Steam Rejected My Upcoming Visual Novel for Having βAdult Contentβ That Doesnβt Even Exist
Banning random eroge from the platform wasnβt enough, apparently.
Hey, yaβll. 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 thatβs not why weβre here today. Those in the community that know about Sirenβs 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 donβt want you to get crushed by the giant boulder thatβs rolling towards us. I donβt want you to get hurt.
Cause this shit hurts bad. Really bad.
Even though Iβm furious at Steam right now, please remember what Iβm 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...coughβ¦), 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 theyβve changed mine. Now, please, learn from these mistakes of mine as my lifeβs work gets crushed by Steam into complete vaporware. A few weeks ago, I completed the beta for my second full length game, Sirenβs 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 Velocityβs five years and around 25,000$. I donβt like talking about those gross game development numbers typically, but I feel like itβs 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 doesnβt really matter that much, other than me no longer being able to justify to my in-laws this βcareer pathβ of mine. Cash is just a means to an end, that end being making more visual novels. I need to make more visual novels. Itβs a compulsion. To quote someone I love very much, βI gonna keep writing until I die!β 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. Sirenβs Call: Second Wind got flagged for having adult content that doesnβt 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 doesnβt mean Iβm βagainstβ 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 itβs a story about marriage and all that entails? Yeah, maybe itβs just a little too βadultβ even though there is no nudity or sex to be had? The main character does use the word βmasturbateβ at one point! Maybe itβs that. So Iβll just get this totally-human Steam person to tell me what the issue is and then maybe I canβ¦
...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 βreviewing.β 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 canβt possibly compete with. Tell me WHY you want me to falsely advertise my game with an βadult onlyβ label that I cannot rip off? But thatβs when I remember that a boulder has no mouth to speak with. It just rolls forward and crushes everything in its path that doesnβt know any better.
So learn from my mistakes. Iβm not saying you need to lie to Steam during your content review if youβre making a visual novel. Just remember that they are now flagging games with no nudity or sex scenes in them as βadult only.β 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 βsuccessfulβ pre-launch, a few more months of this would have put us within striking range. But yeah, I'm not sure if that's a great idea to keep running ads. Steam might be the only way I can realistically recoup my 11,000$ loss from this game and keep making visual novels, but I donβt want to put more people in front of a fucking boulder. I might have to though if things get dire though; that's just the reality of game development. I donβt have much social media, but Iβm gonna do what I can to just link people to itch.io instead from now on, unless, again, things get dire. Iβve 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. Iβm 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 youβre like me. Maybe youβre 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 doesnβt matter to Valve. To them, games are a product. End of story. If I release a patch for Second Wind on Steam, I wonβt 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 βadult only,β get (reasonably) pissed, and then tie that negative feeling to the game. It makes sense. Iβd be pissed too. The whole pipeline leaves a sour-taste in oneβs mouth. Maybe a good publisher can smooth over that process. I donβt 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, Iβll add legitimate porn to the game. I can become the game Steam thinks I am. Crowdfund some hentai after Iβve already done two crowdfunding campaigns. My Mom would understand. My Dad would think itβs funny. But Iβd 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 weβve 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. 6/3/2026: Turns out, JAST did reach out and decided to host our game on their platform! You can read more about it here!
