Games retired are anything but voluntary.

iStripper is exactly what it sounds like, unless you saw the i and thought it was a device that beams a holographic stripper into your living room. In fact the name might not be that obvious, just ignore my jokes. What iStripper is is a program that puts strippers on your desktop, like the programs you saw floating around the internet 10+ years ago but without all the spyware/trojan horse viruses that tended to accompany those programs.

Not that I would know from personal experience.

If you head over to the iStripper store page you might find that the game is no longer available for purchase. Instead you’ll just find this note:

Notice: At the request of the publisher, iStripper is no longer available for sale on Steam.

Now dozens of games get retired from Steam on a weekly basis for any number of reasons; poor sales, bankruptcy, developer focusing on newer titles, etc. Developer Totem Entertainment is none of those things. What they are is unhappy with Valve misrepresenting why the game is no longer on sale.

iStripper has been effectively banned from the Steam store, but for some reason Valve is representing the game as having been removed voluntarily at the request of Totem Entertainment. In an unconventional twist, Valve reached out to Totem Ent. to explain that the game was no longer compliant under a policy change dating back to 2018 banning adult video games that use real photos/videos of human actors.

And Totem Entertainment isn’t alone, as the game Bad Ass Babes was also banned from Steam with Valve representing the game as retired “at the request of the publisher.” Thatcher Products has posted the entire email received by Valve notifying that their game was no longer in compliance with Valve’s policies.

Here is a snippet, the whole post is linked above.

In 2018, Valve broadened its policy allowing adult video game content to ship on Steam and with that decision came a review process for that content. As that review policy developed, Valve decided that we would not ship adult video games that featured photos or videos of human actors. Your title Bad ass babes shipped before this policy was in place. Given the nature of the adult content in your title, it is subject to the same strictures as games submitted to Steam today.

Valve has yet to comment on why they would list the games as voluntarily retired rather than outright banned, as there is ultimately no reason to lie and nothing to gain since both developers were able to speak out and explain what really happened.

Our guess is that it’s not policy but just how the employee handling the account decided to go about it, but it does once again raise the necessity for Valve to have concrete policies and procedures.

This piece will be updated if I receive any more information. I looked through the recent history of games and could not find any others that were “retired” for similar reasons.