Steam Buried His Games for Being "Too Gay" But He Released Them Anyway

Robert Yang has released Radiator Forever, a free compilation of his short experimental games, and Steam's reviewers have already buried it. Yang, the designer behind The Tearoom and Rinse and Repeat, calls the project an "ongoing re-remaster" and labels his release model GaaS, or Gay as a Service.

The compilation opens with four games. Rinse and Repeat, a first-person showering game Yang describes as being about consent and safety, got a control overhaul that drops the hybrid 2D/3D scheme it used as a VR project. Hurt Me Plenty, Succulent, and Stick Shift arrive with minimal changes. Yang plans to keep adding titles over time.

You can find it now via Radiator Forever on Steam, which requires a login to view, and on itch.io. Steam's content reviewers flagged Radiator Forever for "frequent nudity and sexual content," a call Yang disputes. He says he avoided explicit nudity on purpose.

The flag carries a cost. The compilation now shows up only for Steam users who change their preferences to allow Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content, which Yang says cuts him off from 99 percent of the platform. UK users have to verify they are 18 or older to reach anything Valve tags as mature sexual content.

"Compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor," Yang wrote, adding that the reviewers judged the game's general nature "just too gay."

I read that flag as the real story, because Valve waves explicit AAA content through the front door while burying a designer whose entire point is to say something with it.

"Valve loves it when Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 throw customisable genitals at you in the first five minutes, but of course I can't, because I actually have something to say about genitals!"

— Robert Yang

Yang traces the tighter rules to 2025, when Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and the Australian pressure group Collective Shout ran a campaign that pushed Itch to delist or bury many NSFW games rather than lose payment processing. He also points to the UK Online Safety Act, which drove Itch to geoblock the country instead of complying with the law. He expects a wave of anti-anonymity laws to raise costs for sites that serve users like his.

The lineup expands from there. The Tearoom, Yang's bathroom simulator about 1960s sodomy laws and game censorship, where men stand at urinals with guns for penises and dodge undercover cops, should arrive later this year after a control revamp. Hard Lads, Logjam, and Rainbows Are Carnivores follow, and Yang calls those three fairly straightforward to port.

Rainbows Are Carnivores shipped in December 2025 as a free, web-based game on itch.io. Yang built it as a gay fishing and "aquaculture romance" title in which a fisherman grades nude men he pulls from the sea, and framed it as a comment on dating apps and overfishing at once. He compared dating pools enclosed by apps to farmed lakes where most matches die off like trout by season's end. The French film Stranger By The Lake shaped its mix of sex and violence.

Cobra Club, Yang's 2015 game about body image, privacy, and dick pics, needs the heaviest rework. He says the controls do not suit a gamepad, the online features resist maintenance, the chat system fights localization, and the politics were not reality-friendly. That one may not join until 2027 or 2028.

Two titles round out the near-term slate. Pool Day, a skinny-dipping homage to David Hockney's swimming pool paintings, should land soon. Two Body Problem, a gay hockey romance, sits at 69 percent done and will likely launch next year, timed by Yang to coincide with a second season of Heated Rivalry.

I think the free, ongoing model works less as a nostalgia exercise than as a hedge, since a compilation that keeps absorbing new work is harder for a storefront to erase than any single release. Yang cited Santa Ragione's experience with Valve's zero-appeal rejection of Horses as evidence the company will not reconsider its calls or admit a bad one.

Read also, players of Krafton's life sim inZOI noticed that same-sex Zois never spawn on their own, and the studio confirmed it as a known bug. The character creator lets you set romantic preferences by hand, but the pre-made NPCs are hardwired straight, so spontaneous queer romance does not happen without manual setup. Inzoi Studio listed "the inability for gay Zois to spawn" among the issues it is fixing, alongside localization and UI problems.