Valve is now approving sexually explicit games again

With the implementation of Valve's promised "Adults Only" filter on Steam, it appears that games falling into that category due to sexually explicit content are being approved once again.

Dharker Studios, which was previously forced to delay release of its adult visual novel Negligee: Love Stories when a Valve representative told it to "assume months" before its game could be approved, has announced the approval has finally gone through. In a post to the official Steam page, the developer said, "I am happy to confirm Negligee: Love Stories has completed the steam review process and will be our first every [sic] 100% uncensored game on steam, no patch needed."

Negligee: Love Stories was one of several games affected by the temporary freeze on new adult game releases or updates being approved by Valve while the company sorted out its newly-implemented "Adults Only" filter, which launched last week. The idea of the filter is to allow uncensored versions of games like those made by Dharker Studios to be approved, while also giving users who want to avoid such content the ability to block it from their version of the storefront.

Valve's filter is the company's answer to a months-long back-and-forth with developers of games that included sexually explicit content, which began when several of those developers received sudden warnings to censor such content from their games on the platform or have those games taken down. After retracting the warning, Valve responded by specifying that its content policy is intended to allow anything that isn't "illegal or trolling," a definition that was clarified further with the addition of the filter last week. Under this, explicit games will ideally be permitted without censorship (as Negligee has been), though Valve continues to draw the line in its policy at outright pornography.

PC Gamer notes that the game's Steam store page now shows a message from the developer describing the type of sexually explicit content contained beyond the warning before users can navigate to the page itself. The message seems to only appear the first time a user visits the page, and GamesIndustry.biz did not see the message, having visited the page prior to the warning's implementation.