Do erotic games have a place on Steam?. Mature discussion.
Short answer: No

Long answer: No, because while the gamer demographic has somewhat changed from young people to now young people and adults, Steam should foremost cater to the young under 21 audience. When i first made a account here(my first one, this here is my second account) i didn't think about erotic stuff very much, i just wanted to play Dawn of War with my mates and destroy Xenos all day long. Steam shouldn't cater to old perverts like me who see the Xenos in their pants all day long. The original Steam as we know it know is a family platform and should enforce that image and adult games have no place there.
However there is no arguing about it that the mature adult gamer exsist and the group is growing everyday, and do like games with a more aquired taste so to speak. Certainly when there are a lot of middle aged humans who feel betrayed by society, have checked out or have been dealt a bad hand in the healthy body department like me.

Solution: Make a seperate platform for adult gamers, call it the Boiler Room and shove everything too erotic, edgy, for under 21 players there. Require a real ID at account creation so Valve is protected from liabillity. Made it so that you can only pay with points you can buy with credit from your Steam wallet.

Pros:
-Steam stays in its original form and does not change, so there is no trouble with its current user base getting used to a new platform.
-Tender young minds are protected from the filth of the adult world and can be children for a little longer.
- Developers can make a clear choice for which demographic to create a game so they don't have to censor pantyshots, language, or difficult themes. Either it is included in the game or not, no halve measures like a void under a skirt or gore removed.
-Activist groups and payment processors should be happy, brand names are protected and so are our children.
- Valve can be the pioneer with this, discovering new grounds and garnering praise from it fanbase, restore trust and give all NGO's and busybodies the middle finger.
- No adult games slipping through and end up in search results since the shops are seperate and have no contact so to speak other than the Steamwallet system.
-Steam brandname is protected since there is and with a seperate shop never will be adult, erotic games on the Steam store.
-Seperate communities where moderaters can be a little more lenient.

There will certainly be more pro arguments, but those are the ones i could come up with fast.
Cons:
-Uncle Gabe has to come to land to direct construction on the new shop and i am not sure if the sea will give him up.
-Investment, effort, dollars from the side of Valve.
- A somewhat split community, while i think this is a pro, one can only be in one place at a time. But with al the discords and other means of communication i think this problem is neglible.
-Developers need to reconsider their development strategies for whom to develop games, so they can make money but not all the money. Again somewhat a pro for me since every game is the same grey goo to me atm. Make a game for gamers but not for all the gamers if you catch my drift.
-Comsumers have to create a new account, create a new community, and get used to a new shop.
-New moderation team will be needed, plus a new infrastructure and a game acceptance team(for the love of....please no Mary).
-Make changes and have represntatives for Japanese developers, improve communication with indie one team developers. I write this as a con since it goes with investing and effort, but it is rediculous that the communication and transparity from Valve is so lacking.

So these are my thoughts, well showerthougts actuallly. Would you like to see a different shop for the 21+ where we can buy our hardboiled, edgy, erotic games?. Do you have more pros or cons?. Did you lick a lampost this winter?.

Thank for reading. Discuss in a civil adult manner. Dont feed the trolls, they are all morbid obese.
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Showing 1-15 of 89 comments
Sham! 19 Jul @ 6:22am 
should games that are not strictly erotic but contain depiction of erotic or sexualized women and men be on steam tho?

in your argument (which is pretty much just bait anyway) where do you draw the line to what is allowed and what is not?

and who should be in charge to decide?
random orgs or actual laws?
Last edited by Sham!; 19 Jul @ 6:24am
Of course they do.. They make money like any other game genre.
D. Flame 19 Jul @ 6:52am 
Originally posted by PinkPanzer:
Short answer: No

Long answer: No, because while the gamer demographic has somewhat changed from young people to now young people and adults, Steam should foremost cater to the young under 21 audience.

You're wrong right from the start. 18+ is adult, and 84% of Steam users are aged 20 to 49 as of 2024.
Respectfully disagree. A separate platform would cost way too much. And Valve already provides the tools to efficiently obscure the games from those who are not supposed to see them.
Yasahi 19 Jul @ 7:03am 
Originally posted by D. Flame:
Originally posted by PinkPanzer:
Short answer: No

Long answer: No, because while the gamer demographic has somewhat changed from young people to now young people and adults, Steam should foremost cater to the young under 21 audience.

You're wrong right from the start. 18+ is adult, and 84% of Steam users are aged 20 to 49 as of 2024.

This.

If anything, kicking everyone under 18 to a "kiddie" Steam would be better if we start changing something. OP can go there as well.
Short answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Yes, they do.
I don't really care if they are on Steam. Non of them are on my radar, but I'm sure someone must like that stuff.
Don't really care all I care about is robbing them of the trading cards and moving on
While they have no appeal to me, I don't mind them being available.

Issue is the potential for games with nudity or adult situations being lumped in with them by overly zealous individuals.

For example certainly small toxic groups of self identified Christians have been trying to heavily censor all forms of media for decades.
they are GAMES. and there IS an adult filter. If that adult filter can be abused by people who are not adults is another problem, but this can be solved without removing games from steam.

according to what OP said, no adult game should be allowed on steam. so actually yes. thy DO belong on steam!

and btw this is entirely another issue: a 3rd party payment processor can tell steam what to allow and what to not allow. don't you find this disturbing?!
steven1mac 19 Jul @ 7:44am 
People usually find Steam later in life than consoles. I don't know what the average age of people making a steam account, but I imagine it would be somewhere in their 20s.

I think having a button to toggle NSFW games from being shown should be enough, and if people want to buy theses kind of games let them. Most of them are crappy and cheaply made, but people should have a right to choose for themselves, or at least Valve should be able to choose without being pressured by a non-government entity.
Originally posted by steven1mac:
People usually find Steam later in life than consoles. I don't know what the average age of people making a steam account, but I imagine it would be somewhere in their 20s.

I think having a button to toggle NSFW games from being shown should be enough, and if people want to buy theses kind of games let them. Most of them are crappy and cheaply made, but people should have a right to choose for themselves, or at least Valve should be able to choose without being pressured by a non-government entity.
This is true I know I was forced onto steam once I got a full time job in front of a pc, last console i owned was xbox 360
GunTyphoon 19 Jul @ 7:54am 
3
Short answer: Yes. I will not elaborate why. Good day to you sir.
yes, they do.
same as every other genre or type of game, dont like visual novels dont buy them, dont like puzzle games dont buy them, dont like violence in you games dont buy them.

steam is a marketplace, there are parental controls for said market place, if something is mis-tagged either by purpose or accident you can report to help correct it.

busy body monopolystic tactics done by visa mastercard is just showing what scum they are, along with those that suppport them.

"think of the children" i hear you bellow, i have heard this all my life from both "sides" of the isle, never have i once seen these "champions" of child morality picket demo straight outside of a cartel flesh peddlers house, of the porn king empire studios, of hollywood studios casting couches. all they do is go on some sort of moral crusade against fiction instead of reality. until they show more effort into fixing reality thats more than a "give a like for thoughts and prayers on my facebook post" i will consider them limp wristed holier than-though idiots along with all those that preach along side of them.

so again, I am getting sick of asking people to live and let live when they keep deficating on my living room floor every time i see them. you dont like sex games on steam congradulations and slow clap to you, like everyone else on this platform you have a prefrence for the games you like to play, so play them and allow others to play the games that they want and pay for the play. you arnt forced to play smut games. your concern trolling about player choice shows that you are of the same character as other extremists.
coldfish 19 Jul @ 9:11am 
On ideology level, I think the idea of "sex = bad, murder = ok" is ridiculous and Valve should not normalize it by shove sexual content into another site. They especially shouldn't do that just because Visa/Mastercard demand.

On user experience level... I do think Steam should have better filters. One player enjoys "Cute anime girls in bikinis" doesn't mean they would enjoy "MILF R*pe Simulator."
Last edited by coldfish; 19 Jul @ 9:11am
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