Back in 2011, video games as a medium won a couple of major victories against government censorship. In the US, a landmark Supreme Court case gave games the full First Amendment protection , invalidating a litany of state-based attempts to limit the sale of certain games to minors. In Australia, meanwhile, squabbling states finally came to an agreement on the introduction of an R18+ rating in 2011, eventually allowing the sale of violent and sexually explicit games that were previously "refused classification" and therefore banned from sale in the country.

Though these specters of government censorship are gone, retailers and platform holders still often impose their own restrictions on what kind of content they're willing to sell, in some cases making the games at issue less commercially viable and more difficult to obtain.

These content-based distribution issues have been in the news a lot of late. A few weeks ago, Target Australia and Kmart Australia started things off by removing Grand Theft Auto V from store shelves, following a popular online petition against the game's depiction of violence against sex workers.

Then, last week, Apple required developer Lucas Pope to cover up some brief nudity in the iPad version of indie title Papers, Please. Though Apple later reversed itself, calling the initial decision a "misunderstanding," the move highlighted the company's long-standing restrictions on mature and political content in its App Store games.

Rounding out the mini-wave of news, Valve decided to remove controversial shooter Hatred from the Greenlight section of Steam earlier this week, despite apparently healthy interest from fan voting. "Based on what we've seen on Greenlight, we would not publish Hatred on Steam," Valve said of the game, which encourages and revels in indiscriminate killing of random civilians. The company reversed its decision yesterday, adding further uncertainty to their stance on what content is and isn't acceptable on the service.

How much do these kinds of distribution restrictions impact what kinds of games do and don't get made? And should gamers worry about the power that retailers and platform holders have to potentially distort the market for games in general?

“Just sell it somewhere else”

Obviously, none of these individual corporate decisions rise to the same level as government censorship on what kind of games can be made or sold. Retailers and platform owners have the final say in what products can appear on their storefronts, and they shouldn't be strong-armed into selling something they don't approve of for whatever reason. Game makers can still make what they want, even if they're forced to distribute it themselves or sell through another, less restrictive storefront. The Australian Target and Kmart decisions certainly haven't limited Grand Theft Auto V's reach in that country materially—EB Games Australia will still gladly sell the game to Aussies, to cite just one example.

On the PC, even Steam's market-leading position doesn't amount to a controlling monopoly that limits what content can and cannot be made or easily obtained. When the unedited, AO-rated Manhunt 2 wasn't listed on Steam and a number of other PC download services, for instance, interested gamers could still find it through competitor Direct2Drive (for a time) and GamersGate.

But retailer decisions still have an impact. Steam's disproportionate size and scale in the PC game-selling space—amounting to 70 percent of the market or more, by some estimates—can make it much harder for a game to succeed without Valve's backing, for instance. "It's just not possible to make a living in this industry without Steam, so I'm just out," Paranautical Activity developer Mike Maulbeck tweeted after his game was removed from Steam, the result of threats made against Valve cofounder Gabe Newell.

What’s allowed?

The fact that Valve doesn't offer detailed guidelines for what's appropriate in Greenlight games—beyond the vague assertion that they "must not contain offensive material"—means that developers remain in the dark on what's not allowed. So far, we only know that Hatred was briefly unacceptable, and that the "erotic strategy game" Seduce Me is unquestionably over Valve's line. "Steam has never been a leading destination for erotic material," Valve's chief spokesperson Doug Lombardi told Kotaku when Seduce Me was removed from Greenlight. "Greenlight doesn't aim to change that."

The limits of the "just sell it somewhere else" argument really come into view when one company controls an entire platform. In Apple's case, the only legitimate way to distribute games on an iDevice is to get approval from Apple to list it on the App Store. Telling a game maker banned from the App Store that they can still put their game on Android or some other platform only goes so far when Apple has effectively cut that developer off from a major mobile ecosystem with unique features and hundreds of millions of locked-in customers.

Apple's restrictions also contain a double standard; they apply to App Store titles but not to the books, movies, or music distributed through iTunes. Those other media can have as much nudity, violence, cursing, and "adult content" as they want and still be OK on an iDevice. "We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate," Apple wrote in its initial set of App Store Review Guidelines. "If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app."

Such wording is a reminder of recent government attempts to impose restrictions of video game sales while allowing similar content in more established media. And when Apple decides to refuse games for political or PR reasons, rather than for family friendliness, it brings up concerns about a chilling effect on the kinds of games that can be commercially viable in the mobile space.

Faced with these kinds of inconsistent restrictions, games are never going to reach their full potential as a medium. Even those who hate Hatred might well worry about the effects that such vague limits will have on the next developer who wants to make a more artistically important title that pushes gaming's boundaries.

"It's one thing for a person to not want to buy a piece of content, which is completely understandable," Take-Two Interactive President Karl Slatoff said at the BMO Capital Markets Technology and Digital Media Conference in the wake of GTA V's removal from Australian retailers (as reported by Gamestop). "But for a person or a group of people to try to make that decision for millions of people ... we have 34 million people who have bought Grand Theft Auto V. If these folks had their way, none of those people would be able to buy Grand Theft Auto. And that really just flies in the face of everything that free society's based on. It's the freedom of expression, and to try to quelch that is a very dangerous and slippery slope to go down."

The unified front against the AO rating

Even separate corporate decisions about individual storefronts can come close to a de facto ban if a critical mass of decision-makers implements the same kinds of restrictions. Look no further than the current console market in the United States; Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all automatically refuse to allow games that receive an Adults Only rating from the ESRB on their systems. The effects of this unified front played out most famously when Manhunt 2 received an AO rating, only reaching consoles in an edited, M-rated form.

Sure, you can argue that makers of AO-rated games can still go to unrestricted platforms like the PC, but having certain games and content completely unavailable to the console market as a whole remains a big limitation. You could also argue that these decisions only affect the small handful of games that have actually received an AO rating, but you could just as easily consider the unknown number of games that haven't been made because developers knew the "Adults Only" content would never fly on consoles. Isn't the whole point of an industry-run ratings regime to inform consumers about their entertainment choices, rather than to impose limits on what games can be made available to wide swathes of the market?

The film industry has gone through similar battles. In the early years of the MPAA rating system, theaters en masse refused to screen films that received the pornography-connoting X rating, and most newspapers refused to advertise them. It wasn't until 1990 that the MPAA introduced the NC-17 rating to deal with adult films that weren't just straight-up pornography. While many theaters still refuse to show NC-17 movies, films with the rating have at least some chance of commercial impact, especially through "unrated edition" home video releases. Today, the NC-17 rating gets a fair bit of use every year, though the rating's impact on a movie's commercial prospects still draws controversy.

That the games industry is going through its own growing pains regarding what can be sold is yet another sign that it has reached the big time. It's also a sign that the industry is still growing out of its "just for kids" (or even "primarily for kids") image in many corners. It's likely going to take a generational shift—and a few more "adult" games with unquestionable artistic merit and wide appeal beyond shock value—for retailers and platform holders as a whole to be less wary of restricting themselves.