Amid Adult Media Crackdown, Valve Denies “Lewd Action RPG” ‘Heavy Hearts’ From Steam Early Access
As the West continues to find itself gripped by yet another puritanical panic, Valve has reportedly moved to disallow the upcoming Heavy Hearts from their Steam storefront’s Early Access release system on the basis of its “mature content”.
As it says on the tin, Steam’s Early Access program allows for players to get their hands on a given title (after paying a usually-lower-than-full-retail-price, of course) far ahead of its scheduled release date.
In turn, said players are invited to give direct, ongoing, and material feedback on the game’s development, usually by way of said game’s personal Steam community forum, which the dev team will then use to make sure the final product delivers the best experience possible it can (Of course, whether or not their successful in doing so varies on a case-by-case basis, but I digress).
Unfortunately, while the last ten years have held no specific content barriers (outside of Steam’s standard Terms of Service) regarding what types of games are eligible to release via Early Access, Valve may have jsut changed their tune when it comes to ‘adult-oriented’ offerings.
Enter Heavy Hearts.
Developed by the one-man dev team Galewind Games, Heavy Hearts puts players in the role of Lucia, a young swordswoman and one of the last surviving humans, who one day sets out across her fantasy homeland “to find out what happened, stop the extinction, and repopulate the human race.”
“Heavy Hearts is a high-quality Lewd Action RPG inspired by Heavy Metal and Final Fantasy,” reads its description on its official Itch.io page. “The game is made with the intention of being an actual short-form RPG that can stand on its own, even without the lewd content (but of course, we love the lewd stuff).”
After a roughly three-year development cycle, Heavy Hearts was officially submitted to Steam for Early Access review on August 19th.
However, in light of the recent censorship streak being enjoyed by various payment processors, most notably Visa and Mastercard, Galewind Games admitted at the time that, “As it goes through the review process, I keep my fingers crossed tight that it makes it through the censors. If you have both of your hands, please cross your fingers for me too!”
Unfortunately for Galewind Games, their hopes would go unfulfilled, as August 30th would see Heavy Hearts denied eligibility for Early Access on the basis that, according to Steam’s administrators, “We’re unable to support the Early Access model of development for a game with mature themes.”
Venting their understandable frustrations via their official Twitter account, Galewind Games lamented, “This isn’t something that is written in their policy. They are just doing whatever they want.”
And more than just misplaced anger, Galewind Games’ statement is factually correct – As of this article’s publication, Steam’s official, developer-side Steamworks documentation features zero rules that bars ‘mature’ content from the storefront.
However, in its ‘Review Process‘ section, Valve does inform developers that games featuring explicitly ‘Adults Only’ content would be subject to a more strict review process than its general audience counterparts:
“For titles that have marked the ‘Adult Only Sexual Content'” section in the Mature Content Survey, both the Store Page and Product Build must be completed and submitted for review before the Store Page will be reviewed and set to ‘Ready for release’. Adult Content store pages and builds can take longer than the typical 3-5 business days to review.”
In the interest of fairness, a charitable read of the situation suggests that upon reviewing Heavy Hearts, Valve felt its content, particularly its numerous depictions of full-on sex, were less ‘mature’ and more ’18+’.
However, the fact that Valve does not explicitly state this as being the reason for the game’s Early Access denial serves only to raise a number of questions and suspicions – especially as they have already been forced to capitulate to the aforementioned credit-card-company-backed wave of puritanism.
As of publication, Valve has yet to offer any official updates to their documentation, nor provided any further information to Galewind Games regarding Heavy Hearts‘ Steam status.
