“I’m desperately looking for anybody who knows anybody at Valve”: open world satire Future? No Thanks! is still locked in Steam horny jail

Even as GTA 6 breaks the internet with its vistas of full frontal nudity, poledancers and endless, lustful twerking, another promising open world satire with “mild nudity” and some racey encounters has been rendered invisible to a whole swathe of Steam users thanks to Valve’s squeamishness about “porn”. This is despite its creator deleting the associated “sex quest”.

The game in question is Molleindustria’s macabre yet upbeat ecosocialist comedy Future? No Thanks!, in which a grumpy old fart who’s applying for state-supplied euthanasia attempts to polish off his bucket list. Following a great demo, it was delayed last minute due to concerns about some cartoon boobs and bottoms (see above), with Valve’s content moderators allegedly requesting that Molleindustria – aka, Paolo Pedercini – submit a build with a ‘skip to sex scene button’.

Some weeks later, Future? No Thanks! is still locked in horny jail with a rating that doesn’t allow me to open the Steam page without age verification, thanks to the UK’s Online Safety Act. GTA games, though, with their lapdances and blowjobs? I can view those just fine on Steam. I guess it’ll be interesting to see if GTA 6 has to bend for Valve and the payment networks, as and when they date that PC version. I sense that Rockstar may have better luck with the approval process than Molleindustria.

“Even after we removed the entire sex quest, Steam mis-classifies Future? No Thanks! as pornography, making it invisible to most Steam users and completely geo-locked in Germany,” Molleindustria wrote in a Bluesky post this week. “We are currently at Gamescom in Cologne, everybody is asking us why they can’t see the PAGE of a Teen rated game.” Pedercini clarified that “the game is rated USK 16, ERSB 12 and PEGI 12. But Steam prefers to preemptively ban rather than following the German law (USK).”

Further down the thread, Perdicini farcically includes a photo of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, current president of Germany, smiling for a photo op at a booth for Future? No Thanks! and some other games (shout out for the equally interesting city builder Microlandia). “We are here in a booth sponsored by the German government,” he writes. “Here’s the PRESIDENT OF GERMANY this morning, posing in front of a game that Steam considers too pornographic for this whole country.

“This has been the most humiliating and surreal experience in 20+ years of game making,” Perdicini concludes. “I’m desperately looking for anybody who knows anybody at Valve that can at least tell me what’s going on.”

I’ve requested comment from Valve, asking whether the game’s current adult rating on Steam reflects an administrative delay of some kind. I’ll end by again nudging you towards Jay Castello’s recent Aftermath piece on the absolute grind of getting Certain Kinds Of Game on Steam, which includes details of the approval process and more thoughts from Perdicini.