Earlier this month, indie political satirist game dev Molleindustria—pseudonym of Paolo Pedercini, who created games like Democratic Socialism Simulator and New York Times Simulator—announced that he was moving up the release of his latest game. Despite having previously promised to launch the game on the same day as GTA 6 “in order to humiliate Rockstar in the open-world genre and deliver the killing blow to the Western game industry,” Future? No Thanks!, would instead launch today, on July 22.
Now that the day has arrived, Molleindustria’s launch plans have changed once again. The developer announced a last minute delay for Future? No Thanks! on Bluesky, saying that the game has been the subject of an unexpectedly lengthy Steam review process due to the presence of nudity during one of the game’s sequences.
Some sad news regarding today’s release:
— @molleindustria.org (@molleindustria.org.bsky.social) 2026-07-22T19:08:49.374Z
Using a sarcastic tone characteristic of Pedercini’s previous work, Molleindustria said that its launch timeline estimates “were foolish to disregard the only authority on the matter: Steam, which has kept our game under review for more than three weeks in order to properly assess the scale and scope of the nudity contained within it.”
The scale of that nudity, the developer says, consists of “dozens of untextured polygons depicting ass and boobs,” which “appear statically on screen for several seconds.” There are approximately 25 million polygons rendered during the opening scene of Death Stranding 2, to give you an idea of the relative levels of graphical fidelity we’re working with here.
In its store listing, Molleindustria lists the following in the Future? No Thanks! mature content description:
- Suggestion of cartoon sexual activity.
- Depiction of legalized and ethical prostitution.
- Depiction of euthanasia.
“We are thankful to Valve’s review team for its thorough work in keeping Steam free from obscene and horny content,” Molleindustria said. “The game will be released whenever their assessment is complete.”
In significantly less tongue-in-cheek replies, Pedercini explained that he didn’t predict that the build review would take longer than the expected two week estimate offered in Valve’s documentation—particularly because, he said, “the demo is identical and passed the review months ago.”
Pedercini says he believes the delay is due to Valve deliberating about whether Future? No Thanks!’s nudity is graphic enough to warrant an age verification. That deliberation is complicated in this case, because he says the sequence in question “is not immediately accessible in the game,” and Steam doesn’t accept video documentation when assessing game content.
Ultimately, Pedercini said he “literally had to submit a special build with a ‘watch the sex scene’ button.”
While SteamDB shows that Molleindustria labelled Future? No Thanks! as containing “some nudity and sexual content” 12 months ago, the prolonged build review seems to suggest that Valve isn’t fully convinced that the game’s adult content is “appropriately labeled and age-gated” as required by Steam’s onboarding documentation. Its build review guidelines do specify that games with “Adult Content store pages and builds can take longer than the typical 3-5 business days to review,” but this isn’t the first time that the ambiguity of when and how Steam applies its mature content standards has disrupted a developer’s launch plans.
In July 2025, Steam confirmed that it had delisted games based on a new, conspicuously vague rule added to its content guidelines forbidding “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors”—”in particular, certain kinds of adult only content”—after receiving pressure from those payment processors. Concerns about censorship on Steam further intensified in November 2025 when transgressive horror game Horses was banned from the platform without appeal.
The subjectivity of adult content labelling remains an unsolved problem. We can only assume the other games that launched on Steam this week, like—let me just check here—Hentai Tales: Shrine Maiden’s Juicy Fruits, were an easier call for Valve’s reviewers to make.
Gaming Industry#Indie #game #minute #Steam #delay #Valve #reviews #039dozens #untextured #polygons #depicting #ass #boobs0391784747948
