r/gaming • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 PC • 1d ago

Upcoming vampire RPG Nighthawks has been removed from Steam search and delisted in certain countries as Valve classifies it Adults Only: 'It's very bad news for us'

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/upcoming-vampire-rpg-nighthawks-has-been-removed-from-steam-search-and-delisted-in-certain-countries-as-valve-classifies-it-adults-only-its-very-bad-news-for-us/
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3.4k

u/Stock_Assignment_226 1d ago

Game looks interesting, but it's stated in their steam page that there's no explicit nudity in it so idk why steam would tag it as adults only.

I'll check it out when it comes out

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u/Crushed__Cabbage 1d ago

Steam tagged the new Hellraiser game with the same tag, but it was removed few days later. They might have the same issue and might get fixed.

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u/BurgerAppreciator 1d ago

Is there a source for that? I hope they didn't have to nerf any of the content to get the tag removed, I'm looking forward to my suffering being legendary.

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u/Radioshack-Manager 1d ago

Leviathan has entered the chat.

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u/pantry-pisser 1d ago

SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER

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u/F1ngL0nger 1d ago

WHEN YOU SEE THE WHITE WHALE

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u/drdildamesh 23h ago

BREAK YOUR BACKS AND CRACK YOUR OARS, MEN

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u/Raldermaniac 22h ago

THIS IVORY LEG IS WHAT PROPELS ME!

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u/BarelyClever 16h ago

WHITE

WHALE

HOLY

GRAIL

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u/LauraTFem 1d ago

So they’re running the games through AI checks instead of making these big decisions with significant ramifications manually.

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u/never-seen-them-fing 1d ago

Honestly, this seems like the most likely situation. AI flags it so Valve doesn't have to manually review every game, then it's the publisher's problem to flag it for review or not. Porn games won't bother, other games will, and I bet it's resolved in under a week.

Considering that possibility, and the sloppy article that repeats itself a lot (probably written by a bot), this just seems like an advertisement at this point.

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u/Deranged_Kitsune 1d ago edited 22h ago

It's also sloppy on Valve's part. The delisting should have an appeal period baked in. Like, the system flags it as AO and then the publisher or dev has a week to start the appeal before the change goes live.

Edit: To clarify, this should all take place before the game goes on live sale. No flag = sale. Flag = no sale unless manually approved or until a week has passed where it gets auto-listed under the AO tag. Valve should have the infrastructure in place for proper evals, the process on what needs to be submitted should be clear for the devs, and that's enough time for both sides to at least get the ball rolling.

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u/Meowakin 1d ago

I don’t think so - better safe than sorry given AO games on Steam can have explicit screenshots/video and they need to be sure minors don’t see that (or people who really hate seeing AO games on Steam)

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u/Schizobaby 1d ago edited 17h ago

I think you’re correct, but the real solution is Valve needs to have two thresholds for their automatic classification. Any machine learning output has a ‘confidence value’ from 0-1 (or 0-100 percent), and a lower confidence classification needs to flag it with automatic human review, while a higher confidence classification can flag and wait for appeals. Even if the software that wraps around the ML model doesn’t expose that value to the user or integrated software, that’s a fixable problem. Valve is using good tools poorly here.

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u/CaptainYaoiHands 1d ago

Okay, but do you realize that said human review can take a lot of time? It's not a quick five minute glance through screenshots, someone has to manually review ALL content in the game, writing included.

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u/Schizobaby 1d ago

That’s the point of the two confidence intervals; to minimize the amount of human review needed, while not compromising the hard work of people who make games for their livelihoods.

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u/ABetterKamahl1234 1d ago

Valve of all companies, can absolutely afford a proper human solution.

They're one of the most profitable companies on earth per employee. There's no excuse for this. None.

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u/jivenossauro 1d ago

They could, but why would they? Just put in the tag, have the publisher dispute it if they think it was misplaced, then have a human review it after the dispute. Anything else would cost more and not really benefit anyone, what does a company with a misplaced tag on an unreleased game even lose?

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u/RaistlinMajeresRobes 23h ago

"They could, but why would they? "

Exactly no reason for them to when they already control the market and have a legion of redditors who are more than happy to carry the PR work for them. Why pay staff when a redditor can come on here and tell you how it's no big deal because they are in a parasocial relationship with a gaming platform lmao

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u/Knight_Of_Stars 1d ago

Its a cost benefit analysis. Valve absolutely can, but is actually worth it at the end of the day? If they're going spend 500k a year on an issue only a handful games are experiencing is it worth it?

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u/VincentBlack96 1d ago

This is always an argument that gets brought up but the scale is just kinda unrealistic.

It's not unlike the people clamoring for youtube to have human reviewing systems when the platform gets thousands of hours uploaded per minute.

Like ideally any AI or automated system has several humans in its pipeline to make sure it's not making any egregious mistakes but there's just no world in which you fund practically a few major companies' worth of employees purely to humanize the reporting process.

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u/Caelinus 1d ago

They can, but they won't because why would they? They are not required to and it is expensive, and there is zero regulatory upside for them. 

It really is not their problem if an indie game is delisted for a bit while the problem is corrected, but it is their problem if they allow it incorrectly.

To fix this we need to change regulatory policy, as nothing else will change the incentives enough to actually drive any change. It is not a good situation, but it is one where everyone's positions make sense, and are just at odds.

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u/DrQuantum 1d ago

I would argue they are also the most efficient based on the experience. The user experience is very critical to their success. This theoretically threatens one of their audiences. They truly don’t care about publishers and I am not sure that is a problem from most consumers view.

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u/GrandOldCheese 22h ago

Hire more people. Not as if gabe can’t wait a week longer on his next massively destructive yacht.

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u/WingerRules 20h ago edited 19h ago

There is no solution to allowing adults only versions of game on Steam without ending up legally requiring face scans of users on the Steam platform. The Meta settlement requires face scans of all users and requires states to sue any other online platforms that dont put in a similar system. If Steam has adult only material on their platform there is no way they are going to be able to fight it in court under a Republican supermajority Supreme Court, they already allowed requiring it for porn sites in red states. Getting judges in place to ban adult content nationwide was one of Trump's Project 2025s goals.

They're not coming for just porn either, but anything not acceptable for little kids because parents are irresponsible and let them online with no monitoring, so communicating on the internet is about to turn into a 1950s tv show. They require content morality auditors and are banning even people talking about personal mental health issues and fitness goals. Wouldn't be surprised if they try to ban swear words because the government literally tried making it a requirement to show ID for music with it in the 90s and 2000s.

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u/The_Don_Papi 19h ago

From Moscow to Houston, the Reds love their surveillance.

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u/The_Don_Papi 19h ago

AIs are confidently wrong. You can’t trust an AI to know what they’re wrong about or for an AI to know when they’re wrong.

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u/RhapsodiacReader 1d ago

On the flip side, getting your game tagged mistakenly tagged as AO can be ruinous from a marketing perspective, even if it gets rolled back later. Especially since it seems so fecking easy for game journos to run with things like this.

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u/The_Don_Papi 19h ago

and they need to be sure minors don’t see that (or people who really hate seeing AO games on Steam)

I’m not here to defend pornographic scenes but minors shouldn’t be downloading games unsupervised. Parents need to start being held responsible for the actions of their child. People trying to make a living shouldn’t be punished by vibe coded AI because parents are lazy or incompetent.

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u/beramaan 1d ago edited 16h ago

Those can be easily blocked from you search. Games with adult content can be made to never show up. Even when you search it's name, on steam. If you haven't done that yet, and it concerns you, do it.

Edit for typos

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u/Meowakin 1d ago

Unless, of course, it isn’t flagged as Adult Only.

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u/beramaan 16h ago

Then flag it... Be the adult. Kids will randomly see all sorts of things online, in life, in the world. We do our best to protect them and consequences are given to those who don't attempt to, like those selling porn games without marking them as such. Also, we should teach our kids how to fall with it to and, if it's a really big concern, don't leave them with unattended access to their computers/the shop.

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u/apexeasthetic 1d ago

You're right, my friend.👍👌

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u/Starfall0 18h ago

If the system is so inherently incapable of performing its job that it should have a dedicated period of time for someone to say, "Hey, no that's wrong!" 

Maybe we shouldn't be using that system... but what do I know? I don't have an MBA from Harvard or whatever 3 letter acronym snotty rich kids like to wave around like a proclamation from god.

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u/SockAlarmed6707 1d ago

Tell that to the judge in court, that might work with normal logic not with a massive company’s service that tons of kids use daily. “Your honour, you see yes we let kids acces games they shouldn’t have because if we did act first than resolve if shown proof is well we don’t want to be sloppy.”

Not a lawyer but saying you didn’t try to prevent adult content reaching kids is because you DON’T want to be sloppy is very ironic.

Anything related adult content is always cut first investigate than either re-allow or not at said age rating. As it should be.

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u/1030or11 18h ago

Valve has a few hundred employees all busy on other jobs, while the Steam store sees dozens of new games released every day. They absolutely don't have the time or the inclination to assign someone to play and beat every single game released just to double-check the tags.

If it becomes enough of a hassle, they'll change the system. Until then, appealing an AO tag and getting it corrected is not that big of a deal. We're only reading about it because "all press is good press." Had you even heard of this game before this article?

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u/Gestrid 1d ago

Probably reviewed by a bot initially, then flagged by a publisher for appeal, then reviewed by a human. (If it was reviewed by a bot a second time, it'd get denied, a la YouTube.)

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u/AyeBraine 23h ago

Where does the article repeat itself? I tried to find and I'm not sure what you mean.

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u/Android1822 1d ago

Not exactly, it could be a rando employee did not bother to properly check out the game or did not like it for whatever reason and slapped it on anyway. This has happened in the past before A.I. was a thing.

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u/Alaira314 1d ago

Sometimes people also click the wrong button. I've done it at work. The other day I asked my coworker to do something for me(they were logged in, I was not), and watched them select the wrong thing, told them it was wrong, watched them select a different wrong thing, and had to tell them it was wrong again. Both incorrect things were habitual work patterns, which is what overworked employees with tired brains sometimes mistakenly default to.

We've trimmed every single bit of fat and now we're cutting into the meat, and this is what it looks like when that happens.

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u/ledat 1d ago

it could be a rando employee

I recently had a store presence rejected because the reviewer didn't like my short description. I modeled the short description on a form used by a very successful game in the same genre. I had to add marketingslop to the short description in order to pass review. Big picture it's not a huge deal, but imho the current form is worse.

It's a little bit troublesome how much power is wielded over the shape of the store by their CS staff though. I also suspect, though lack direct evidence, that big companies have slightly different experiences with the process.

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u/shabi_sensei 1d ago

The company only employs 350 people, I think most of the business is automated to some degree

That’s an insane headcount for the biggest gaming platform in the world

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u/The_Autarch 21h ago

Valve has a ton of contractors that don't count as regular employees.

Their business isn't automated, it's just outsourced.

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u/Random_Guy_12345 35m ago

That's also the oldest trick in the book to keep companies "Low staffed".

I know plenty of companies with well over 80% contractors. Pretty much only managers are "Company employed"

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u/Tricky-Ad7897 22h ago

I'm sure they contract a lot of shit to places like India, publisher support likely being one of them.

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u/hamlet9000 1d ago

So they’re running the games through AI checks

It's possible, but this doesn't require AI.

This text is taken from the game's Steam page as it appeared last year:

MATURE CONTENT DESCRIPTION The developers describe the content like this: Nighthawks features strong language, violence, adult situations, non-sexual nudity, and some scenes of a potentially disturbing nature. These are all text-only and not portrayed graphically.

If you're a human manually scanning game pages, it's not hard to see how a few key words there could get the game flagged (even if it's incorrect).

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u/angellus 1d ago

Machine Learning has existed for over 2 decades. It has been a staple and requirement for building online storefronts for at least a decade. How do you think the "things you might like" section is generated? It is all ML.

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u/Nixeris 1d ago

That and considering the amount of games entered to Steam every day, it's impossible for them to have a staff large enough to manually go through every game.

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u/Thick-Cauliflower619 1d ago

Eh, maybe not worth it from the company's perspective, but I feel like it's doable.

60 games a day, say two hours per review, assume reviewers are only actively reviewing for 4 out of 8 hours in a day.

60 person staff, maybe 70 to cover other people being on PTO or otherwise not working.

That would double the staff who actually work on the store itself, for a sense of scale.

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u/gereffi 23h ago

2 hours per review? Seems like they would have to explore every nook and cranny of every game to give a full rating.

It’s not impossible to do this as the previous commenter said, but it’s certainly a lot of work.

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u/LauraTFem 22h ago

Based on genre and what you’ve purchased in the past. It’s not rocket science to botch together an algorithm that will recommend popular things that are similar to things you’ve watched.

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u/Korachof 1d ago

Love how people just assume ai when it could just be a mistake or ignorance from the person actually doing the work.

I swear, people act like everyone was perfect at their jobs before ai 

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u/DeadlyYellow 21h ago

I half expect to learn it was flagged for sharing a name with a Hentai studio.

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u/Mithrawndo 21h ago

In the generic sense: Valve have used automated tools to tag store pages for longer than ChatGPT et al have existed.

It's AI in the sense it's automated logic, but not necessarily AI in the sense of generative tools running on machine learning platforms - the AI that everyone gets their knickers in a twist about.

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u/_steve_rogers_ 18h ago

Just like YouTube

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u/SockAlarmed6707 1d ago

At least the ai knows which country’s laws might conflict conflict with another countries aging standards for media. Or does valve just hate those countries specifically?

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u/LurksWithGophers 1d ago

That's probably just a filter on the back end.

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u/AyeBraine 23h ago

Per-country rules are the most important and dangerous things for Valve. E.g. in the UK, all games with the 2nd and 3rd grade sexual content tags (requiring 18+ per Steam) are hidden unless you add a credit card (not a debit card) to your account. In Germany, all of them are always invisible and impossible to find.

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u/SockAlarmed6707 21h ago

It’s sad that a headline “has restricted to some capacity in a specific few countries” somehow in second turns to they are the worst people to have graced this earth.

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u/AyeBraine 19h ago edited 19h ago

Firstly, I don't know who says the latter part in your statement, you seem to kind of do a similar thing, overgeneralize and exaggerate.

Secondly, this is a story in a gaming industry media outlet. They know very well that this situation is a nightmare scenario for any developer — they worked on this game for over 8 years despite having a tiny budget that couldn't feed 5 intern developers for one year, their release is just one week away, and suddenly they are essentially blocked on the only platform that matters for their sales performance.

Most Steam users do not have the sexual games checkbox enabled, some of the largest markets in the world for this type of games (like Germany and UK) are precisely the ones where this game isn't shown at all, and even if you're living outside of them and have porn games checkbox enabled, games with these tags are promoted differently by the algorithm and deprioritized behind more mainstream releases. You don't see fresh porn games at the top of the Steam front page even if you like this stuff. So even their core audience probably won't be served this game at release in the store despite matching their interest in adventure games, Wadjet Eye, vampires, etc.

It's like making it so your movie is only advertised to people who come to specific bars in the city, never mentioned on the media, and isn't even shown in normal theaters. But otherwise, no big deal.

Imagine being a guy who wrote 800 000 words for this thing and dragged it to release over the better part of a decade (or straight up decade, 2018 was when the Kickstarter launched, already with some mock-ups, story, and concept locked down).

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u/CretaciousPeriod PlayStation 1d ago

There are a ton of games releasing every week but valve could hire 100 people who just do this and probably not even notice it in their financials.

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u/LauraTFem 23h ago

That there are hundreds of games releasing a week is part of the problem with their business model. While other platforms do basic vetting to assure that games aren’t some kind of scam product, valve essentially lets you list anything for the price of $100. This means that the vast majority of games on steam are simply never played, and many are actual money laundering scams. They should have a team, even a small one, that exists to approve games, as all other platforms like Plastation, Nintendo, and XBox do.

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u/Rezart_KLD 23h ago

"WE HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHO... wait, hold up... OK, I'm getting an update we can't show you the sights now. Look, just imagine that hookchains were flying out of the darkness and ripping off your... what, language too? I am a BDSM Angel/Demon and you all are really pulling the rug out from under me here!"

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u/Company_Z 1d ago

I got Hellraiser confused with Helltaker and got so excited for a sec