// PC GAMER — GAMING
Steam reverses porn game rating it mistakenly gave to an indie vampire RPG, and despite the stress it was a 'net positive' overall as wishlists on Steam 'basically doubled overnight'
It's a happy ending, but Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eyes Games says this was absolutely not a guerrilla marketing stunt: "I’m not that dumb and I'm not that smart!"
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It's a sad day for aficionados of undead porn games, but a good one for pretty much everybody else: Valve has rescinded the adults only rating it had applied to the upcoming narrative RPG Nighthawks, meaning it will appear in standard searches on the storefront and won't be blocked from sale in some regions.
"Phew. What a roller coaster," Dave Gilbert, head of publisher Wadjet Eye Games, wrote on Bluesky. "Thank you everyone for your amazing support while we got this sorted. If you weren't able to wishlist before, now you can!"
I tested for myself, and sure enough, Nighthawks now appears in Steam searches even if you're not logged in. Previously, the adult rating meant it wouldn't show up unless you were logged in and had your account set to display AO-rated games.
In a separate post, Nighthawks developer (and former PC Gamer contributor) Richard Cobbett also expressed relief at the change: "Now I can get back to only stressing over people actually liking it!"
Oh, thank goodness. Now I can get back to only stressing over people actually liking it!
The entire situation was bizarre. Nighthawks, a game about life as a new vampire in a world where the existence of vampires is known, began as a 2018 Kickstarter project; it promised depth, complexity, great storytelling, hand-drawn art, and absolutely nothing about sex.
The same is visible on the Nighthawks Steam page: A little sexy, maybe—it's vampires, after all, and you know how they are—but hardcore sex? Not so much.
Complicating matters further, Cobbett told us when the AO rating was first imposed that nobody was really sure what had caused it. "Vampires are inherently a bit sexy, and Nighthawks is definitely a mature game in terms of content," he said over the weekend. "However, regarding nudity, sex, and similar elements specifically, it's really all very mild, usually comedic in tone when it happens, and far less explicit than anything you'd see on HBO."