33Paradox’s Victory Project was one of the many all-ages games that were banned from Steam for completely ridiculous reasons. Valve used the “child exploitation” excuse to get the game off the platform, but wouldn’t and couldn’t explain what about Victory Project contained child exploitation. Well, the developers are receiving some form of vindication thanks to Sekai Project stepping in to publish the game on a number of other platforms later this year.

A ton of huge announcements came out of this year’s Anime Expo 2019 event, including games, manga, anime, and even visual novels. Honeys Anime did a roll-out of all the upcoming titles slated to release under the Sekai Project publishing banner in the West, and one of those titles happens to be Victory Project.

Some of you might remember that Valve originally banned this game from Steam way back in January of 2019. However, before they banned the game, Victory Project was indefinitely delayed. The visual novel was supposed to release in late 2018 but it kept getting pushed back due to Valve not approving it for release.

A month later and the game was banned from Steam.

Various pro-censorship advocates attempted to make the excuse that the developers Orange Class and Zhu Cheng Project attempted to skirt by Valve’s rules and that’s why they deserved to be banned. Others spread misinformation that visual novels like Victory Project were “illegal” because Valve claimed that these games were “legally gray” and therefore they had to ban them.

The pro-censorship people nor Valve provided any proof that these games were legally gray, nor did they provide any proof that they were illegal. Unfortunately, the people who supported censorship were louder than the people who didn’t, and so games like Victory Project stayed banned from Steam… just until Sekai Project stepped in to save the day.

However, it’s obvious that there’s nothing “illegal” in the game since it’s getting a release on GOG.com, which actually has stricter content curation policies than Steam.

But we’ve also seen some other games release on GOG.com that were also banned on Steam, such as Maidens of Michael and The Expression Amrilato, the latter of which did eventually make its way to Steam (again) after MangaGamer made a public fuss about the situation.

Not every studio has MangaGamer’s clout, however, and so complaining about it oftentimes fall on deaf ears.

On the upside, at least those of you who wanted to check out an English version of Victory Project will be able to do so on GOG.com, Nutaku, Denpasoft, and the Sekai Project storefront.

(Thanks for the news tip Hiecchi)