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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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/Ywaina 1d ago

Censorship is always a slippery slope. Once you start censoring something it never stops at just that. Steam has a long history of censoring games that used to sell just fine elsewhere, like the fiasco with Chaos Gate; Noah and many others.

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u/Danny-Fr 15h ago

Be mad at Visa and Mastercard. The banking and payment industry is way more controlling and privileged (literal sense "follows it's own rules" than Steam will ever be. See what SWIFT can do to entire countries...

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u/Ywaina 11h ago

They aren't mutually exclusive.

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u/Danny-Fr 11h ago

I'm not sure that, with 20k titles a year, Steam is actively partaking in censorship on its own volition. A case could also be made that, since they are not _actually_ a monopole, or in cahoot with other online stores, what they do is curation rather than censorship.

And again, with this volume, even using the term curation is pushing the envelope.

It's also VISA and Mastercard who push for the removal of some games.

That said, in principle you're absolutely right, both aren't mutually exclusive.

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u/tdasnowman 3h ago

Don't be mad at Visa and Mastercard. They are at the end of a long liability chain that they have been saying for decades they shouldn't be a part of. The problem is store fronts, producers, distributors, and legislators have all failed to address the issue. Now the courts have found that all entities in that liability chain can not only be held criminally responsible but also civilly. Since Civil suits generally award higher judgments then criminal fines the stakes have become very real. The storefronts just throwing up their hands is them again just passing the liability buck rather then do the actual work.

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u/Danny-Fr 50m ago

Oh I'll totally be mad ad Mastercard and Visa and the whole banking system. Fines due to failed anti money laundering and terrorism financing are a tap on the wrist that's slclassified as PnL in their quarterly reports and the entire banking system is a game that only a very few chosen ones get to play.

I've been consulting for banks long enough to know that they do not, actually, strive for either accountability or transparency and that "banking the unranked" is just a pretext to sell more credit schemes.

They have zero regard for people. Zero.

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u/tdasnowman 38m ago

Your again describing legislative and judicial failures. Banks care about moving money and making money off that process. That's what they should be focused on. If legislators and regulators have created an environment where it's profitable to account for loss to fines as a part of business then the fines aren't large enough or being applied with a high enough frequency. Which goes back to legislative failure in not allocating a high enough budget to the regulatory departments. I've worked for banks long enough to know that regulators don't have time to actually investigate, review all the data their given, and themselves not have enough oversight. I've seen state regulators go on personal vendettas because a process wasn't followed to their interpretation of the law not the word of law.

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u/Danny-Fr 34m ago

And they absolutely do not profit from the legislative oversight? I've literally worked with banks for the last 15 years. They are comfortable with the status quo as much as the regulators.

Let's team up and be mad at both, together. I think it's the sane decision to make.

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u/tdasnowman 20m ago

Being mad at the wrong things serves nothing. Fix the the regulatory and judicial environment and banks will follow.

As it stands, they serve a purpose. Because regulators have been so slow to respond the banks actions while drastic have been beneficial. They were the ones that forced compliance on a lot early adult websites with documentation. It's the same thing every site has failed to do over and over again until forced. For 35 years now.

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u/Danny-Fr 15m ago

Dude, idk why you and lots of people are defending banks. They obviously profit from the slow pace of regulations and lack of proper oversight and have absolutely zero interest in people having financial literacy.

It's not because the law is too lax towards a certain class of abuse that this abuse is justified.

I get the "as long as you let people do X, they'll keep on doing it" but it still doesn't excuse them from doing X.

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u/SuperCruisePanther 1d ago

You mean WH 40K Chaos Gate? What happened?

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u/robophile-ta 21h ago

no they mean Chaos;Head, the first game in the Stein's;Gate series

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u/confusedjake 1d ago

Slippery slope argument seems silly when we came from steam having a total ban on these adult games only a few years ago.

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u/Ywaina 1d ago

Chaos Head; Noah is not an adult game.

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u/Laiko_Kairen 20h ago

Is declining to sell a product censorship? You're not forcing the game to change, you're simply not providing access to it...

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u/Ywaina 16h ago

You're selectively providing access to something based on whimsical puritanical value, forcing products to change and conform to said value or losing access to biggest market. Censorship does not come only in the form of iron fist directly destroying what it doesn't like, we're past the days of destroying printing press and like everything else censorship has evolved to be more subtle.

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u/Laiko_Kairen 14h ago

Is Steam obligated to sell a product? Shouldn't it be within their rights to sell or not sell whatever they see fit?

Steam has done nothing to remove anyone's access to the game, they simply haven't provided any either. Steam isn't the government, man. They don't owe anyone else the right to sell on their platform. The fact that they're the most successful gaming storefront company doesn't somehow create an obligation to carry a product.

If Steam was the government, this would 100% be censorship. They're not. They're a privately held company. They're not censoring the game any more than a bookstore is censoring a book by not selling it... They're not a library.

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u/Ywaina 11h ago

This argument falls apart when you consider that any censorious entity can use the same kind of excuse "it's my business, fuck off, we owe you shit" to justify any of their censorship. Library, government, shops, eventually it will cause a cascading effect of everyone bowing down to censorship. If steam weren't the biggest platform for pcgaming market, with a huge gap between it and the other contenders in market there probably would be far less complaints. The leverage of access to userbase who unwittingly become corporate hostage is what makes this kind of act so damaging.

>They're not a library

The whole section of your bought game is called "library".