Pick-up artist game ‘Super Seducer 3’ “banned” from Steam

Valve have “banned” Super Seducer 3 from Steam, as revealed in a series of screenshots posted on creator Richard LaRuina’s Twitter.

Super Seducer 3 is the third in a series of pick-up artistry games that uses FMV footage to allow players to seduce women in various scenarios. LaRuina himself plays the lead role in the game, interacting with multiple women and hosting cut-scenes surrounded by groups of women in their underwear.

The intended release date of Super Seducer 3 was February 15, a date that has been pushed back to allow for further assessments and reviews from Valve.

In the screenshots of conversations between Valve and LaRuina, their decision-making was laid out. Valve explained their decision not to publish the game, saying: “As we have mentioned previously, Steam does not ship sexually explicit images of real people”.

Steam have BANNED and removed Super Seducer 3 from the store. They will not allow it to be released in any form.

Our page is gone and 61,700 wish lists are gone.

Prior to this they told me expect either “approval or feedback”.
We repeatedly said we’d do whatever they needed pic.twitter.com/hVuDcvzL2n

— Richard La Ruina (@RichardGambler) March 20, 2021

The conversations appear to have been the result of several back-and-forth discussions between LaRuina’s team and Valve. The screenshots mention multiple “product resubmissions” and Valve’s final decision to disallow the product on Steam.

Despite these serial attempts at finding a middle-ground, it seems Super Seducer 3 was unable to censor its more ‘explicit’ scenes and Valve declared their decision “final” due to an “impasse” between the two.

Yeah exactly. That's what we struggled with. Is Instagram sexually explicit? We figured that if we were less sexy than IG and music videos that we'd be okay.

— Richard La Ruina (@RichardGambler) March 21, 2021

LaRuina admitted he believed that Steam would allow the game if it offered an option to censor it. He also compared the content to Instagram, saying he thought “if we were less sexy than IG and music videos we’d be okay”. Steam appears to have taken the stance based on ‘real people’ being sexually explicit in the FMV content, as opposed to animated games that include similar concepts.

A tweet from LaRuina back in February revealed that Super Seducer 3 has also been denied a place on the Epic and GOG storefronts.

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