A lot of people have been asking about House Party and how we are handling Steam’s new rules surrounding adult content. It’s been a crazy ride for House Party. Originally, the game was accepted on Steam as is, only to later be forced to censor some aspects of the game. Now it seems like Steam is taking a well-overdue new approach to games with sex and sexual themes in them, and allowing them on their platform, but there are still a lot of things to consider for us. After much deliberation, we present to you, our latest DLC patch!
We live in strange time where people are super scared of boobs, vaginas, and penises, especially in America where I live. While it’s awesome that Steam is taking a better approach to this, people in this country still seem to happily consume and embrace all types of violence and gore, and still lose their shit when they see a naked body. There’s still a negative stigma attached to anything that is deemed “over the line” when it comes to sex and sexual themes, especially with games in particular, whereas violence and gore seem to have no limit.
That being said, flipping the switch and making House Party completely uncensored comes with a price of a new “AO (Adult Only)” rating on Steam. This rating is applied ONLY to games with overly sexual content, but NOT to games of overly violent or gory content ::sigh::. The problem with getting this rating on Steam, is that it actively hides your game by default, and it becomes less visible on the store and to consumers. Even though this is a step in the right direction, games are still being penalized for having sexual content in them, and rewarded for gratuitous violence.
It’s not just Steam that this happens on mind you. If you take a look at Twitch’s Prohibited games list, they claim they are “protecting the integrity of their service” from violence and gore as well as sexualy themed content, but if you look closely at the “list”, they only enforce the latter. Granted, Twitch has every right to prohibit whatever they want on their service, but they are neither fair nor honest about how they go about it, and their values are really screwed up. Under the guise of “protecting their integrity”, they are trying to parent you and control what you should and should not see, and they hold on to this ridiculous caveman notion that sex is somehow taboo, and violence, murder and gore are super awesome! Not only that, but they are flat out lying when they say they police both violence and sexual themes, when they only really care about the latter of those things. Show me one game that was banned on Twitch for being too violent? They are perfectly fine with broadcasting horrifically violent and gory games like GTA5™, Friday the 13th™ and Call of Duty™. The list goes on and on, but they ban games that have any sort of sexual themes, yet make exceptions for games that they make a lot of money on like Witcher 3™, Conan Exiles™ or even South Park™, where characters are graphically probed by giant alien anal dildos. Not only that, but House Party has an in-game option for full censorship, which puts the game completely within Twitch’s guidelines, yet it’s still banned. What it boils down to, is that Twitch is only interested in being the moral arbiter over what’s acceptable, imposing their beliefs on to you, and deciding FOR you what you can and cannot see based on their subjective morality, which is pretty messed up to begin with. Of course, the exception is that if the content in question is making them a lot of money, they will completely abandon all of their “principals”. We, as gamers, are responsible adults, and the choice of what games we choose to play and watch others play should be ours and not, respectively, the Twitches of the world. Let the gamers choose what they wish to see and play, not some “moral” authority.
As a side note, let’s also make it clear; I have nothing against violent video games. I think both sex and violence are completely OK topics for a video game and for all works of fiction in general. I am just trying to draw attention to the hypocrisy and sort of, well… backwards thinking where somehow we ended up brainwashing ourselves as a society into thinking that naked bodies are somehow worse than murder! But I digress…
House Party has been an amazing success so far. For those of you who know House Party, the game is much more than a “sex simulator”. It’s a comedy at its core with all kinds of splitting story-lines where your decisions matter and change the direction and outcome of the story. Sure it’s garnered attention for being one of the first games to be as brazen as it is about its sexual themes, but that’s not ALL the game is about. There’s so much more to it, and by being hidden behind an AO rating on Steam, we would lose our visibility, lose sales, and ultimately possibly not be able to carry on as a studio. With our new success comes more employees, more contractors, and more expenditures as we try to grow as a studio and we try to make this game and future games the best they can be. We can’t really afford to take a hit in visibility even though we think it’s ridiculous that we have to live in a world where these double-standards exist.
Our solution has been to release this new DLC add-on for House Party that will be completely free, and that will lift the censors in the core game and make the House Party game whole again on Steam. The core House Party game will remain censored and “suitable” for all audiences, and the DLC content will be marked as “AO” and take the hit in visibility. We’ve cleared this approach with Steam, and they are happy with it as well. Anybody who purchased House Party in the past, will be able to download this DLC for free, and anybody purchasing House Party will see the option to include the DLC content if you set your user preferences to not treat you like a child.
As always, we thank all of you for your continued support, and we look forward to continue to work on House Party as we bring it out of Early Access and toward full release, and we look forward to bringing you more games in the future!
Sincerely,
Bobby and the Eek! Games Team.
Dude, I’m going to go buy this game just because of this post. I’d never heard of this game until today. The double standard is dumb. Best of luck for everyone and I’m happy to support you all!
Honestly, it really is a ton of fun. I had seen and heard some stuff about it and decided to give it a try, and was not disappointed.
You could have bought it before and did some small research and took off the censor bars.
Indeed, the double standard IS DUMB!
Thanks for the support and enjoy the party!
Should I get this
excelente solo pido que saquen el lenguaje español en el juego base esperar los parches tarda demasiados y tiene muchos errores
Cool
glad i dont use twat-ch 🙂
Looking forward to the DLC. Happy of this turn of events. I wishe you all the very best!
I’m pretty fine with what you stated there, but you really should think about this “we’re getting over obsolete sexual stigmata and are so liberal and human-friendly” attitude, considering the fact, you only can play a dude trying to nail girls by being – mostly – a manipulative male jerk. The optimal approach would be to empower all sexes and genders and make it possible, for example, to play let’s say a female charakter. That would be a good approach. By just demanding more freedom to show more sexual content without representing all kinds genders and mutual respect, it could appear as a pretty lame sexist and, simultaneously, penis-driven idea. Just a hint for furhter improvements. Best regards
This game is about choice. Sure, you can play the game as a jerk, but you can also play as the nice guy. There are also gay scenes, and opportunities that are flip-sided and empower the female. There is really only one quest that involves tricking/manipulation. Other than that, the player can just make some “bad choices”, that usually outcome in a bad result for the player. It’s a choice the player makes. We also have playing as a female in the pipeline, which will open new opportunities to the player. My guess is that you didn’t play the game, and you only saw a few videos online, like most people who judge the game as you have. There is a lot of content you missed if this is your impression of the game.
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