Black Mercury Studio’s visual novel RPG, Toy’s Lover~Girl Buds, just couldn’t seem to catch a break when it comes to getting approved for release on Steam. The Taiwanese developers have had to deal with the R18+ visual novel getting banned not once, but twice.
According to the Nukige Group’s listing, the visual novel role-playing game’s appID was originally added to the Steam database back in September of 2018. After making some minor changes and updates here or there, they finally submitted the store page for review, but it was banned on February 18th, 2020 according to the original appID history on the SteamDB page.
Months later they tried again, opening up a new appID in the Steam database on May 23rd, 2020. After adding the store images and header, the store page was submitted for review on July 7th, 2020, but it was denied by the software curators at Valve, and it was banned on July 8th, 2020, according to the SteamDB entry.
Obviously, this leads one to question: why?
Well, the most obvious answer is due to the fact that it involves schoolgirls. There’s a trailer you can view of the role-playing visual novel below.
The R18+ tale centers around a struggling sex toy shop during the peak of Japan’s declining birth rate. This has led the shop to fall on hard times, which eventually forces the owner to fall ill from the stress. His daughter, an aspiring idol who attends school, is forced to take over the sex shop and ends up receiving some aid from her fellow classmates, as well as a long time friend who returns to the scene.
The game centers around the girls both exploring ways to increase the sales of the sex shop, as well as exploring their own hidden sexual desires.
Given the fact that they’re school idols, it’s easy to see why Valve decided to axe the game, even though it does have yuri themes, which would technically put it on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. However, I think it’s a combination of both the schoolgirl theme and the fact that it’s yuri aimed at a male audience, designed to titillate and tantalize, that ultimately led to the game being banned.
By now most people know that Valve usually targets anime or visual novel-themed games that contain:
- Lolis
- School settings
- School outfits
- Schoolgirls
- Hetero-only romances
If it’s one of the above or all of the above, it’s likely your game will get nuked. And sometimes it doesn’t even need to include romances… just really attractive female designs aimed at straight male audiences.
As for Black Mercury Studio, they’re already working on their next big project, Convenience Store Without Skirts, which is being crowd funded on ZecZec.
It’s another role-playing visual novel with tons of lewd art and sexy waifu-bait, but it has a unique management sim-twist where you have to manage a convenience store, too.
Convenience Store Without Skirts blasted past its initial funding goal right out of the gate, managing to accrue NT$400,000 (which is around $14,000) on July 7th, 2020, the day the crowdfunding drive went live. It’s somewhat ironic that a day later their visual novel, Toy’s Lover, got banned from Steam.
Hopefully Black Mercury can get Toy’s Lover shuffled on over to a few other outlets, including Jast USA or MangaGamer.
At the moment you can purchase the Mandarin version of Toy’s Lover from over on the NSFW DLSite store page.
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