The developers of Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival are pushing forward with sexually explicit content, despite recent crackdowns by payment processors on adult games. Narrative director Antony de Fault stated that the situation, which saw payment processors like Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa withdraw services from Steam and Itch.io, is "ridiculous for our art form." He added that the team made no changes to their game in response to the pressure.
Last year's campaign by Australian anti-porn group Collective Shout led to many games being removed from digital storefronts, creating an uncertain environment for developers incorporating any sexual content. Some titles are processed without issue, while others face bans with little recourse. Valve recently blocked Molleindustria's Future? No Thanks! due to scenes of minor nudity, only rescinding the ban after public lobbying.
Despite the volatile climate, the Hellraiser team played a demo featuring explicit content, including male and female nudity, and felt confident proceeding. "It happened, and it spooked us, but we didn't make any changes," de Fault said regarding the previous year's events. "The situation didn't seem to get any worse and, honestly, I'd forgotten about it for the last six or seven months."
Game director Emil Esov suggested that the established Clive Barker intellectual property offers a degree of protection. "For us, it's maybe a bit easier because Hellraiser is an established IP," Esov explained. "It comes with the territory where you work in this universe. It would be much harder for an original IP, then you need to justify more and you may get challenged more."
De Fault elaborated on this point, likening the game's position to being "grandfathered in" due to the franchise's origins in the 1980s. "It gives us permission to continue to play in that sandbox. People already know what it is, they're not freshly having the conversation of figuring out what Hellraiser is, so I think we avoided it a bit."
However, the game's availability may still be impacted. While Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is slated for a Steam release on October 8, Saber Interactive is still seeking age classifications for sale in territories like Germany and has not yet submitted the game for classification in Japan. This follows similar difficulties faced by other horror titles, such as Illfonic's Halloween: The Game, which saw its PS5 release cancelled in Japan due to certification issues.
Regarding the development process, de Fault emphasized that content decisions were driven by creative intent rather than external pressure. "Honestly, we didn't think about it that much," he stated when asked about certification's impact on content. "It was just really important that we didn't compromise and that we made what Hellraiser should be. The entire reason to do a Hellraiser game is its unique flavour of horror. It deals with these themes that other video games daren't approach. If we were to shrink away from that, it would be self-defeating, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on to say this is a unique experience. It was never a question of not doing it. It was more a question of what do we actually want to say with this game?"