Look, if you want to understand any corporation's decisions, then do a cost-benefit analysis. Does Valve stand to gain more by greenlighting this porn comic than they stand to lose from agitating the zealous drones who tend to also buy Modern Warfare games at release price?
I don't think those are the people who are going to get mad, though. I would like to see what percentage of the main game buying demographic is actually offended by things like this.
"The main game buying demographic" is not and has never been the demographic that companies are worried about scaring. They're worried about shareholders, not customers.
I linked a
Zappa interview (originally from Playboy but SFW unless you're worried about language that is probably less graphic than the series of made-up porn titles in this thread) the other day; it had this pertinent bit:
Did the record industry fight the labeling hard enough?
The record companies are interested in one thing, which is making a profit. If Cop Killer sells millions of records, they are happy about it. They are not happy when police officers' pension funds sell their Time Warner stock and people boycott Time magazine.
The people who flip the fuck out about GTA/Mass Effect/RapeLay/Super Columbine Massacre RPG are not the people who are likely to BUY GTA or Mass Effect, and CERTAINLY not the people who are likely to buy RapeLay or play SCMRPG. But they may own stock in the companies that make them, or buy other products from the companies that make them, or any number of things that might affect their bottom line.
It would be great if they could just mind their own damn business and let people play whatever games they want, but that's not the sort of person we're talking about here.
(Valve, of course, is not a publicly traded company and is therefore insulated from concerns about people selling off stock. But there's still a lot of potential harm from a controversy -- lots of the companies who sell games through Steam ARE publicly traded, and a Hot Coffee-scale backlash could have a ripple effect through the entire industry. Worst-case, Steam itself could come to be falsely identified as a porn site in the minds of the public.)
Anyway, point being that a platform that defaults to announcing what you're playing to everyone on your friends list the instant you play it (and lists your in-game achievements publically!) might not be the best platform to distribute erotic games.
Solution to that's simple, though.
Segregate adult games to a separate section that, at least by default, DOESN'T post all that shit publicly.
Yeah, that flies in the face of the current annoy-your-friends-with-oversharing paradigm, but I think under the circumstances it's the better option.
There's also a pretty compelling argument that there's games that will literally allow you to murder police with a purple dildo and throw their bodies into a trash compactor, which while cartoony and played up for laughs is a lot more offensive than a lady's breasts.
I certainly like to think the majority of Americans agree with that assessment and our laws and ratings systems are just wildly out-of-step with actual popular opinion.
That said, our ratings systems and laws ARE built around the supposition that sex is more offensive than violence, and our media certainly play along (though they'll jump on a good controversy about either one).
I've mentioned before that, while I disagree with Breyer's dissent in Brown v EMA, I think his reasoning is sound -- it IS utterly absurd that you can legally prohibit a retailer from selling a copy of Playboy to a 15-year-old but not from selling him a copy of GTA4.
Anyhow. In conclusion it would be nice if SOMEBODY would break the cycle and allow a mainstream distribution point for adults to buy adult games. Valve is certainly in the best position to be that guy, and it is disappointing that Valve has chosen not to. But I can see why they're gun-shy, too.
