Well, bad news for VR Girlfriend's game from Illgames twin sister Illumination. Steam has been f*ckin around and not giving approval to Illumination to sell the games, and now the devs had to postpone the game launch (scheduled to be this month) because they have to
majorly revise the game so it meets steam "specifications".
We don't know for sure what's the problem, whether it is a technical problem or content problem. But here's what the devs themselves said about the steam refusal:
"despite repeated revisions and reapplications to obtain sales approval, we have not yet received approval." Now reading between the line, it looks like steam doesn't like what they see on VR Girlfriend, as in the content of the game itself, and they repeatedly denied Illumination attempt to get approval.
Now for everyone who doesn't know, while the studio is new, the people behind it is not. They're the veterans behind Illusion and other popular 3D H-games. They have experience on how to launch the games on steam. Heck the first game, the OG VR Girlfriend game launched by Illusion years ago, is still exist on steam sore page!!
So why they're denied approval? One thing for sure is it's not technical specification. The devs had experienced VR expert and correcting and adjusting for tech spec shouldn't take "repeated revisions AND reapplications to obtain sales approval". So the logical conclusion is it's not the technical side that steam team reject for, but the game content itself. This is why the dev had to "majorly" revise the game, because they had to remove major content of the game and replace it with something that steam team may approve.
What content do you think it got removed? Well, this game featured a high school girl as the main heroine, and may feature gameplay content centered heavily of her daily activity as a normal high school girl. The steam approval team doesn't like that and they denied EVERY Illumination attempt to make the heroine as a high school girl, even when they "toned down" the high school aspect. Now facing complete refusal, Illumination had no choice but to back down and remove any trace of high school girl aspect, removing major content of the games and adding new content and re-brand the girl as an older office worker or something. Now all of this is purely my own speculation, but looking at how puritan steam moderator can be, I can't think of any better explanation. Of course I hope this is just me being paranoid and there's no content cut and the girl can live herself as a high school girl uncensored, but yeah, don't think so.
So for me it looks like Illumination got unfortunate and have sh*tty content approval team that hellbent on denying VR Girlfriend to get sale approval, so much so that they had to make major "revision" (read: heavy self-censor) to their game to cater to these approval team whims. F*CK THESE APPROVAL TEAM!!!
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