Finally, a new Labs experiment!

Unfortunately it does a pretty bad job showing me games I would be interested in. It shows a bunch of sexual games, visual novels, free games, puzzle games... all kinds of games I never play.

With all the info Steam has of my playing habits I'm sure they can make better recommendations. Hope they improve it.

Also, a reminder that the "Interactive Recommender" still exists and it works ok to discover games that went under your radar.

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No date in Steam yet though. I will happily buy this and, specially, Breath of Fire IV when they release on Steam.

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I recommend checking the comments on arsTECHNICA: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/07/steam-cracks-down-on-some-sex-games-to-appease-payment-processors/ [External Link]

Seems like the payment processors have been made liable for the content that gets bought so they are in CYA mode.

I mean, they have always done this shit but this time it seems like there is a kind of a reason.

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The issue of low effort games in Steam is a different topic and I get it. But I remember the times when releasing games on Steam was pretty difficult and releasing sexual games was impossible. I remember Steam Greenlight and how it pretty much failed to fix anything.

Unfortunately for now the only reasonable options are to allow everything or allow nothing and we are currently in the "allow everything" phase. That means that there are thousands of games released every year and most of them are worthless.

Buy who gets to chose which games are worth it? I don't trust Steam to make that choice for me so I prefer the current situation, even if that means that 3 or 4 times a year I have to expend an afternoon waddling through thousands of shitty games to find some hidden gems.

Even so, Valve is always looking for ways to improve the situation. Years ago we got the curators system, which is an actual nice improvement. There are steam groups for different kinds of games. There are hundreds of different filters in the store to help you find some actually good games.
You can also check the top releases every month. You can check the top games every year. You can check popular wishlist games. You have the "deep dive" and "interactive recommender" that came out of the Steam labs some years ago.

Censorship is not the solution to low quality games. We live surrounded by too much information, what we need are tools to simplify getting what we actually want and Valve has been providing them in spades (because their earnings depends on it, mind you). No other store has as many ways to discover games as Steam does.

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This is infuriating (and this is coming from someone who doesn't play sexual games, for no reason in particular).

First, I don't get all the complaints about seeing adult games with sexual content on Steam. Just filter them out. Use the tools you are given instead of limiting the freedoms of other people.
Steam gives you plenty of ways to filter out what you want to see. You can filter out tags, publishers, general mature content, nudity+sexual content, only sexual content...

Back on topic, this is the usual US puritanism. Decapitating people is fun, boobies are wrong. I'm guessing those specific games have some theme in common but unfortunately there is no clear rule to follow.
Suddenly your salary depends on what some payment processor thinks of your game. This should be illegal, they shouldn't get to choose which money they process. Money is money, unless it comes from illegal businesses they should just process it.

I wonder what's the solution, Patreon, OnlyFans, Pornhub and plenty others continue to work while having some of the most disgusting porn out there so there must be a way. Steam is probably big enough to fight it.

Truly words evade me. Decade after decade the same stupid problems, they just never go away, it's so frustrating.

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FYI I can't follow any of those links, uBlock blocks them all.

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I got it today and I must say I'm impressed. It's more immersive and detailed than I thought

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I wish they would return to Jade Cocoon :grin: what a beautiful game. I mean, Katsuya Kondō is not even that old yet, he's still directing and designing.

But let's see what else they bring to Tokyo Xtreme Racer, the trailer really gives no details whatsoever.

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As Tchey said, Siralim Ultimate is an amazing game to create crazy builds in a creature-collector kind of game. Do investigate what you are getting yourself into.

Lunacid is also great, a kings-field-like game but generally modernized, to me it's basically flawless. Devil Spire looks similar but is much smaller and a rogue-like, not bad, not great, it's fun for a few afternoons.

I haven't played the others.

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To me it looks like the success of the Steam Deck is completely in Valve's hands.

If they keep a fair price, promote the console and maintain the OS and the hardware properly it will be a huge success. It's not like there is much competition and there is absolutely no company that can provide what they can (being the owners of the biggest (by far) gaming store and all that).

But it's Valve, their attention span is almost as bad as Google's and they seem to believe that their products need no promotion, for some reason.

Let's keep in mind that Steam OS has been in a pretty poor state for a long time, Half Life Alyx came out almost 2 years ago and we haven't heard from them about VR games since then (although everything points to them being in the middle of the development of a new game but they are always in the middle of something that never gets released) and their controller was discontinued, probably because of the mixed reception it got. On the other hand I think people are happy with the Valve Index, it's difficult to say since they don't allow reviews of it.

So... I hope they succeed but it depends on them. We'll see.

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