Valve’s anti-Asian discrimination continues, this time it’s Ji Shang Yan’s Chinese visual novel, Yao Shi: Yaokai’s Poetry, that got hit with Valve’s banhammer, according to the Nukige Group listing. Reasons for the ban? Nothing was stated by Bellevue, Washington corporation but if I had to take a guess based on the reasons for past bans, it was due to the lolis.

According to the SteamDB entry, the game was banned on July 8th, 2020 after the appID was originally created on May 2nd, 2020.

According to the entry, developer Ji Shang Yan and publisher Qing Wen updated the app with the opening movie and some of the press materials on July 7th, 2020 in order to get the store page approved by Steam’s curators, but the following day the app was banned. The SteamDB entry now reads…

“This app has been deleted or is hidden to the public. SteamDB has seen data for this app before, so for historic purposes it has been kept visible on this page, and may be out of date.”

According to the VNDB, the visual novel released back in August of 2019 in China, but was initially banned from Steam on February 13th, 2020. So technically this would be their second attempt to get the visual novel onto the Steam store.

Information on the visual novel is light, but the opening movie gives you a slight hint as to what the visual artwork and characters are like.

As you can see, there appears to be a loli, and one whiff of that from Steam’s Taste Police and it was probably to the ban-bin for Yao Shi.

For those of you who have been paying attention to Valve’s patterns for bans, the following topics usually end up netting a visual novel instant removal:

• Lolis
• School settings
• Schoolgirl outfits
• Hetero-only romances

Those are the patterns we’ve noticed for both all-ages and R18+ games getting nuked from the Steam store. For instance, Victory Project was banned, even though it wasn’t set in a school and contained no schoolgirl outfits, but it did feature hetero-only romances. Some people attempted to use the excuse that it was due to being an R18+ visual novel, but Victory Project later released on GOG.com with no problems, proving those theories to be incorrect.

Some pro-censorship Centrists have claimed that Steam controlling a majority of the VN market and banning certain kinds of VN subject matter would be for the best because it would “force developers to make new kinds of stories”, but that kind of censorship is dictatorial. Who are Steam’s Taste Police to determine what Asian developers are allowed to create or what stories they should be allowed to tell or what characters they should be allowed to use?

It’s funny that Social Justice Warriors are entirely against cultural oppression just until it comes to Asians.

In any case, Yao Shi is sadly yet another victim added to the ever-growing Waifu Holocaust banned game list.