After a wave of social media backlash, Steam, the popular gaming platform, has announced that it will not be distributing a controversial game called “Rape Day.”
Prior to this latest statement on the Steam Blog, the preview page for “Rape Day” had been up and running on the site for weeks. The pre-release page teased a “choose your own adventure visual novel” in which players can “control the choices of a menacing serial killer rapist during a zombie apocalypse.” The disturbing, since-deleted listing, which was reportedly hidden from regular search results due to its sexually explicit nature, offered a mature content warning for sexual assault, necrophilia, and incest, to name just a few.
“The zombies enjoy eating the flesh off warm humans and brutally raping them but you are the most dangerous rapist in town,” the description continued. “So skip the foreplay and enjoy your Rape Day; you deserve it.”
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Naturally, “Rape Day” sparked controversy in the lead-up to its doomed debut. A recent Change.org petition addressed to the CEO of Valve Corporation, which operates Steam, called on the platform to stop “Rape Day” before it started. “Rape is not a game and the makers of this should not be allowed to make money promoting the rape and killing of women,” the writer of the petition urged.
The creator of the game has responded to the petition, as well as to other coverage of “Rape Day” and its backlash, with: “lol.”
As Business Insider noted before the game was officially pulled, “‘Rape Day’ puts Steam in a compromising position; the game unapologetically glorifies rape, and has little to offer in terms of actual gameplay. Even if Steam isn’t promoting the game, it would profit from every sale. While Steam has been reluctant to restrict content on the grounds of free speech, there’s not much moral wiggle room left in this situation.”
Two days and over 3,000 supporters later, the Change.org petition was updated with a “victory” bulletin, linking to Steam’s recent announcement.
This isn’t the first time Steam has been criticized for what Polygon has deemed its “hands-off approach to game curation.” In May 2018, the platform weathered a similar controversy with “Active Shooter,” a school shooting simulation game that saw its imminent release cancelled after intense backlash; parents of school shooting victims were among the many outraged. In an email statement, Valve’s Doug Lombardi told The New York Times that “Active Shooter” “was a troll, designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence.”
A subsequent Steam blog post, dated June 2018, attempted to clarify the platform’s policies, but ultimately failed to provide much clarity. “We’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling,” the post concludes. “As we mentioned earlier, laws vary around the world, so we’re going to need to handle this on a case-by-case basis. As a result, we will almost certainly continue to struggle with this one for a while. Our current thinking is that we’re going to push developers to further disclose any potentially problematic content in their games during the submission process.”
At another point in the blog post, Valve emphasized that, “If you’re a developer of offensive games, this isn’t us siding with you against all the people you’re offending…Offending someone shouldn’t take away your game’s voice. We believe you should be able to express yourself like everyone else, and to find others who want to play your game.”
The developer of “Rape Day,” who goes by Desk Plant, wrote on their website that, “My game was properly marked as adult and with a thorough description of all of the potentially offensive content before the coming soon page went live on Steam.” PC Gamer reported that, “Valve’s outline of the Steam Store page review process indicates that all listings are manually approved by Valve before they appear in the store.”
In an update on Steam prior to the game being pulled, Desk Plant reportedly revealed that the review process for the game’s release was “taking longer than expected.”
In an email statement to The Daily Beast, Desk Plant claimed that Steam’s decision not to distribute was dictated by public opinion, as opposed to any sort of set protocol. “I don’t think Steam has put much thought into their policies and values,” the game creator wrote. “They have become a reactionary company that continually changes its policies based on external pressure and even lie about what they will do in the future, such as when they said they would not be the ‘taste police.’”
“I’m all for rules and limits,” the “Rape Day” developer continued, “but a well thought out long term strategy might be a good idea for Steam to consider coming up with.”
In their official statement on the game, the Steam team appeared to own this “reactionary” label, writing, “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.”
They added, “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.”
