German developer Yume Creations recently announced that their game Imolicious has been banned from Steam for allegedly exploiting children. They shared an e-mail from Valve’s software product release manager, Jason Ruymen, who explained that the game would not be allowed on Steam because the platform does not host software that contains the exploitation of children. And yes, that’s the same Jason Ruymen who banned Dank Boi Games from releasing Gay Nation on Steam this past summer.

The message containing the e-mail was posted on November 14th, 2018, via a tweet.

Oh great, Imolicious got banned on #steam -.- There aren’t any children in there, plus I added the typical all characters are over 18 warning… pic.twitter.com/wODi1oshPL — Yume Creations (@YumeCreations) November 14, 2018

If you’re unable to read it, it states…

“My name is Jason Ruymen, from Valve. We wanted to let you know that we will not be shipping your title Imolicious on Steam. While we will generally ship most things on Steam, we still will not ship titles that exploit children. The appID itself has been banned and cannot be reused.”

If you attempt to search for the game on the Steam database, there is no entry for the title under Yume Creation’s developer database listing on SteamDB.

It’s possible that the ID was deleted or was never approved, but Imolicious doesn’t pop up in any capacity on SteamDB.

According to the developers, they made a post over on Tumblr indicating that Imolicious is currently undergoing proofreading and testing, with a scheduled release set for December.

Yume Creations’ other titles are still available on Steam, including Aozora Meikyuu, Yozora Rhapsody and Games and Girls.

Two of the titles have uncensored patches for the Steam versions available for download over on the official Yume Creations website. All of the studio’s previous titles were released before Valve implemented the adult filter patch, so any of the lewd content, sexual content, or nudity was tucked away behind R18+ patches.

As noted by the developer, all of the characters in the upcoming Imolicious were over the age of 18, and they noted that the characters are designed to look like the typical visual novel school girls.

She not looks like a child… Just a school girl like any other VN on Steam :/ pic.twitter.com/rxY3iH8BT5 — Yume Creations (@YumeCreations) November 14, 2018

As others pointed out, the visual novel shares a similar art-style to many other VNs on Steam, and there are already plenty of uncensored and adult-oriented visual novels available on Steam with characters that look similar to the one featured in Imolicious.

This isn’t the first time that visual novels with anime art-styles have come under fire. Just recently Maomao Discovery Team had its store page removed from Steam, but at the time of writing this article the developers have not disclosed why. The Key To Home was also banned from the Steam store twice for featuring “sexually suggestive” imagery of children, even though it was rated ‘T’ for Teen by the ESRB.

I reached out to Jason Ruymen from Valve Software to find out why Imolicious was specifically targeted for banning but not other games featuring anime characters in visual novels that contain sexual content. The story will be updated if Ruymen chooses to respond.

(Thanks for the news tip Kaos)