Kindred Spirits was among the first batch of 'adult' games that were released on Steam. It was honestly quite the big news back then. There were some discussions among the industry people about Steam's pants-on-head-stupid policy regarding putting slightly adult themed games on their platform. The talk back then was that despite KS being very, very light on those so called adult situations (Titanic probably showed more than Kindred Spirits); Steam was still giving the publisher a lot of go around for a dang long time despite the publisher directly asking Steam what they needed to do to get it approved. So any games that were perceived to be "those kind" of adult games are still given a rather hard time to be put on Steam. Yes, present tense. Some are just outright DENIED for ??? reasons. Still present tense. Some of the VN from that period had all ages version PERIOD with no adult patches available at all until much later. For example G-senjou no Maou/The Devil on G-String, which is not a yuri title, was censored on steam and came out in late 2015. The adult patch was not available anywhere until 2019 or 2020 according to a steam forum post. Said patch is only available on the publisher's website Denpasoft. Another VN example is Song of Saya, censored version on Steam. Adult patch can only be purchased from JAST.
Basically VN might be auto censored on the developer/publisher's end to get around Steam's weird acceptance policy. Even in 2021 when I buy VN with actual adult themes in it, chances are there's a separate adult patch either on Steam or off site. This applies to western VN as well. Meanwhile downright hentai games are just... released as is usually. Steam is flippin' weird. Shovelware garbage titles get approved for much less...
If you are looking to purchase VN on Steam, based on pricing it's actually better if you just buy the uncensored version directly from the publisher's website if it's one of those titles with paid adult DLC. Although if you are just interested in trying out a VN to see if it's your cuppa, use Steam version to demo for -2 hours. Keep in mind that because of Steam's lack of transparent acceptance policy, potential yuri titles may also be outright rejected on steam despite being an all age title. I still don't understand why The Curse of Kudan is not on steam.
last edited at Jan 3, 2022 8:19AM