Well that was quick – Steam has quietly banned Hentai visual novel Taimanin Asagi: Episode 1, as well as plans to release the other three episodes.

On August 13th, it was announced that the adult game would be sold on Steam- with the first episode being free. This came as a surprise to many, due to the extreme nature of some of the game’s content.

SteamDB (a third-party website that “[tracks] updates for both applications and packages, we keep a history of all changes made to both applications and packages”) noticed on September 4th at 01:40:03 UTC (6:40 p.m. PT, 9:40 p.m. ET) that the game had most of its files and information removed. The final tags were removed at 03:26:59 UTC (8:26 p.m. PT, 11:26 p.m. ET).

Steam had gradually edged away from adult content- with one developer on October 28th 2017 confirming they were no longer allowed to post any information regarding uncensoring patches on Steam.

On May 18th 2018, many adult game developers received messages from Steam, stating they needed to remove adult content from their games or have them removed. The day after it was explained this was an error– as all adult games were being re-reviewed.

Valve then stated on June 7th 2018 that it would “allow everything” on Steam other than “trolling” or illegal content. On July 16th, developers claimed Steam was working on a new adult filter system.

While the first totally uncensored adult game did come to Steam in September 2018, others have not been so lucky. Visual novel Hello Good-Bye was banned even after patching the game appropriate for all ages. “HunieDev” also confirmed that HuniePop2 would be censored on Steam, while heavily hinting at an uncensoring patch being available.

There have been additional unconfirmed reports of anime-styled adult games being removed from Steam, with conflicting accounts of why those games were banned- some with extreme content, but many allegedly not.