or sex to be had? The main character does use the word âmasturbateâ at one point! Maybe itâs that. So Iâll just get this totally-human Steam person to tell me what the issue is and then maybe I canâŚ
...oh.
Right, 36 minutes median playtime.
Across 7 people (not 8 cause one of them was me play-testing on Steam).
Over the course of several weeks of âreviewing.â
What the fuck are we doing here Steam?
Legitimately what is the excuse?
Tell me what to "fix" with my game.
Tell me what is so over the line that my game needs to be paired with legitimate eroge/hentai games that I canât possibly compete with. Tell me WHY you want me to falsely advertise my game with an âadult onlyâ label that I cannot rip off?
But thatâs when I remember that a boulder has no mouth to speak with. It just rolls forward and crushes everything in its path that doesnât know any better.
So learn from my mistakes. Iâm not saying you need to lie to Steam during your content review if youâre making a visual novel. Just remember that they are now flagging games with no nudity or sex scenes in them as âadult only.â Cult of Takumi for Hundred Line and Persona 5 are totally fine with their crew though. Remember that. Learn from it.
Before this point, I was spending about 25$ a day running Reddit adds to direct people to Steam and generate wishlists so that I had enough groundswell for people to, you know, be aware that my game exists when it launches. It was going well. As you can see from the above picture, we got like 3,000 wishlists since I launched the Steam page in January. Given that 10,000 is the metric for a âsuccessfulâ pre-launch, a few more months of this would have put us within striking range.
But yeah, not doing that anymore. Steam might be the only way I can realistically recoup my 11,000$ loss from this game and keep making visual novels, but I donât want to put more people in front of a fucking boulder. I donât have much social media, but Iâm gonna do what I can to just link people to itch.io instead from now on. Iâve emailed JAST about potentially bringing my games to their platform, because I heard they are compassionate people that give VN developers that have had their games purged from Steam a good home. Iâm hoping they write back. I respect their legacy.
Really, the whole situation with Chaos;Head should have made this kind of thing obvious to me. But I was blinded by love. I wanted to keep making games. I still do. Maybe youâre like me. Maybe youâre a human with a heart in their chest that loves seeing how people react to the stories you need to tell.
But the human element doesnât matter to Valve. To them, games are a product. End of story.
If I release a patch for Second Wind on Steam, I wonât be able to be vocal about it on Steam itself. They remove entire accounts for things like that. So, visual novel fans will see the black bars covering content I can only guess Valve considers to be âadult only,â get (reasonably) pissed, and then tie that negative feeling to the game. It makes sense. Iâd be pissed too. The whole pipeline leaves a sour-taste in oneâs mouth. Maybe a good publisher can smooth over that process. I donât know. All I know now is that the feeling of joy I felt for getting my second visual novel in 7 years completed feels like a distant memory.
Maybe if I find more money, Iâll add legitimate porn to the game. I can become the game Steam thinks I am. Crowdfund some hentai after Iâve already done two crowdfunding campaigns. My Mom would understand. My Dad would think itâs funny. But Iâd think of Aoi Tori and how much worse the porn in my game would be. Purple Software is too high of a bar for me. At least on that front.
No matter what happens though, please be aware that this is happening. The boulder here is only getting bigger. And weâve gotta a find a way, as visual novel fans/developers, to either shatter that boulder to bits or, more realistically, circumvent it altogether.
Please be safe. Remember you are loved.