Valve, the company who oversees the online gaming platform known as Steam, issued a statement about increased scrutiny on possibly pornographic visual novels.

Visual novels are exactly as the name implies - they are 2D graphic stories told through a visual medium. More often than not it is a linear story but some do offer player choices and branching storylines of varying levels.

These visual novels have been received with mixed results, denounced as not meeting the criteria for games due to the lack of player agency or even stats. You essentially click through a narrative slideshow.

That said, several visual novels or "games" of similar styles have received wide acclaim for their superb writing or themes addressed.

The reason for the Steam crackdown is, I believe, two-fold. One, due to the relatively inexpensive and quick nature of crafting these visual novels, there are many of them (and many of low quality). Valve may be attempting to stem an oversaturation of visual novels in general and specifically those that feature adult or pornographic content.

Many of these visual novels tend to focus on romance or are specifically designed to be dating sims, (a game centered around the protagonist trying to get together with a wide assortment of supporting characters, more popular in the East than the West) and subsequently feature many romantic or outright pornographic scenes.

The oversaturation of the Steam market with these games coupled with a previously lackluster system of vetting on the part of Valve has resulted in many projects on the Steam page disguising themselves as visual novels for the sake of posting pornography or even selling it.

There are legitimate projects on Steam attempting to tell a serious, well-written story that just happens to have adult themes and material which are vastly different from cheap, barely cogent guises for posting pornography on the site.

While I agree with the Steam Cleaning going on, I do hope that Valve will implement better vetting measures to ensure that legitimate projects are not incorrectly targeted by simply falling under similar tags are the targeted offenders.

Visual novels, especially romances ones which may target specific demographics (yuri, yaoi, dating sims, etc.) may be a niche market but they are nonetheless a paying one with an audience entitled to have a platform for their games as much as the rest of us. I hope Valve maintains this ideal at the forefront as they secure their market.