A week before launch. Fucking hell.
Ghazi
A community for progressive issues, social justice and LGBT+ causes in media, gaming, entertainment and tech.
Official replacement for Reddit's r/GamerGhazi
Content should be articles, video essays, podcasts about topics relevant to the forum. No memes, single images or tweets/toots/... please!
Community rules:
Be respectful and civil with each other. Don't be a jerk. There is a real human being on the other side of your screen. See also the Blahaj.Zone Community Rules
No bigotry of any kind allowed. Making racist, sexist, trans-/homo-/queerphobic, otherwise demeaning and hateful comments is not ok. Disabilities and mental illnesses are not to be used as insults and should not be part of your comment unless speaking of your own or absolutely relevant.
No gatekeeping and being rude to people who don't agree with you. Leave “gamer” stereotypes out of your comment (e.g. sexless, neck bearded, teenaged, basement-dwelling, etc). Don't compare people to animals, or otherwise deny their humanity. Even if you think someone is the worst human on the planet, do not wish death or harm upon them.
No "justice porn". Posts regarding legal action and similar is allowed, but celebrating someone being harmed is not.
Contrarianism for its own sake is unnecessary and not welcome.
No planning operations, no brigading, no doxxing or similar activities allowed.
Absolutely no defense of GamerGate and other right-wing harassment campaigns, no TERFs and transphobia, racism, dismissing of war crimes and praise of fascists. This includes “JAQing off”, intentionally asking leading questions while pretending to be a neutral party. This also applies to other forms of authoritarianism and authoritarian or criminal actions by liberal or leftist governments.
NSFW threads, such as ones discussing erotic art, pornography and sex work, must be tagged as such.
Moderators can take action even if none of the rules above are broken.
"Nobody wants to invest in a game that can't come out on Steam."
Speak for yourself. Valve and Steam becoming more and more frustrating to deal with for both developers and users, not that it was never not frustrating, but yeah, we should all move to gog or itch.io instead.
Steam's explanation is below.
I suspect the game was just too gorey. Note that the game isn't out yet, and I saw no indication that the authors of the article had played or seen it.
After review, we will not be able to ship your game HORSES on Steam. While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute. Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor. While every product submitted is unique, if your product features this representation—even in a subtle way that could be defined as a ‘grey area’—it will be rejected by Steam. For instance, setting your game in a high school but declaring your characters are of legal age would fall into that category and be banned. This app has been banned and cannot be reused. Re-submissions of this app, even with modifications, will not be accepted.
Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.
Steam doesn’t usually have a problem with gore.
day six featured a scene in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, resulting in an interactive dialogue sequence where the girl rides on the shoulders of a naked "horse" while it's led by the player.
I can see how this might’ve been interpreted as sexual.
Edit just in case: There’s a lot of shady shit Valve does that you could criticize. This is just blatant attention-seeking.
all characters in Horses are clearly 20 years old
man and his young daughter
Weird to write the former in their FAQ but then wonder if the latter might be a problem
This article mentions that they took the scene out of the final version of the game. It also mentions that the dev claims that the young girl model was just a placeholder, which just raises the question of why they would use a child as a placeholder in such a scene.
Valve shill & drones will defend this.
It's like monopolies are not good, actually.