The publisher’s official account:
IGN’s coverage:
It looks like Steam’s vague guidelines for mature content and their monopoly over gaming is once again causing problems for developers. Notably, this is different from the adult content policy previously discussed, as this game is not an adult game and was rejected before the recent restrictions on adult content.
I hope whatever marketing & visibility they lost by Steam’s weird actions gets made up for and more by this news coverage. That way they get the benefit of visibility without having to pay Steam’s massive fees. They need to be forced to be more transparent about their curatorial practices (or in a perfect world leave that to the users).
It’s a nice thought, but Volvo is not in a position to be “forced” to do anything, with the possible exception of world governments cracking down on gambling, which was likely the reason behind them wrecking the CS2 skin market rather abruptly with the patch last month.
The problem I have is with the developer, and their short horror game, having no idea what to do other than appeal the ruling so their $5 game can go back on Steam, even though it can be got on other platforms. Yes, I know Steam is so much bigger than the other platforms, but developers who are in business need to be smarter than this when money is on the line. Better that they ride the underdog train and generate interest in their game – unless their game is on its face unpleasant or worse, uninteresting.
In other words, if this game was unplayable on any platform, there might be cause for alarm, or if Volvo had a habit of doing this more often (and let’s remind ourselves that 40-50 new games go up on Steam every DAY,) I might care. But I’m already hacked off by indie devs not understanding how discovery works much less go without any real marketing plan, and this sounds a lot like what’s going on here.
Others may disagree.
That’s exactly what I mean when I say “forced”. I’d like devs to realize Steam is not the be-all-end-all, even if it is the largest market in PC gaming right now. Steam will continue with this behavior until there’s more competition. I believe we could get out of this Steam monopoly if more devs just stuck with their guns and generated sales without Steam in the mix.
I know this will hardly impact Steam and Epic’s bottom line. However… it does provide a starting blueprint for when this happens again in the future. Here’s hoping this is inflection point where indie developers realize Steam is not the only place you can scale.
Epic Game Store is only successful as a Fortnite Delivery System. Everything else we ever hear about it is how ineffective it is and how much money Epic loses on it. Which never discloses what it saves by not having to use Steam or paying Valve’s fees.
I came across an interesting take on the HORSES ban. Thought y’all might find it interesting: They Tried to Ban This Game. Here’s Why. | Nebula
I think peterspittech’s video is a pretty good consideration of the situation and I agree with it (though I have yet to play Horses, so maybe my opinion will change when I get around to it). I’ve been thinking about the ban off-and-on and I think the thing that bothers me the most is the amount of power publishers have in the games industry given that there are so few of them with so much power.
Steam, just on its own, is by far the largest digital distributor of PC games, and because of that their decisions can have a lot of impact on developers.
Then there’s Epic Games and GOG… what other serious contenders are there? I feel like there’s not much choice. If we looked at film or books, I feel like the situation is quite different, but I am not totally sure.