Sexual assault simulator Rape Day banned from Steam following backlash

A computer game in which players rape and murder women has been removed from the popular gaming marketplace Steam.

Rape Day was launched on PC earlier this week and features scenes of “violence, sexual assault, non-consensual sex, obscene language, necrophilia and incest”, The Independent reports.

Desk Plant, the game’s developer, claims that Rape Day is a “dark comedy” that sets out to normalise sexual assault in a similar way to how “murder has been normalised in fiction”, the news site adds.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

On the game’s website, the developer writes: “In some way, every good fantasy is a power-fantasy. Even if it’s some odd-ball story about gaining the acceptance of the loss of control, it’s still a form of power.

“Porn is even more so about power.”

However, Rape Day’s launch immediately prompted a major outcry, with an online petition calling for the game to be banned amassing more than 3,000 signatures.

Valve, the company behind the Steam service, has now responded to the backlash and removed the game from its PC gaming platform.

“After significant fact-finding and discussion, we think Rape Day poses unknown costs and risks and therefore won’t be on Steam,” the company said in a statement.

“We respect developers’ desire to express themselves, and the purpose of Steam is to help developers find an audience, but this developer has chosen content matter and a way of representing it that makes it very difficult for us to help them do that,” the company added.

The news comes less than a year after Valve announced its “anything goes” policy, where all games would be permitted on Steam unless the company deemed it illegal, the Daily Mirror reports.

Despite the ban, Desk Plant still plans to continue Rape Day’s development.

“The next step is reaching out to other quality developers whose game(s) were banned, which include pornographic content and nothing illegal, to organise a niche site where you can purchase porn games that are too morally reprehensible for Steam,” the developer said.