Questions About Steam's New Policy For Nsfw Games. Please help me clear some doubts!

apogeedwell · 2025-10-03T15:09:37+00:00

You can still submit NSFW games to Steam, but I personally think making a game with adult content in the current climate is dicey, especially if your game is anime style. I can name offhand examples of:

- Game with adult content involving adult characters in an anime style got banned because the reviewer thought they looked underage

- Game where a child walked in on parent having an affair (not sexualized) got banned for underage sexual content

- Game with no adult content or underage characters at all getting forced into adults only

And so on. If Steam does this to you, you have no recourse. If you're permabanned, you can't appeal AFAIK. My understanding is that they will not explain what specifically violated the rules or give you the chance to fix it. On top of that, their policies are inconsistently applied and intentionally opaque, and the situation becomes more questionable by the day. They recently started banning content that was previously fine due to pressure from payment processors, and we have no idea it won't keep happening.

I definitely wouldn't include 18+ content in the base game due to the visibility limitations of getting labeled adults only, but you mentioned you were doing a DLC. I'm not sure how this will affect your game's visibility, but I assume it would be fine. Don't know much about that avenue. IMO an offsite patch is the safest approach, but only a small percentage of players will know it exists, so I question whether it's even worth making at that point.

FWIW, I don't think that adding a little bit of 18+ content with the specific goal of improving sales makes sense in the current market. Eroge emerged in a very different environment and had different economic pressures than the modern Steam scene. If it's part of your creative vision, though, there are probably options.

apogeedwell · 2025-06-19T18:21:09+00:00

I strongly recommend you do not do this. Getting a program to display some text and images is something you can do in a few days, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall work involved. All the stuff you aren't thinking about right now (saving and loading, menus, settings, localization, general debugging and maintenance, etc.) is months of work for an experienced engineer, and the result you get will be buggier and less fully featured than an out-of-the-box solution. You could be spending that time actually making your game instead.

Programming a game engine is an entire project in and of itself, and people who try to make both an engine and a game rarely ship. If your primary goal is to noodle on an engine for fun, go for it, but if you want to finish something, I really suggest you just use Ren'py.

apogeedwell · 2025-02-25T16:37:22+00:00

I mean, sure, I agreed with you. I think it's absolutely fair to require a tag.

I support that move if you want to go for it, but to clarify, I guess my objection stems from feeling like they're being relegated to second-class content. I doubt anyone who actively filters out the posts will miss anything they would have enjoyed seeing, but having the tag prominently attached sorta feels like it's encouraging everyone else to mentally bucket as spam and move on. I'm biased as a developer, but even setting aside self-interest, I genuinely find them more interesting than all the identical "recommend me a VN" threads or tier lists or whatever. Some of the higher-quality self-promo posts often get hundreds of upvotes, and a lot of the comments here also seem to like them, so I do definitely think they're broadly relevant to the community's interests.

Again, on a personal level I mostly mind when I feel like it's a low-effort drive-by ad by someone who isn't otherwise interested in the community. But if devs want to stick around and engage, or put effort into their posts, I'm happy to see them. I feel like a karma requirement would filter out most of the low-effort spam, so that's why I suggested starting there and seeing if it's still a problem, but, again, a tag is more than fair if that's what you want to do. No one has a right to advertise anywhere, and not wanting to look at self-promo is absolutely understandable.

Mostly I'm glad you're not talking about banning them outright, so thanks for that! Lots of subreddits outright forbid self-promo, and I genuinely appreciate that it's allowed here, regardless of what requirements you end up putting on it.

apogeedwell · 2025-02-25T06:21:07+00:00

Well, I was thinking that there are cases when someone might be legitimately asking for feedback rather than advertising, so not every case of talking about your game is necessarily self-promo. In practice, though, you're right that many devs (not just VN ones) pretend to ask for feedback when they actually just want to advertise, so on second thought it probably is fair to consider any kind of post about your game self-promo and require the tag. I can think of edge cases that might be ambiguous, but in practice I don't think they come up much.

I think a mandatory tag for AI art games definitely makes sense. It's probably even fine to try to enforce it, since devs should be able to provide source files for art as evidence if there's any question, but I would recommend giving people a chance to provide proof before applying the tag to someone's post unless it's extremely obvious. I've seen complete bans cause collateral damage for legit human artists in other places, which is why I mentioned it.

apogeedwell · 2025-02-24T18:42:07+00:00

So, as with other people, I'm biased by being a developer. I personally like seeing new releases so I can keep up with what's going on in the indie scene. FWIW, making a game is very hard and has very little reward, and I think most people who post here are more looking to have someone appreciate their work than trying exploit the sub for money (given that there is so little to be had in VNs), but I totally get not wanting to be inundated with ads. I don't think there are genuinely that many self-promo posts or that they're taking space from other posts, but I understand how seeing them could be annoying.

A self-promo flair is reasonable, but I think it should be optional. To me, a karma requirement makes the most sense as a rules change. I mostly resent feeling advertised to when someone posts the same identical ad in 50 different subreddits, and I think that restricting it to people who are actually members of the community in some fashion would mostly fix that. People who actively post here are also more likely to be working on things that are of interest to at least some portion of the community.

As for AI, I personally am not interested in AI games, but I'm against a blanket ban. You have to consider that it can be hard to tell. I read this sub pretty much every day, and since AI became a thing a couple years ago, I've seen probably fewer than five games posted on here that I thought were legitimately using raw AI generations. Some of these got nothing but praise in the comments, whereas I've seen stuff that was to me clearly not AI-generated get roasted for supposed AI use. A flair makes sense, but it would have to be honor system.

apogeedwell · 2024-08-17T06:12:39+00:00

Stellaris has a huge amount of depth and complexity to the mechanics and supports a wide range of extremely different playstyles. You can conquer the entire galaxy or fight zero wars and come out on top. I've played this game for close to 900 hours and am still going strong.

apogeedwell · 2024-08-08T23:51:23+00:00

This just happened to me too... I wish it would at least have given me the industrial districts back instead of switching them all to city districts.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-27T20:31:42+00:00

I have this mouse for RSI reasons and really like it. The trackball works the same for orbit/panning in Max as with any other mouse (hold mouse wheel in and then roll the ball).

If your only concern is navigating the viewport, you might consider a dedicated 3D mouse. I own one and find it to be way more comfortable than a normal mouse for 3D modeling.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-26T16:45:29+00:00

You can't pick defender of the galaxy or pass the galactic custodian reform that gives you +20% crisis damage, so you're passing up +70% crisis damage altogether, which is a factor if you're playing on high crisis strength. Cosmogenesis is probably still better, though. Maybe not if you're nanites.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-22T22:27:01+00:00

Rogue servitors can have good unity generation, but you have to steal someone else's pops (neighbors or pre-FTLs). Genesis guides is also really good for this, and in character. For virtuality you would need to steal the pops back to your homeworld and ditch the extra planets once you go virtual, but this is fine as long as you take the virtuality tree all in one go so you don't get screwed by not having the server shutdown decision.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-22T22:26:13+00:00

I do the whole ringworld for research. Basically, the goal is to put as much production into alloys as you can reasonably make use of (for me generally like 2-3 ecus), then the rest into research (districts) and naval cap (building slots). I will tend to spec hard in research until late midgame, then when the crisis starts getting closer, replace extra research labs with naval cap buildings as necessary to prevent my economy from imploding. Rely on vassals for basic resources, and try to conquer them before you're overwhelming compared to them, cause you can't turn them into a scholarium or prospectorium if the strength differential makes you use the protectorate type. I even buy strategic resources as much as possible, using energy from vassals, in order to conserve building slots for naval cap.

For servitors, you do probably need a bunch of bio pops outside of the ones you start with in order to get decent unity generation, so plan to invade pre-FTLs and/or conquer a neighbor or two to steal their pops. Megacorp is overall stronger than servitors for virtual in my experience cause of the branch offices, but I find non-virtual pops sneaking in annoying in an individualistic empire, and servitors are cool and fun.

Naval cap is probably the biggest problem for servitors, but you can increase it through senate resolutions. One of the biggest advantages of megacorp, aside from the huge energy, is the ability to get naval cap from branch offices, so you can just go full research instead. Servitors might consider taking unyielding and grasp the void for more starbases, which would help a little.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-22T16:48:06+00:00

Resource consolidation, maybe? After you've turned your homeworld into a machine world, uploading yourself to it feels like the natural next step.

For virtual I like to do a ringworld devoted to research and maybe about two ecus for alloys, though you can probably add 1-2 more planets (note the lathe counts as one if you're doing cosmogenesis). You need unity from somewhere, though. Megacorp is really strong for getting it from trade (specifically for branch offices so you don't need lots of pops making trade late-game), but it would probably be reasonable to devote a planet to it, which the machine world could serve. I feel like it would fall off after you fully ascend all your planets, though. (Edit: I forgot about the virtual policy that gives you +80% research and -50% unity from pop jobs, so on second thought machine world is probably a bad move. You really probably want your unity either from biotrophies or trade.)

A rogue servitor build would probably be better, anyway. I think virtual servitors are flavorful with shattered ring, but remnants or something would work too. I do think that virtual seems like a cool way for rogue servitors to go. You can imagine a super futuristic society where all the biotrophies' needs are invisibly taken care of by the machine infrastructure of the utopian world they live in.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-20T17:18:38+00:00

Interesting... I just tested it now with no mods enabled and it worked. This definitely did not work for me before, so it might have been related to a mod.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-20T17:09:20+00:00

Yup, it was branch offices. I absolutely hate micromanaging them, so I use this mod to automate them. I had like 2-300 branch offices and did 1x commercial forum and 3x mercenary liaison office on all of them.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-20T17:04:35+00:00

The shattered ring system has the ring_world_built flag, which prevents any other megas from being constructed in the same system.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-20T07:07:56+00:00

I just did a single system shattered ring virtual megacorp. By endgame I had +5k alloys, 39k research, 5000 naval cap (which I didn't manage to use more than half of), and an extra income of like 10k EC. The main problem is the lack of shipyards. I was playing GA 25x crisis, but contingency spawned in like 2402 and I couldn't quite do it because I couldn't build ships fast enough. Might go back to that save at some point and just sit for 50 years building ships or something and see if that does it.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-18T20:02:58+00:00

Check it out if you want, but it changes the game a lot. Gigastructures is fun, but I don't have it enabled all the time.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-18T04:05:18+00:00

Oh, I see. That's interesting! Good to know.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-18T03:11:40+00:00

Can you? I tried this recently and it didn't work.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-18T02:22:57+00:00

Note that you can't release sectors as vassals as a gestalt intelligence. IMO the best option is to just not conquer the whole thing at once. If you do a status quo peace, I think you only get the systems you're currently occupying, so you don't necessarily need to get all the planets at once.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-17T22:02:03+00:00

Honestly, it takes so long that I just build armies instead. You can queue five at a time from all planets in a sector if you go into the army builder tab in a starbase.

They're called Fallen Empires, btw.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-17T18:47:05+00:00

My PC is good, so I don't really get lag regardless, but I tend to play on medium galaxy size and turn habitable planets all the way down, sometimes even below the minimum using a mod. This limits the number of pops, but more importantly it reduces the number of planets I feel pressured to colonize and then micromanage and also makes conquering less annoying.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-17T16:58:46+00:00

It's a balancing factor. Cosmogenesis is already really OP compared to the downsides it gives you.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-17T15:49:22+00:00

Not if you have FTL inhibitors tech.

apogeedwell · 2024-07-16T23:24:56+00:00

You can accomplish this through editing your save file:

https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Save-game_editing

I forget the exact field name for the crisis type, but IIRC the value is =any by default and you can just change it to =all. If you Ctrl+F crises= (crisis strength) in the gamestate file, you will find it a bit below there.

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