The 3D puzzle gravure game, Hentai Nation, was banned from the Steam store on March 8th, 2019, according to the SteamDB entry. The reason for the removal? Child exploitation.

The game was marked as adults only and was scheduled to enter into Early Access on Steam. Originally it was supposed to be released on February 14th, 2019, but after an extended review from Valve, the game was indefinitely postponed and then banned.

I did reach out to the developers, MR Games, and asked if they were informed about why the game was banned, and they responded by stating…

“Hi, we are still trying to figure it out, apparently Steam thought the game exploited minors, which is absolutely not the case with our game. “The game never made any mention of the models being underage, none of them are school girls, none had smaller height, and no scenes involving children environment (like a school). “Three of the models could possibly be misunderstood due to having smaller breasts than the others, so we just removed them and will replace/modify them in the future, if Steam allows.”

Oftentimes if an anime character is flat-chested or has small breasts they’re labeled as “loli” and in the case of Valve, this oftentimes means that the game will be banned. It’s happened to a number of other games, including Niplheim’s Hunter, to which Valve originally asked the developer to completely remove an entire character from the all-ages version of the game. Later they got back with the developer and said it was a “misunderstanding”.

Other developers weren’t so lucky. The makers of Hello, Goodbye and Victory Project both had their games banned even though neither game contained sexual content, since the developers submitted the all-ages versions for review. It was especially egregious in Victory Project’s case since it was a political thriller and had no school settings or underage characters, two conditions that Valve allegedly uses to determine if the game contains “child exploitation”.

In the case of Hentai Nation, the game is a little bit like Honey Select, insofar that you can modify the scenes, import different 3D models, and pose them. Since it was marked as Adults Only, it obviously contained nudity, as indicated on the web cache of the Steam store page. There were also various mini-games to indulge in as well.

Even though Hentai Nation never mentioned the ages of the characters and contained no school settings, Valve still banned the game, but didn’t explain what about it contained “child exploitation”. Valve has been doing this to a lot of anime and visual novel themed games from Japanese and Chinese developers, and have silently changed their policy about not being the taste police by selectively banning games that they consider to be “legally grey”.

MR Games stated that the whole thing caught them off guard and that they’re now waiting for a reply from Valve to further explain the ban…

“We were very surprised by the ban, the game was sent for review on February 5, Steam never contacted us regarding anything, and banned us yesterday, all the models were displayed on the videos and screen shots and the page was accepted prior to February, which really caught us off-guard. “The game is a puzzles game, so no history was involved, no mention of minors or crimes, no alcohol, no drugs.”

Hentai Nation joins an ever-growing list of banned anime and visual novel games that Valve has rejected from inclusion on Steam, banned after initially accepting on Steam, or in the case of games like Mega Milk Story, retroactively banned for undisclosed reasons after it was available on the service for more than six months.

We’ve reached out to Valve multiple times since they’ve instituted the new adult filters to ask them why certain games are banned but others that contain fictional underage sex between characters (like Sweet Pool or A Hand In The Darkness) are allowed, but Valve has never responded.

(Thanks for the news tip Mitsuru Kirijou)