I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this, so please bear with me.

So, for the game I'm developing, it's made in the style of Hunie Pop and, with that genre of game, there are going to be... images that aren't entirely SFW. How the developers for Hunie Pop circumvented this on Steam is by distributing a patch of the game via the game's community page that uncensored the game. I'm not sure of the... ethics of this method, but it worked and works for many other developers that make games that are 18+.

My question is, however, are there any other ways to do this other than a patch? The ideal result for this project would be to have two versions of the game: one that is safe for work/streaming/steam and one that is the full version of the game that has everything uncensored. My idea is to bundle them together. Say the game is available on my team's website as well as Steam and buying the game on one platform bundled it with a game key that would work on the other (if that makes any sense). Would that even be possible? How does one generate game keys outside of Steam? Would that violate Steam's ToS?

Fortunately the project is still early in development so we have time to get everything sorted, but it doesn't hurt to figure things out early.

Thank you in advance!

4 hours ago, ToadstoolTyrant said:

I'm not sure of the... ethics of this method,

They way it's seen by the community is that because it is something you have to actively find and use, it shows that you intent to use the 18+ version and isn't something you accidentally turned on.

4 hours ago, ToadstoolTyrant said:

My question is, however, are there any other ways to do this other than a patch?

The Huniepop patch was just a file, all the NSFW stuff was distributed with the game.

A bool check was used and if the "Patch" file wasn't in the folder a censor was placed over the content. You didn't even need to download it you could have made your own by renaming a file.

So you could use a patch file like they did or you could ask players to go to your website, download a image and paste in in a folder that the game reads to see if it's patched.

The best thing in my opinion would be to use a actual patch and then to name the system something like NSFW pack.

That is all of your NSFW content is kept separate from the game, that the player then downloads from a website and patches the game with. This could be as simple as a zip file that your game looks for to load content from and if it isn't found a other zip is used.

The reason why I think this is better, is because the games do have the NSWF content stored in the game, opens a way to use it and abuse steam users with it. When someone does this, steam will be forced to remove all games using this patch or any game that has a 18+ or NSFW patch mentioned somewhere.

Steam lets you generate as many keys as you like for your different steam versions / DLCs and then do what you will with them, including selling them on your own site.

My gut feeling is they won't like your de-censorship patch situation, but maybe you'll be small enough to go unnoticed / unpunished... 

When GTA:SA was patched by the community to de-censor it, it was reclassified as adults only by some countries and even banned from sale!

I'll have to look more into it, Hodgman, but I'm not sure if the developers of other games that are Adult in nature had trouble with steam when releasing their de-censorship patch. I'll send some devs an email asking about their process and any snags they hit. I know games like the Sakura series and Nekopara (I'm realizing now that by going into this genre a lot of my peers will be a little creepy lmao) still have large successes on steam, and newer titles like House Party don't even need to release nude patches (i suppose since no actual genitalia is shown?).

Thank you both for your suggestions!