Steam Censors Another Game with Unclear Rules

The real problem here is that Steam might have grown up in the USA but applying it's cultural values to every other culture is considered a no-no in most civilised cultures (i.e. (ex-)empire countries and cloe ex-colonies) as well as something that will lead to a massively reduced potential market for Steam (who, after all, is trying to make as much money as possible here). The problem with applying all local cultural values to everything is that you end up with so many rules that there is almost no realm where you can place a game people actually want - even some 99% hyper-realistic games would fall into this category due to the hypocracy of even some cultures within themselves never mind once multiple standards are overlapped. So then you end up with applying some cultural values to some games and not others or some sort of mix and match since the publishers can claim to come from any country you can't usefully apply the ones from the country they claim to come from - and this doesn't work with international companies who produce controversial games, e.g. almost every publishers or dev you've heard of for having women with uncovered heads, almost every publisher or dev who produces historical or contemporary setting games for religious symbols of the wrong religion or religious stereotypes, every publisher and dev for racial and cultural stereotyping (when taken out of context - which any detractors will do). Ultimately Steam becomes an arbitor because either it vets everything or else it categorises everything by country it can be published in (which doesn't match culturals but they don't have IP ranges so it's the closest approximation I guess?) but then you get serious problems with users complaining and then trying to hack the system... ironically the best solution is for people, the world over, to be more tolerant of things they don't understand or agree with... which is becoming less and less true the more the internet allows people to live in their own bubbles of people who only agree with them... so good luck Steam (and every other International media publisher out there) you can hope that language barriers help but with English titles you are on a hiding to nothing. That begs the question, how many massively offensive to western audiences games in the arabic language are there? How many games in German or Japanese are there on these sorts of platforms that also massively offensive to US audiences? How many people are already massively offended by US games that are hugely violent but don't see them because they can't read English or they are too tolerant to say anything? (For reference I have my Steam settings to warn me of violent games and not at all about nudity and yet huge numbers of violent games get a pass but no sex, nudity or even clothed cleavage or legs would get through (unless it is males) with much of it (see above) banned before it even gets to me... double standards much dear USA?? *sigh* Actually the above story contains the perfect examples, violent games with the player doing exteremly illegal and culturally insensitive things that get published and then taken down, slightly sexy games that are proposed and never see the light of the platform... definite bias there.

After thinking about this issue for a while, I think the term censorship is really poor for these cases. To me censorship is the government stepping in and making something illegal. Here a private company is choosing not to distribute someone's game. No one is stopping the developers from making these, but valve doesn't have a legal obligation to distribute. If a book store decides not to carry 50 shades of Gray that's not censorship that's just thier business choice.

I actually like how valve is handling things, I can understand why people get upset but the platform belongs to valve, they should just come out and say "if we don't like it it doesn't go on steam". People need to understand that valve isn't responsible for upholding the first amendment and while I always disagree with censorship, it's valve's store and they can do what they want with it.

as many have said... Valve is a private company rather than a government. Excluding content that their company, shareholders, or the majority of their stakeholders (even at the expense of a minority of stakeholders) is perfectly fine and reasonable. If fans of the excluded content want access to it there are other ways beyond steam including different platforms and standalone content provided by the developer itself. and also yeah calling it censorship mislabels what it is and weakens the actual use for censorship :p

ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, need more tiddies tho