My rant wasn't directed at you but the OP. Sorry.

You did some fine work listing how the various games are indexed and such.

I just wanted to inform people that various games were pulled from the german Steam store. I don't see anything wrong with that. :P

Don't worry. You'll learn how to properly cite information in school eventually, hopefully.

I've derailed this topic enough now. Sorry about that.


If people like you are allowed to post links here, I have no worries...

I'm attending university, guess I won't learn citing correctly then. :P

But maybe you'll eventually learn not to be a prick. ;)
I'm an asshole and I'm proud of it! :P

I noticed that list with games removed from Steam this morning. This crap sucks! :(

I'm quite sure that all games on that list will also be removed from GOG.

Somehow here in Finland we were still able to get rid of that ridiculous censorship law for e.g. movies where great movies like Robocop, Predator and Terminator were mutilated to an almost incomprehensible mess before they dared to show them to Finnish people. People and politicians cared enough to abolish that shitty law ("ennakkotarkastuslaki", I think the law was set in 1987. and abolished in 2001).

Too bad if that is not possible in Germany... :(

#einearmlaenge

Glad to see those tax Euros aren't going to waste!

You know that the BPJM can't do anything when it comes to websites and companies which are not placed in Germany? They can index that specific site but that is all they can do. If a site is indexed it does not show up in German search engines like google.de (google.de, bling.de and so on are using the BPjM filter) if you use google.com (what is suggested anyway) it does show up because the BPjM filter is not active. That is all they can do, they can't block sites and they can't force stores to remove games for German customers.

The last shop they wanted to index was Gameware which never happend and if you have seen the BPjM filter leak there are a few shops on that list but all of them sell Nazi stuff the rest is porn and some weird stuff like a gameserver site from a gaming clan (with .de adress).

The best example for this was the reddit case when reddit blocked a website for German users and argued that the BPjM forced them to do this. People smelled censorship and magazines like Spiegel, Focus and so on brought news about it. The BPjM released a official statement that they never asked that this specific site has to be blocked (they don't have the right to do this which are their own words) and that the only thing they could do is indexing that site which would lead into the restrictions above (not visible on German search engines) nothing else.

The problem is that Publishers are overreacting and blocking games which makes no sense at all because adults are free to buy them anyway. Square Enix as example completely blocked Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition for PC so you can't activate, install or play the game with a German IP. You can buy this game in any store which sells indexed games in Germany but only for console because of the reasons above.

Also people always think that the BPjM would index Wolfenstein and Co. because of the use of Nazi symbols but the truth is that the criminal code 86a (use of forbidden symbols) is not mentioned as a reason for the index in the youth protection law. The BPjM can't index games because of Nazi symbols. Hope this myth is busted now!

*BPjM called Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien in english Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors.

Did you know that the age verification system of entering your own age is put there just to remove the legal liability from the companies running the websites? I did. Now you do to.

The system wasn't implemented thinking it would be followed, it was implemented to make the act of going onto a page voluntarily that of the individual's.

That's about as reliable as entering your date of birth given that pretty much every minor has at least one adult with a passport/ID card living in the same household...

I think it is silly to put the blame on international publishers and stores in this one. All the blame should go to Germany for having such shitty laws.

Not being visible in German search engines can be considered as a major drawback already, affecting the operation of the store greatly in said country.

The store/publisher can't be sure either if it will stop there, or if the paranoid German government will later make the laws even stricter that there will be other problems than just being invisible in German search engines.

Also they may fear it is much easier to get "indexed" by the stupid German officials, than getting out of that later. So better not to get indexed to begin with.

Stores and publishers play safe, for a good reason. All the blame should be on Germany. In Finland we were able to get rid of that shitty censorship law (so that I could finally rent, buy and watch e.g. an uncut version of Robocop which wasn't heavily mutilated, making some scenes very hard to understand what even happened in them), Germans should be able to do the same.

I wrote a message to the devs of Rise of the triad and they don't know why their game was removed.

"So this is news to us. We're going to look into it but we haven't changed anything so we don't know why that happened."

Apparently Steam does this on their own for whatever reason.

It might be a mistake. It wouldn't be the first fuck-up of this nature by the BPjM (see X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the PS2 vs PS3 debacle). I very much doubt that the people at Valve weren't aware that there was a remake of Rise of the Triad.

Yeah, I've gotten a similar reply, the dev didn't know about the removal of the game.