'Too Gay' for Steam, Radiator Forever Fights Shadowban

A free collection of award-winning experimental games is effectively invisible on Steam because Valve's content reviewers decided it was "just too gay." Developer Robert Yang released Radiator Forever this week, bundling remastered versions of his short-form games like Rinse and Repeat, Hurt Me Plenty, Succulent, and Stick Shift into a single package he's calling "Gay as a Service." You can't find it through Steam search, and in most countries, the listing won't even appear unless you've specifically opted in to view content flagged for frequent nudity or sexual content.

The problem, as Yang detailed in a blog post announcing the release, is that the game doesn't contain explicit nudity. He deliberately avoided it. Valve flagged it anyway.

"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 says this tagging "amounts to a delisting/shadowban from 99 percent of the Steam user base." UK users face an additional barrier: they need a valid credit card on file for age verification before the listing will even load. I covered this story earlier this week, and the double standard Yang is pointing to hasn't gotten less glaring. Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 both feature customisable genitals within minutes of starting, and neither is buried behind the same content wall. The difference isn't explicitness; it's who's making the game and what they're saying with it.

Yang would prefer to avoid Steam entirely, but his options have narrowed. He explains that Collective Shout, a conservative Australian pressure group, drove Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe to pressure Itch.io into delisting or burying NSFW games throughout 2025. The UK Online Safety Act then forced Itch to geoblock British users rather than comply with what Yang calls "expensive, intrusive, and ineffective" requirements. "The cold fact is that Itch reaches a lot fewer people these days," he wrote. "So it's time for me to go crawling back to Steam."

Radiator Forever is planned as a living collection. Yang intends to add The Tearoom, his celebrated historical bathroom simulator, later this year, with Hard Lads, Logjam, and Rainbows Are Carnivores also in the pipeline. The collection is free on both Steam and Itch.io, assuming you can actually find it.