Paolo Pedercini has been making games for over 20 years. He says nothing prepared him for this.
The Molleindustria developer, known for The McDonald’s Video Game, Oiligarchy, and Every Day the Same Dream, says Valve classified his upcoming adventure Future? No Thanks! as containing adult-only sexual content during Steam’s review process.
That designation drops the game into Steam’s mature-content system next to sexually explicit titles. It also triggers Steam’s regional rules. In Germany, users trying to open the store page were met with “This item is currently unavailable in your region.”
The game carries a PEGI 12 rating and is reportedly rated USK 16 in Germany.
Pedercini called it “the most humiliating and surreal experience” of his career.
The scene is gone, the label isn’t
Valve’s concerns reportedly centered on a short sex scene, an interaction involving a sex robot, and an achievement called “Have Sex One Last Time.”
Pedercini says he cut the disputed scene and resubmitted the game. According to him, Valve kept the adult sexual-content designation anyway. He then publicly asked the company to look at it again.
It isn’t clear whether Valve ran a full second review, or whether other content still triggers the label.
The timing made it worse. Pedercini was in Germany showing the game at Gamescom, on the general show floor, at a booth reportedly supported by the German government. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited and posed for promotional photos.
So attendees could walk up, play the game at a mainstream booth, then pull out their phone and find the Steam page completely blocked in their country.
For an indie game, that isn’t just embarrassing. A Steam page is the wishlist machine. Convention buzz is worthless if nobody can click through and follow the game.
Worth being precise here: Germany didn’t ban anything. Steam’s own content categorization, combined with Germany’s strict age-verification rules for adult material, is what pulled the page. Valve has historically chosen to make adult-only pages unavailable in Germany rather than build a compliant verification system.
Future? No Thanks! is set in 2045, in an ecosocialist utopia where climate change is being handled, democracy works, and tech serves the public. You play Harvey Huffstone, a bitter old conservative who hates all of it. It’s his last day alive by his own scheduling, and he wants to tick off a bucket list before a planned euthanasia.
