"Compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor": Robert Yang on the current challenge of bringing experimental gay games to Steam

Radiator Forever is out now

Radiator Forever, an "ongoing re-remaster/re-re-release" collection of developer Robert Yang's short and experimental gay games has arrived on Steam, giving it a new home alongside Itch.io. In a blog post about the release, Yang has outlined the complex situation facing adult game creators at the moment, with the likes of last year's business with payment processors and online-focused UK laws are making it a lot tougher for games like Radiator Forever to exist on the most prevalent PC platforms.

Yang, whom you may remember tracking down Dark Souls 2 hackers for us, has been making short-form gay games for years now. Radiator Forever's an amalgamation of such projects, designed to make them easier to update going forwards, as well as facilitating adding new games to the collection. It can be found on Itch.io and now Steam, but in order to see it on the latter you'll need to have logged in and - in the case of UK users - have a valid credit card set up so Valve can verify your age. Finding the Steam listing without following that link is also near impossible, with Yang asserting that it's "hidden from Steam search for most users and it's even geoblocked in certain countries".

Yang then went into more detail as to his decision to bring the games to Steam rather than just Itch, as well as the challenges that entails nowadays. "Collective Shout/Visa/Mastercard/Stripe's anti-sexuality censorship campaign in 2025 forced Itch to delist/bury many NSFW games to avoid getting cut-off from virtually all online payment processing," he wrote. "Additionally, the much-criticized UK Online Safety Act has forced Itch to geoblock the UK rather than risk expensive, intrusive, and ineffective compliance with a bad law. Overall the situation is still pretty fragile, and the coming tide of anti-anonymity laws (masquerading as teen social media safety laws) is going to make it all even more expensive for websites to serve their users. Of course I will continue using and supporting Itch as a much-needed alternative to Steam, but the cold fact is that Itch reaches a lot fewer people these days. So it's time for me to go crawling back to Steam."

According to Yang, Valve have tagged Radiator Forever as containing "frequent nudity and sexual content", something which the developer argues "amounts to a delisting/shadowban from 99% of the Steam user base". "While I was careful to avoid explicit nudity, compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor, and the Steam content reviewers have decided the game's general 'nature' was just too gay, regardless of my good faith efforts," Yang claimed. He also argued that there's a double standard at play when it comes to freedom of expression in games from big publishers vs indie developers, citing Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3's customisable genitals.

As for what makes this re-remastered collection extra swanky, beyond tweaks to individual games, the developer's added in a completion percentage tracker for each segment and a new tag to make it clear when something fresh has been added.