Steam digs the porn games. Oh, you hadn’t heard? Steam has a slew of top porn games, many of which often make their top played list. As it stands, a user must be logged in and 18+ in order to view porn games on Steam. However, it seems that the age verification process for porn games isn’t working as well as Steam would prefer. So now Steam is requesting that game developers who choose to market adult gaming content be more “consistent.”
This terrible story of despicable luck comes down to a single user who, when displaying Steam’s games, foudn a porn game image. If you are logged into Steam and you are 18+ and you’ve selected “adult” content as OK to display via your settings, you can mingle in the porn games. If any of those conditions aren’t met, you can’t (or in this case, shouldn’t) be able to view adult gaming content.
The Steam user saw a game called Doom Eternal displayed on their recommendations. For that game, the user got an age verification pop up. Say what?
To be fair, when the user clicked the porn game, an age verification request gating the content popped up. But alas, the damage had already been done (at least, visually).
Steam is looking into the situation, because, of course they are. The damage in this case is limited given the user couldn’t access the full game, or even the trailers. But that doesn’t make this any less of an egregious foul up. Steam has endured a decent amount of criticism in allowing porn games on their hugely popular gaming platform. Allowing adult gaming content has always hinged on top-rate age verification and preference control. In this case, all that broke down and has now put some bad publicity on the shoulders of Steam execs.
Let’s be honest, porn games sell. Steam doesn’t want to lose all that revenue to free porn game sites like this one. Instead, they want to attract a wide variety of gamers to their platform. Not to mention that most of Steam’s porn games cost money.
So what led to the foul up?
On Steam, the game developer who uploads the file to Steam must declare it’s adult-status. So when game developers fail to appropriately categorize their game, that leads to mishaps as the one we’re discussing. It’s also possible some game developers could see opportunity in “mistakes,” but it’s impossible to understand if any of those shenanigans are occurring.
So Steam wants game developers to pay special attention during their process to ensure there are no more of these errors. Steam will also need to do more to make sure there are ways to catch mistakes, or game developers who may want some free publicity or a jump start in sales.