There are some sick people in the world and I, for one, don’t want to live on this planet anymore. For those who don’t know, Valve initiated an “anything goes” policy on Steam last year, but clearly, everything has its limits. Well, a game called Rape Day made its way onto Steam and even had it’s own Steam page, depicting disgusting images until Valve stepped in and decided to take action. We can’t believe it even got this far, but at least it is gone now…
Related: Valve Removes a Steam Feature That You Probably Won’t Miss
So what is Rape Day? Well, it is a 30-minute long game that the creator reportedly worked 2 years on. It is an interactive visual novel which allows the player to control “the choices of a menacing serial killer rapist during a zombie apocalypse” and “verbally harass, kill, and rape women as you choose to progress the story”. No, I’m not going to put in any links to the game’s blog or images, because this is simply crazy and vomit-inducing.
Although this game shouldn’t have even made it through the approval process, the good news is that Valve removed Rape Day from Steam, explaining the move in a statement, which you can read below.
Over the past week you may have heard about a game called ‘Rape Day’ coming soon to Steam. Today we’ve decided not to distribute this game on Steam. Given our previous communication around Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store?, we think this decision warrants further explanation.
Much of our policy around what we distribute is, and must be, reactionary—we simply have to wait and see what comes to us via Steam Direct. We then have to make a judgement call about any risk it puts to Valve, our developer partners, or our customers. After significant fact-finding and discussion, we think ‘Rape Day’ poses unknown costs and risks and therefore won’t be on Steam.
We respect developers’ desire to express themselves, and the purpose of Steam is to help developers find an audience, but this developer has chosen content matter and a way of representing it that makes it very difficult for us to help them do that.
That’s still a bit weak if you ask me, as Valve should also ban the developer completely. Rape Day got a lot of attention last week and a petition was started to get the game removed from Steam. Even so, the “game developer” maintains that nothing is wrong with Rape Day, that no rules were broken and that they even did the right thing by removing a baby killing scene from the game. Seriously…
What is your take on all of this and how much worse can the digital world really get? Let us know in the comment section below.
