Valve has a horrible habit of jumping the gun and banning games before getting a full understanding of them. They’ve been known to ban all-ages outings of some visual novels, as well as games that contain no sex nor any nudity. In the case of Crime Opera Studios’ independently funded and developed visual novel, Crime Opera: The Butterfly Effect, the game was unceremoniously banned from the Steam store under the determiner of “child exploitation”.
The news first came courtesy of a couple of tweets from the developer, who informed fans and potential customers that Crime Opera: The Butterfly Effect was banned from Steam.
We ar absolutely devastated that our #visualnovel Crime Opera: The Butterfly Effect has been BANNED by steam, for completely bullshit and untrue reasons! More to come. #steam #vn #oelvn #VNdev pic.twitter.com/Triqb873kB
— Crime Opera Studios (@CrimeOpera) November 20, 2019
In a follow-up post responding to a user who asked what the stated reason was for the ban, Crime Opera Studios explained that Valve told them via e-mail that the game contained sexual acts involving children, which was untrue, according to the developer.
Their reason was sexual acts involving children, which is absolutely and completely untrue. I have posted a detailed analysis of the situation over at reddit, /r/visualnovels
— Crime Opera Studios (@CrimeOpera) November 20, 2019
If you attempt to visit the Steam store page for Crime Opera: The Butterfly Effect, it will simply redirect you to the main store page.
According to the SteamDB entry the game was banned on November 20th, 2019, but curiously enough there was no Adults Only tag on the title. So even if it did contain sexual content it wasn’t explicit.
So how did Valve reach the decision that this game somehow fit under their “child exploitation” violation?
Well, in a follow-up post over on the /r/visualnovel sub-reddit, the developer explained that Valve likely saw the main cover image of the game and saw that the tag on the Seam store contained “sexual content” and made the snap decision to ban the game without properly reading what it was about or even play-testing it to see if it did indeed violate their terms of service….
“[…] I submitted the build and it was stuck for over a week as the steam team needed to do a manual review. I got a little worried about the time it was taking, so I sent them an email this morning asking how long it may take. A couple hours later, I was sent notice that the game is now banned from steam, effective immediately.
“The reason? They are claiming it involves sex with minors. Let me be absolutely clear about this, there is NONE of this in our game. The one depiction of sex in the game involves two ADULTS, and they are FULLY CLOTHED. Steam hosts games far more racy than ours, featuring anime characters who look far younger being involved in such acts as our characters do. I was hesitant to even put the sexual tag on our store page because I worried it would mislead people who are looking for eroge Vns. […]”
They attempted to appeal the decision but was still denied entry on the Steam store.
Typically, majority of the responses in the thread called for cooler heads and a calmer mind when dealing with Valve, and suggested they attempt to politely reach out again to get the situation resolved.
However, it’s usually very rare that a visual novel that’s been banned is allowed back onto Steam.
There have been a few rare cases where games that were wrongly identified as “child exploitation” were allowed back onto Steam after massive media attention and a whole lot of pushback from fans. One notable example is Hello, Goodbye, where the all-ages version was banned but months later after multiple appeals and a lot of news articles, the game was finally allowed back onto Steam.
In some other cases like Food Girls, the all-ages Chinese visual novel never contained any adult content whatsoever, but Valve forced the developers to replace/censor one of the loli characters before they allowed it on Steam.
Other ecchi games like d20: Sweet Roll Club and My Girlfriend were also banned from Steam, even though once again they contained no H-content. However, one was set in a high-school and the other was set in college, and Valve are especially aggressive at banning games set in schools or with characters that contain school uniforms, which is why Lilith’s Taimanin Asagi was banned.
That’s not to mention that Valve completely allowed an underage sex scene in Life is Strange 2, and didn’t bat an eye at it.
Oftentimes there are defenders of Valve who will claim that these games are “illegal” or that they can’t allow them due to Washington state laws, but those arguments all fall apart when you consider that Evenicle is allowed on Steam and it has far more explicit content than all of the games on the Waifu Holocaust 2.0 list.
That’s not to mention that typically if a game isn’t allowed in a certain region, they simply block it from being available in that region, such as Fight of Gods being blocked in Malaysia.
The biggest problem with a lot of these bans is that when people muddy the waters with misinformation instead of moving to hold Valve accountable for being more consistent with their curation policies, it means more developers suffer from being pushed through the nebulous review process and having their games banned for ill-defined or nonsensical reasons.
If you check the archive of the Steam store page for Crime Opera: The Butterfly Effect, there’s nothing there that would warrant a ban. And according to the developer there is no sexual content involving minors. So at this point, one has to ask why is Valve banning this game? Unfortunately the company refuses to respond to any of our inquiries.
However, Crime Opera Studios – after surviving a failed Kickstarter and self-funding the game over the course of three years – would probably be wise to seek out distribution on Jast USA, Fakku!, MangaGamer, or DLSite.
At the moment you can grab the demo for Crime Opera: The Butterfly Effect from the itch.io page.
(Thanks for the news tip anon)