Indie game developer Robert Yang has encountered significant difficulty in making his "gay as a service" bundle of remastered queer experimental games discoverable on Steam. Yang, who refers to the project as "Radiator Forever," intended to offer the updated titles as a free, periodically updated package rather than individual store pages.
However, Yang stated on his blog that Steam has classified his game bundle as containing "frequent nudity and sexual content," leading to its suppression for the majority of users on the platform. Yang noted that despite his efforts to avoid explicit nudity, the game was still flagged. "Compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor," he wrote.
Yang expressed a preference for avoiding Steam altogether but cited pressure on alternative platforms like itch.io from payment processors, influenced by anti-porn advocacy groups, as a reason for returning to Valve's storefront. "It's the number-one platform for PC games, with a reach several times larger than itch.io," Yang explained. Like itch.io, Steam is dependent on payment processors such as Stripe and PayPal, prompting it to implement what Yang described as an "overly broad content review process" to mitigate the risk of service withdrawal.
According to Yang, Steam's content reviewers determined the game's general nature was "too gay," irrespective of his intentions. He criticized this as an arbitrary and hypocritical system, arguing that it scrutinizes indie titles with distinct themes more harshly than major AAA releases that feature customizable sexual content. "Valve loves it when Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 throw customizable genitals at you in the first five minutes," Yang commented, "But of course I can’t, because I actually have something to say about genitals!"