Valve admits it wrongly slapped adults only Steam rating on indie vampire game

Valve reversed an Adults Only rating it mistakenly applied to upcoming vampire RPG Nighthawks days before the game’s September 22 launch on Steam.

The classification had pulled Nighthawks from Steam’s default search results and blocked its store page in several countries, the same punishment that nearly sank a Teen-rated point-and-click game caught in a nearly identical mix-up last month, before Valve corrected that rating too. This time, the fix came just as fast.

Nighthawks began as a hotly anticipated Kickstarter campaign in 2018, promising hand-drawn art and a slow-burn vampire story with no mention of sexual content.

Developer Richard Cobbett told PC Gamer that any mature material in the game is “far less explicit than anything you’d see on HBO,” and more comedic than titillating when it does appear, not the smorgasbord of content an Adults Only tag implies.

After an appeal, the undesirable label got dropped, though neither Valve nor Wadjet Eye have explained why the label got emblazoned on the store page in the first place, or why it disappeared just as suddenly.

Gilbert said the experience was stressful, but not without an upside, since wishlists for Nighthawks nearly doubled overnight once fans galvanised behind the game. He was careful to note it wasn’t a deliberate publicity stunt: “I’m not that dumb and I’m not that smart!”

He also thanked fans for wishlisting the game throughout the process, adding that anyone who couldn’t add it to their list before could now do so.

Without the label, Nighthawks now also appears in standard Steam searches again, even for users who aren’t logged in, reversing the restriction that had limited its visibility to accounts with adult content settings enabled.

سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/valve-admits-it-wrongly-slapped-adults-only-steam-rating-on-indie-vampire-game-3409735/