Hega Studio’s Faptastic Journey was banned from Steam on August 8th, 2020 according to the SteamDB entry. This is despite the fact that the game’s store was approved by Valve as far back as April and the game itself released on July 30th, 2020, with an R18+ patch available as a separate DLC download.
If you attempt to access the Steam store page for either the base game or the R18+ DLC it simply redirects you back to the main Steam store.
Sankaku Complex did a detailed report on the ban, linking to a Steam forum post from the developer who confirmed that the game had been banned. Some users wanted to access the R18+ content and the developer had to link them to a Google Drive file so that they could restore the uncensored content to the Steam version of the game since the DLC had been banned from Steam.
No reason for the ban was mentioned, but the Nukige Group‘s description only lists that it was “removed”, but the developer confirmed in a forum post that Valve had the store page banned.
It’s unclear exactly why it was removed along with the R18+ DLC, but the Hega Studio developer mentioned in the Steam forums that they would attempt to come back with a new title in September or October, mentioning across several posts…
“Thank for your interested. We will get back soon. Maybe Sep, or Oct. […]
“There is no news for now. We need more time to create a new store page.
“Sadly that our faptastic series almost lose any chance to comeback steam again. We need to work on a new game. […]
“Thank for your kind words. We will work harder and come back soon with some new titles.”
English obviously isn’t their first language, but based on what was mentioned in the forum posts, it appears as if Faptastic Journey is done for on Steam, but they may release some new titles on Steam in September or October.
As is usual, there are the pro-censorship people placing the blame on the developer, claiming that they must have violated Steam’s agreement somehow, all while ignoring that Hega Studios still has Hentai Asmodeus on Steam, along with its R18+ DLC.
So if the developer violated the Steam’s developer agreement, all their content would have been removed.
However, what we have been seeing from Valve lately is targeting a lot of H-games, visual novels, and anime-style products aimed at heterosexual audiences.
Systematically they’ve been getting banned, even after being on Steam for months, such as Holy Sisters 3D, Yao Shi: Yaokai’s Poetry, You Ling Lan: Lily of the Hollow and Toy’s Lover.
Now some people have argued that Steam isn’t targeting these games and that they aren’t singling out R18+ games, visual novels, or anime-style games because titles like Senran Kagura, Evenicle, and Gal*Gun 2 are still available on Steam. However, what it looks like is one of the curators are going through and banning games that most people wouldn’t miss or very few people would notice.
For instance, who’s going to run to the aid of a Taiwanese, Chinese, or Russian developer? Who’s going to vie for them to have their games returned to the platform? Who’s going to make a big enough stink to get the media to pay attention? No one.
They can essentially weed out these games with zero push-back, and that seems to be what they’re doing.
(Thanks for the news tip Famine108)