Steam's First Uncensored Game Is Restricted in 28 Countries

Steam's first uncensored, adults-only game called Negligee: Love Stories was recently released, but gamers in 28 different countries can't officially purchase it through the gaming store due to the game's availability being restricted.

A game with a page that greets players with a warning about nudity and sexual contend and requires of-age players to log into their accounts just to view its Steam Store page, Negligee: Love Stories marks Steam's first voyage into totally uncensored games. The creator of the game, Dharker Studios, shared an update on Steam (via PC Gamer) that discussed the restrictions on availability and called the restrictions a "downside of being the poster child for the first fully uncensored adult game on Steam." Past games have included DLC or unofficial patches that provided players with uncensored content, but Negligee: Love Stories offers all this uncensored content up front without any obstacles other than an age gate and a price tag.

Several countries began contacting Steam to ban the game from selling in their regions, Dharker Studios said, and after looking into the international laws regarding the distribution of adult content, the game's creators described the regulations as "very murky and grey." While laws prohibiting certain content differ depending on the country and aren't always enforced, Dharker Studios said that it didn't want to risk breaking these laws and being hit with fines that would severely impact the developer, something that it said "would likely end [the] company."

"Based on this we (Dharker Studios) created a list of countries that had laws that prohibited distribution, sale or viewing of content included in the game," Dharker Studios said. "E.g. Russia has laws against homosexual content, which the game includes in part. Japan has laws against uncensored genitalia being visible. Germany have laws against selling to people under 18 and require software to verify ages which steam does not currently have. Thus every country on the list has a law that potentially makes selling this game illegal and as such we cannot sell to that."

The developers acknowledged that other game creators haven't been restricting their own releases in other countries since Steam started allowing the adults-only games to be sold on the marketplace, but the team said that it has no answer for why others aren't following suit or why it's being allowed by Steam.

A full list of countries where Negligee: Love Stories can't be purchased through Steam can be found below.

• Japan
• Malaysia
• Botswana
• Egypt
• Morocco
• Nigeria
• South Africa
• Sudan
• Uganda
• Bangladesh
• China
• Lebanon
• South Korea
• Pakistan
• Saudi Arabia
• Turkmenistan
• Belarus
• Iceland
• Ukraine
• Russia
• Australia
• Papua New Guinea
• Indonesia
• Guyana
• Iraq
• UAE
• UIE
• Germany