Good news everyone!
Wait, no. Bad news everyone. We have been rejected by Valve again.
We are now two days from release. Valve has frivolously rejected our launch for the third time.
Their first issue was that the "Huge Combat Level could not be found", an issue that arose from them testing for less than 30 minutes and not being able to exit the tutorial. This was resolved when we fed them console commands. Annoying, but understandable; unfortunately this process took over a week.
The second reason has to do with our game's subject matter. Our protagonist's journey is motivated by a past traumatic event involving sexual assault. For this reason, we chose to disclose both in-game and on the store page that there was mature content, and that the player would be allowed to opt out of direct references. Direct references include, in the current EA build, a sequence where the player views one of their attackers doing the deed from the first person perspective.
We were disappointed by how many games depict sexual assault as being gratifying and arousing, so we chose to depict it as simply disgusting and revolting. The sequence involves an emaciated, wrinkled alien creature bobbing up and down while licking the camera. This, to us, is so disgusting that it required advance warning and an option to disable the content.
Well, according to Valve, this is not sufficiently explicit to be a reference to sexual assault. So they rejected our build again.
Currently we are removing the content warning, which we feel is very wrong. Unfortunately, even doing this, there's a very good chance the build review will not pass before launch day.
For the past 3 years we've been working extremely long days to deliver this game to you. As you might know, we are only two people, so it's been an absolutely wild amount of work to meet all the deadlines. We are deeply sorry to delay again. Hope you'll still be with us once Valve decides we can finally be available on the store.
Better Luck Next Time,
-Team Fortune