Negligee: Love Stories, Steam's first uncensored adult game, was approved and released last week. Since then, several countries have apparently banned the sexually explicit adventure game. In turn, developer Dharker Studios says this means it "can't release [the game] under the radar", and its availability has now been restricted in 28 countries.
As detailed in this Steam Community post (via Kotaku), Dharker Studios says it must abide by the laws of specific countries and that "these restrictions are the downside of being the poster child for the first adult game on Steam."
The post adds: "Several of the restricted countries banned the game which prompted us to realise that we can't release it under the radar. You might think that it is ludicrous but Dharker Studios Ltd is a company, if we release a game in a country where the content is illegal or could be considered illegal then potentially we could suffer.
"If they fined or targeted steam as per our agreement with steam, we (Dharker Studios) would be liable for all costs and damages. which would end our company, we are a small indie developer and do not have the resources for such costs whilst making games."
Dharker says it must err on the side of caution, and notes that those living in restricted countries can purchase Negligee: Love Stories by other means. The full list of restricted countries includes:
- Japan.
- Malaysia.
- Botswana.
- Egypt.
- Morocco.
- Nigeria.
- South Africa.
- Sudan.
- Uganda.
- Bangladesh.
- China.
- Lebanon.
- South Korea.
- Pakistan.
- Saudi Arabia.
- Turkmenistan.
- Belarus.
- Iceland.
- Ukraine.
- Russia.
- Australia.
- Papua New Guinea.
- Indonesia.
- Guyana.
- Iraq.
- UAE.
- UIE.
- Germany.
Dharker then turns its attention to the possibility of censoring Negligee: Love Stories —something it is not willing to consider at this stage.
"In the past most of our games have stories and then the adult content is created in addition to the main story," adds the developer. "Making it easy to censor them and still offer a full robust game. This is why all of our past games have no country restrictions as that adult content has been removed.
"This is not the case for Negligee: Love Stories, the stories themselves are adult in nature and style from start to finish. If we censored this game so that everyone could play, it would remove 90 percent or more of the content, unfortunately that means this isn't really an option for this game. We will however continue to look into making a censored version as well as alternate versions to allay some of these restrictions, but for now we are not ready to post any such games."
Dharker concludes by suggesting future games "will be developed to release a censored edition where possible and then have a free or cheap mature content DLC pack as well."
Read Dharker Studios' full update in full this way. For context, Tyler's rundown of Steam's processes up to this point is also worth your time.