Indie Developer Calls Valve a Monopolist and Criticizes Adult Content Moderation Policy
Moderators insist on an adult rating for Future? No Thanks! and refuse to explain anything to Paolo Pedercini.
This summer, indie developer Paolo “Molleindustria” Pedercini spoke about the problems with the PC release of Future? No Thanks! on Steam. Valve moderators paid close attention to his project. Now he has spoken with Aftermath and shared his experience interacting with the company.
According to him, Valve repeatedly demanded that his game be rated “adults only” — which puts it on par with full-fledged pornographic games. At the same time, Valve representatives refused to explain their position on the age rating.
The developer noted that although the game does have “brief scenes of nudity and adult content… there are no scenes of sexual acts on screen”:
There is a very clear and structured content rating system in the gaming industry, and Future? No Thanks! clearly falls into the ESRB 17+ or PEGI 16+ category. [But Steam now marks it as an adults-only game] similar to those porn games whose main goal is to arouse the player.
Pedercini believes that “Steam is a monopoly with virtually no precedents. As a developer, I am completely dependent on their whims.”
Because Future? No Thanks! was categorized as an adult game, its visibility in the Steam store was limited. As an example, he cited the UK: due to legal peculiarities, a user would have to prove they are over 18 to access the game's store page. It will also be unavailable to players from Germany and China.
Paolo Pedercini said he is willing to make changes to his game to get a different rating. However, he doesn't understand what exactly he needs to do — Valve hasn't explained anything to him: “They tell me they can't point to reasons or specific content.”
Now the author of Future? No Thanks! plans to cut some content from the Steam version and then release a “director's cut” elsewhere, which will include everything originally planned.
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