With Rape Day ban, Steam shows it?s not as ?hands off? as it claims

Since last June, Valve has claimed that "the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store," with only minor exceptions for content that is "illegal or straight-up trolling." But Valve's decision to block controversial upcoming title Rape Day from Steam shows its actual moderation policy is more reactive and restrictive than originally promised.Rape Day attracted plenty of headlines over the last week or so for its pre-release description of a visual novel where you "control the choices of a menacing serial killer rapist during a zombie apocalypse." Trailers and screenshots posted to the game's (now-deleted, archived, extremely NSFW) Steam page show some very basic branching dialogue choices amid brutal static scenes of hardcore pornography and sexual violence.Developer Desk Lamp said in a March 4 update that the game had been submitted to Steam for approval and that "the review process was taking longer than expected." Yesterday afternoon, Valve posted a short blog post stating directly that "Rape Day will not ship on Steam":Much of our policy around what we distribute is, and must be, reactionary [Valve presumably means "reactive"]—we simply have to wait and see what comes to us via Steam Direct. That said, in a statement provided to CNET this week, that developer said, "I think I might agree with Steam that my game is not the right fit for a distribution site that is marketed at the general masses and children."Maybe Desk Lamp is being too cute by half, trying to come up with an easy justification for a game that's only meant to troll the storefront. That's a drop in the bucket in the Internet outrage machine, but it reflects an outcry about the game that was starting to hit mainstream news outlets and social media commenters who aren't usually immersed in the game industry.Further ReadingOp-ed: Valve takes a side by not “taking sides” in curation controversyIn announcing its new policy back in June, Valve argued that "if we allow your game onto the Store, it does not mean we approve or agree with anything you're trying to say with it." But as I pointed out in an op-ed at the time, that sort of we-don't-have-a-position position doesn't prevent Valve's brand from being dragged down by Steam's worst content."By allowing practically the most hateful games imaginable on its storefront, Steam offers an implicit endorsement that amounts to much more than just a place on the digital shelf," I wrote at the time.