The end of game censorship on Steam -- really?

After all the outrage, after all the hullabaloo, Steam is going to stop censoring and removing games on their platform unless they contain actual illegal content. Right? Sounds great, but I don't really believe it.

It's a great principle they're trying to establish, and I wish the folks at Valve luck in their efforts to improve their processes around this. But the jurisdictional issues of law means that just because anime tiddies may be available for purchase in the USA doesn't mean that games with them will be available elsewhere. And while the major payment processors in North America may be less anal about being used for transactions involving adult content today, that doesn't mean that all Valve's processors around the world will feel the same way.

Personally, I think the legal issues will be the hardest part to deal with. Developers aren't going to want to restrict their games by region or country just because a bunch of stodgy old farts in some nations think that games with tits and vag out and open should be illegal or at least only sold in sealed brown boxes, and it'll end up on Valve to once again police this with the threat of being banned in one country or another if they let such games sell. We already see this kind of bullshit with Germany, where high amounts of violence or any Nazi symbols means an automatic ban on the game, even if you're the one going around killing Hitler and saving every Jew you see. Essentially, the problem isn't with Steam now, but with the authoritarian assholes who decide from country to country what people are allowed to see and hear and play. And I honestly just can't see Valve caring enough to fight all of them, especially when they're already talking in the blog post about having to maintain manual processes for deciding where games can be sold.

Something I like about itch.io and Nutaku is the complete lack of fucks given over things like this. itch, of course, is completely user-driven, and has very minimal support for anything compared to Steam (aside from creating and uploading games). Nutaku's entire raison d'etre is to sell smutty vidya and is already probably banned by all the countries that don't like tiddies anyway, so they don't seem to care. Even then there are some categories of adult games I doubt that Nutaku will ever distribute out of fear of moral guardians even in the USA (of which there are still many, even in these libtard-infested times).

I guess what I'd like to see is something like the wide gamut of adult content like you can find on DLsite.com on Steam, where freedom of expression is paramount and the only things actually banned are unauthorized content (i.e asset flips and illegally copied IP). Who cares how deviant something is or if it shows stuff verboten in some Eurocommie or dictator-run country? Let us buy it, let us play it.

[Follow-up: Maybe itch.io isn't as good as I thought it was...]