Future? No Thanks! says that it’s an “ecosocialist open-world utopia for our dark times.” Or it would be, if it had released on July 22nd as planned. Instead, it's currently being held up by Steam, who have spent weeks “assess[ing] the scale and scope of the nudity contained within it,” per a social media post by developer Molleindustria.
Perfect Tides developer Meredith Gran released the first game in the series four years ago. “[The review process] went so smoothly that it practically seemed automated,” she tells me, aligning with her expectations that it would take about a week for Steam to “play through it a little bit and look for major crashes.” And so when she came to release the follow up, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, earlier this year, she expected a similar experience. In fact, she thought it might be easier: While both games contain sexual content (“nothing you wouldn’t see in, say, a PG13 movie,” Gran explains), she considers Station to Station “more cut and dry,” than the original, since the character has aged up from a high schooler to a college student.
She sent her build to Steam and waited. It took much longer than it had with the first game. Eventually, Steam responded with a question about the disclosure she had added to her store page. Under “mature content,” she had written “Non-explicit depictions and written descriptions of sexual acts. Depictions of verbal abuse. Use of recreational drugs.” Steam asked her to send them a build that would specifically highlight the moments described by the first sentence of her disclosure. “I basically had to make a build of all the sex scenes in my game and send them back,” says Gran.
Both these games were subject to delays when their builds were being reviewed, but Steam also requires checks when first creating a store page. When developer Heather Flowers was uploading the marketing materials for the upcoming hand-stabbing horror roguelite 500 Finger Fillet, she initially included, in her words to me, “a very cool-looking image” of a hand with the ring finger having just been cut off, with a splatter of red blood. “Steam said no, you’re not allowed to do that,” she says. She ultimately replaced the image with one of an intact hand, the knife on the table between the fingers, the blood now pink.
All three of these examples are part of a seemingly increasing trend of scrutiny on Steam, which goes in tandem with crackdowns elsewhere, like the Online Safety Act in the UK requiring sites to verify that users are over 18 to access certain features and media, and the threats made by payment processors about adult content on sites like itch.io. Or another example: Flowers reports having to offer a blood-free version of the demo for 500 Finger Fillet so that YouTubers don’t get dinged by content systems on that platform when uploading gameplay. The affected developers describe frustration and fear, as well as a potential chilling effect on what gets made in the future.
“[Future? No Thanks!] has some brief nudity and mature content… but there’s no intercourse on screen,” Paolo Pedercini, the creator behind the Molleindustria pseudonym, tells me. “The game industry has very clear, structured content ratings, and Future? No Thanks! is demonstrably ESRB 17+ or PEGI 16+.” But, he says, Steam is currently flagging the game as adult-only, “like those hentai and porn games whose main purpose is titillation.”
Valve did not reply to a request for comment about the content review process.
If the game remains flagged this way, it will “have very serious implications on its accessibility and visibility,” says Pedercini. (One side effect would be that, as someone living in the UK under the aforementioned Online Safety Act, I would have to prove I’m over 18 in order to be able to access the game’s store page. Pedercini also says it would be completely unavailable to buyers in Germany and China.) Pedercini is considering tweaking the game to avoid this issue, but it’s not clear exactly what he would need to fix.
From these developers’ reports, as well as the account from Santa Ragione, the developer behind Horses, once a build and a disclosure form are submitted to Steam, the process goes on behind closed doors. Steam might request a build or instructions that allows them to see disclosed content more easily, as in Gran’s case, but in Pedercini’s they were less forthcoming. He was told that his achievements may have inappropriate names, but when he asked whether changing one from “have sex one last time” to “find romance one last time” would help, Steam didn’t reply.
“The review process is extremely slow and vague,” he says. “It’s frustrating. You work six years on a game, you line up press and events for the launch, and then some guy at Valve clicks on a checkbox and blocks everything.”
For Gran, after she submitted her build full of the sex scenes, Steam took “probably about two weeks” to get back to her, during which she was “sweating.” “I’m just left to speculate. What do they think of this? Who is this person who’s deciding the fate of this game I’ve been working on for four and a half years?” This was also happening just a few weeks after the game Horses was delisted from Steam and other storefronts over its sexual content, making Gran wonder whether she would get to sell the game at all, and whether it would become known for having bannable content rather than “really just a truthful retelling of a teenage experience.”
But then, with no further communication, Gran was simply told that Perfect Tides: Station to Station had been approved, and it went on sale without issue on the day of its planned release. “Anecdotally I have been made to understand that if you have any sort of sexual content in your game, this is what’s going to happen at this point,” she says. “You’re going to go through a review process in which you are pretty much shut out from what’s going on and what’s being considered until they make up their minds.”
Gran says that the idea of changing the kinds of stories she wants to tell based on this potential additional scrutiny “repulses” her. “Stories of adulthood, of young adulthood and beyond, always involve explicit content, content that is potentially inappropriate for children… I try not to moralize and just present things frankly, and that’s really the only thing I’m interested in doing.”
But it’s hard to overstate just how crucial Steam listings are for developers. “Steam is a monopoly with very few precedents,” says Pedercini. “As a developer, I’m completely at their whim.” The storefront is currently embroiled in at least three lawsuits over allegations that it’s a monopoly.
For Flowers, that’s a fact she sees no choice but to work around. “I think [Steam are] harsher on sexuality than they are on violence, generally speaking. I think the combination of those two is where it gets really, really difficult.” And so while 500 Finger Fillet might have subtextual sexuality, “if there were a boob in the game… I do genuinely feel like we would have a much bigger problem than we currently do.” And that’s not something she’s comfortable chancing, especially as games are now both her fulltime job and she is the owner and creative lead of studio DEADBODY Games, putting her in a position of responsibility for others’ livelihoods.
“I feel like as artists it's sort of our duty to push against [censorship] as much as possible,” says Flowers. “But at the same time, as people living under capitalism, we often need to pull back and get as close to the line as possible without actually showing it.”
Gran sees it slightly differently: “Success is extremely rare and at the end of the day the only thing that we can be sure to walk away with is the truth that we tried to tell ourselves. So I actually think because these are such bad, restrictive-feeling times, there is no downside to just telling the stories that we want to tell right now.”
During the process of writing this article, Steam replied to Pedercini. “After removing all the nudity (putting clothes on the sex worker and sexbot) Steam rejected Future? No Thanks! again for the reason: ‘Contains sexual content that is explicit or graphic and is intended for adults only,’” Pedercini tells me. “They say they can't specify the reasons or point at the content.”
“I'm going to cut the entire sex quest from the game for Steam distribution and release the directors' cut elsewhere,” he says. “But I wouldn't be surprised if they already made a final decision and tagged it ‘adult only’ even without any mentions of sex.”
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Chris Person
