In my above post I mostly talked about the kids part but obviously I also meant the coming down on the incest in games, the limiting of countries you can use Paypal from which is widely seen as another form of limiting adult content, etc. Furries & the LGBTQ community are on the payment providers radars already, so how long until Steam starts coming down on that?
Obviously Steam is a company that wants to make money and there is nothing against that. However they should be fair and treat everyone the same. The Ciri example you mention is exactly one of the hypocritical decision making examples from Steam - make a rule apply to all or bin it. I hate when companies are fluid with their rules. There might be grey-area cases but 99% of the time it's clear that it's just money that decides things.
Considering the appeal process; I agree it's hard to justify endless appeals. However none what-so-ever is quite harsh, especially if the original reason for rejection was misinformed or even outright wrong. Imho they should allow for some method appeal.
For the €100 not covering the costs - that is the cost of doing business. Originally it was even free to have your game approved but the €100 barrier was created to prevent dubious parties overflowing them with crappy games. Steam's business model is designed on making money from that 30%. Purposely so, because this way smaller devs offer their games on their platform instead of elsewhere because they couldn't afford it.
I think the payment processor's reign (the true problem here) is at its peak now and will go down in the future. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I've seen several
political initiatives to curtail their power. They are in their first baby steps, but it's more than what I had some years ago.
Australia, Spain, the UK, etc. are getting signature campaigns to reduce that power. Will they succeed? It's hard to guess. Will, if they succeed, be soon enough to save the (current) adult entertainment, or will they use their remaining power to crush it?
I read the Spanish project on payment processors, and I think it's the way to go for Governments. It basically says that a payment processor CAN'T choose which payments they should process (or bully companies to not commercialize them) if it's legal in Spain. Even for payments made overseas to Spanish companies.
So, if that project is approved and applied, Visa/MC/PayPal/etc. won't be able to tell Steam "don't release this incest game from a Spanish company" or they will be liable to a big fine FOR EACH PRODUCT. They won't be able to tell a bookstore not to sell Bibles, Corans, furry porn, or LGBTQ wholesome stories either, if they are published by a Spanish company, because they are legal in Spain. It's that or stop operating in Spain (the 12th largest economy in the world).
As you said, it's all about money over principles, so I guess the payment processors will lower their pants in this one, even more if more countries do similar normative frames.
You talk about "the cost of doing business". You are right. But the devs should also know the cost of doing business. I can say adapting Season 1 to Steam and passing through their approval process cost me money and, more importantly, a lot of time and stress. Without knowing if it would ever get published. I played safe, removed anything "banneable" from the game. Re-removed it when they went pseudo-hard on incest (that was easy) and the game got approved. BUT you see a lot of developers (yes, I read thousands of posts about what to do, what not to do, and devs' experiences) who complain about their game being banned because:
* They have high school girls (even if they are 18+), so Steam didn't have the right to ban them.
* They have girls in high school uniforms but the high school is never named or seen, so Steam didn't have the right to ban them.
* They have 100y.o. vampires/elves/whatever who look like little girls. They are adults!
* In their game, the parents go to the "college" (where everyone wears HS uniforms) to talk to the teachers. Changing "HS" for "College" in the text won't deceive Steam, I'm sorry.
* One of the funniest ones: Nowhere in Steam do they say I can't do a game with Koikatsu or Honey Select. I paid the 100€ and got rejected and I want my money back. No comments.
* Etc. (including the most ridiculous reasons)
I understand most of us AVN devs are new to this Steam (or even development) world and don't know the rules 100%. And they aren't easy to find because they fall in a gray fog most of the time. But, if I could get the information by spending a lot of time on research, other devs can also do it. I won't say I'm the best dev out there at doing research (or at anything), so it shouldn't be that hard.
I will always side with the small developer against the big company (even if it wasn't in my own interest, I would do it because it's fair). But not if the small developer thinks he's the cleverest person in the world and he can deceive the big company because they are morons less intelligent than him/her.
