You Must be 18 or Older to Enter cut from Steam over pornography concerns

The offbeat horror game You Must be 18 or Older to Enter has been removed from Steam after the digital distribution platform ruled that the game was pornographic in nature.

Many games make use of sexual content in some ways, even if the games themselves are not made specifically with the 'adult' audience in mind but Steam's historically wishy-washy stance on adult content makes the platform a risky bet for game developers working with that kind of material.

For the most part, Valve hasn't drawn a definitive line in the sand to let developers know what is or isn't ok, so watching to see which games are and aren't removed is the closest things most developers have when choosing a platform for their own creations. 

In the case of SeeminglyPointless' You Must be 18 Or Older to Enter, sexual content appears in the form in in-game (and selectively blurred) ASCII art that the game's protagonist attempts to stealthy view on a home computer without being caught by their parents. 

SeeminglyPointless co-founder James Cox shared a blog post on Gamasutra detailing what he knows about the sudden removal, which was only discovered after the studio was contacted by people unable to find the game on Steam.

After a brief correspondence with Steam Support, Cox says he was told that the company had ruled that You Must be 18 or Older to Enter was now classified as porn and, as such, no longer allowed on Steam. 
While Cox says that he hopes Steam will reconsider, he isn't optimistic given the conversation he's had with the company so far.

Allowing pornographic or otherwise sexually explicit content on Steam is always a controversial conversation when it arises, especially given Valve's somewhat inconsistent enforcement of what it will and won't allow on the platform.

For example, sex and sexual content are central to the plot of the erotic visual novel Ladykiller in a Bind and that game was released uncensored on Steam earlier this year, though it only did so after months of uncertainty and heartfelt explanations from the game's developer.

However around the same time You Must be 18 or Older to Enter was released this past October, Valve also started taking action against game developers that offered optional adult-content patches for their games anywhere on their Steam store pages.