On July 29th, 2020 Valve banned the all-ages version of the visual novel Bokuten: Why I Became An Angel from developer Overdrive and publisher MangaGamer. No actual reason was given for the ban initially, but later Valve’s PR rep, Doug Lombardi, explained why it was banned and it was due to some H-scenes still being left in the files of the all-ages version of the game, even though you needed third-party tools to access them. This led to MangaGamer working with Valve to patch Bokuten, and now the game is back on the Steam store.
The controversy was chronicled over on the Steam forums, where despite the game being removed from the Steam store the community hub was still accessible. It was there that fans of the visual novel collated information and found out that the reason for the ban came after someone at Valve was tipped off that there were still some H-scenes present in the visual novel’s files. A couple of these scenes had not been removed from the game’s files even though they had been removed from the game itself.
Valve’s Doug Lombardi told the Daily Dot…
“In our initial content review, we missed content hidden in the game’s depot that features adult content with underage characters. While not accessible in the game itself without an externally acquired patch, we were distributing that content depot through Steam, therefor[e] the game would not have passed our content review. We’ve notified the developer, and improved our content review process to avoid this in the future.”
The Daily Dot pointed out that MangaGamer’s PR director, John Pickett refuted Lombardi’s statements by explaining that access to H-scenes required modding tools, no different than the “Hot Coffee” mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Pickett explained…
“We took painstaking care to ensure that there was no adult content in the all-ages edition distributed on Steam and Discord [Store]. There is mature content befitting a mature title, but there is no adult content in the build provided by Steam. Our company does offer an adult-patch, and adult content is contained in the patch available solely on our own website and our servers. No adult content is distributed through Steam servers for Bokuten.”
It’s true that the files weren’t accessible through the vanilla version of the game provided on Steam simply by playing through Bokuten.
Reddit user bad_spot from the VNDB showed some NSFW examples of the CG images that were located within the datasets, but they required third-party tools in order to see said images. It wasn’t something the average user would have been able to access even if they tried.
This is basically the equivalent of texture files or meshes leftover in the game’s assets that modders or dataminers sift through looking for secrets.
This still doesn’t explain exactly how Valve found out that these CG images were located in the datasets for Bokuten: Why I Became An Angel, or why they decided to ban the game months after it had already been available on the store instead of notifying MangaGamer about the issue beforehand.
Essentially they could have just disabled the purchase button until the issue was resolved if they thought it could have posed a legal problem for them.
However, Valve used the discrepancy to outright ban the game without a second thought.
After various media outlets reported on the issue, such as Clownfish TV, and MangaGamer sought to rectify the problem, Valve then reneged on the ban and allowed Bokuten back onto Steam.
Not every other developer/publisher is as fortunate, though.
There are still many all-ages visual novels that have been banned from Steam without explanation or recourse, such as Victory Project, My Girlfriend and The Key To Home. This is despite the fact that they allow games like Life Is Strange 2 on Steam, even though it contained an underage sex scene.
Most people who have recognized the patterns of the bans see that many of them are ideologically driven, not unlike the way Patreon has been banning Japanese artists and policing the artists’ off-site content for art that they deem “problematic”.
If you still wanted to purchase Bokuten: Why I Became An Angel but you don’t want to support Steam’s discriminatory practices, you can still pick up the visual novel from the MangaGamer store page.
Keep in mind that even MangaGamer isn’t completely innocent in all of this, and some of their own localization staff have badmouthed the very people who pay money to purchase the products that keep them housed and fed.
(Thanks for the news tip anon)
Loading comments…