Valve rolled out a new set of tools and filters last week to give Steam users the ability to better curate the games they see in the online storefront, a change that has seemingly paved the way for games featuring sexual content to launch on the platform.
The first game to do so is an adult visual novel called Negligee: Love Stories that developer Dharker Studios announced would be launching uncensored on Steam at the end of this week.
Valve had previously been withholding Steam approvals for games with adult elements while it worked to get these tools in place, so Negligee’s acceptance offers other devs a look at what those changes mean for game launches.
While Negligee will appear for sale on Steam this Friday, Steam users will need to opt in to seeing adult content on the Steam Store in order to even view the game’s store page. As such, any similar content will require would-be purchasers to log in to a Steam account and manually enable adult content on Steam to see games of a similar nature on their own store feeds.
The change follows a long series of changes and restrictions from Valve that seemed to target games with any measure of sexual themes or content while Valve itself worked to figure out the place of adult content on its marketplace.