Steam u-turns on ban for Danganronpa dev’s game and reworks review process

pcgamer.com:

Valve has decided, in its inscrutable and mysterious way, to reverse course on a previously-announced ban on the Steam release of Chaos;Head Noah(opens in new tab), an anime visual novel and crime against the semicolon from the developers of Danganronpa. Good timing, too: the game releases today.

Even Valve's laissez-faire 'anything goes' release policy(opens in new tab) has its exceptions, as developer Spike Chunsoft discovered when its port of 2009's Chaos;Head Noah (itself a port of 2008's Chaos;Head) was unceremoniously banned from launching on Steam(opens in new tab). Neither Valve nor Spike Chunsoft said which rules the game supposedly violated, the latter only announcing that it wouldn't be making the «guideline-required changes to the game's content» to secure a Steam release.

To be fair, there are several things you could point at. The «Mature Content Description» on Chaos;Head's Steam page reads like its writer thought their job was to just write down everything that could be considered mature content in the world ever. There's knives, strangling, torture, «mangled fingers, dangling entrails,» and «exposed brains». Plus, horror of horrors, «partially exposed breasts and buttocks». 

None of that really seems like it would be enough to draw Valve's ire, though: some people point to the game's (let's be honest, pretty creepy) lingerie DLC for its high school characters as a potential point of contention, but all we have is speculation. Either way, Valve has decided that—whatever it was—it's not a problem anymore.

In fact, Valve has «examined the process» that led it to the ban decision and «made some changes to avoid situations like this in the future,» so let a hundred senpais bloom. There was a fairly loud