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Well We Can All Wave Goodbye To Horror Games And Games With Decent Melee Combat Now

Anonymous
Not applicable
Oculus have just emailed with regards to a new content policy and it's ridiculous. Details here:

https://developer.oculus.com/distribute/latest/concepts/publish-content-guidelines/

"

Content Guidelines

Here are some basic content standards that we apply to all apps and games. The following is not accepted in the Oculus Store:

  • Pornography, including content for the purpose of sexual gratification.
  • Excessively violent content (including but not limited to: torture, rape, child abuse, animal abuse, cannibalism, glorification of gore, and dismemberment).
  • Hate speech, bullying, molestation, or harassment.
  • Real-money gambling.
  • Applications directed to children or users under the age of 13.


So if you're wanting to play a horror game or game with melee combat you won't see any dismemberment. Fucking ridiculous.

I can see horror game developers in particular abandoning the Oculus Store in favour of Steam if you can't have a few severed limbs here and there. And that's going to be a disaster for all Rift owners because we know how much of a clusterfuck SteamVR is for Rift owners since the Rift launched.

Dismemberment has been a part of video games since the 80s ffs.
99 REPLIES 99

Aekero
Heroic Explorer
I mean horror =/= dismemberment to me. You could build a game that could scare people out of their minds without excessive gore/dismemberment, and I'm not a fan of that excessive violence thought train to be honest. I think about some of the scarier movies I've watched and they haven't had anything to do with excessive gore.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Aekero said:

I mean horror =/= dismemberment to me. You could build a game that could scare people out of their minds without excessive gore/dismemberment, and I'm not a fan of that excessive violence thought train to be honest. I think about some of the scarier movies I've watched and they haven't had anything to do with excessive gore.



Of course excessive gore and dismemberment aren't ESSENTIAL for a scary game but my first idea for the game was what would happen if Dreadhalls and Alien Isolation met at a party, got drunk, had no-holes barred rampant sex and had a baby lol 😮

If I'm going to be unable to have players remove thumbs of corpses and am going to be unable to have these alien enemies popping out of corpses that's two excellent design decisions for a VR horror game (even though I do say myself) that I'm going to have to put on the scrap heap.

The main tension in the game is going to be down to intelligent use of lighting, sound and music but not being able to include dismemberment is going to mean that my game is going to be censored which I'm REALLY not happy about.

And I dare say that the same can be said of other developers working on VR horror or survival horror games. No cannibalism is also a major horror trope that is also going to be unnecessarily censored.

Luciferous
Consultant
I've been chopping up cannibals all week in 'The Forest' mind you I don't think it is excessive as I have only been using enough parts of them for home decoration. 🙂

Evileyes
Rising Star
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Zenbane
MVP
MVP
Can we at least wait until we actually start to see games rejected from Oculus store before we overly object to the wording on this policy?

Let's try to leave premature reaction to Vivarians; this is unbecomimg of Rifters!

I kid, I kid.

Evileyes
Rising Star

Zenbane said:

Can we at least wait until we actually start to see games rejected from Oculus store before we overly object to the wording on this policy?

Let's try to leave premature reaction to Vivarians; this is unbecomimg of Rifters!

I kid, I kid.



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Anonymous
Not applicable

Zenbane said:

Can we at least wait until we actually start to see games rejected from Oculus store before we overly object to the wording on this policy?

Let's try to leave premature reaction to Vivarians; this is unbecomimg of Rifters!

I kid, I kid.



Well I'll update this thread when I get clarification on a similar thread I've started there but the fact that they've singled out dismemberment doesn't bode well for my game unfortunately.

Zenbane
MVP
MVP

snowdog said:

Well I'll update this thread when I get clarification on a similar thread I've started there but the fact that they've singled out dismemberment doesn't bode well for my game unfortunately.



They didn't necessarily single it out just yet. They listed it within a very specific context:
  • Excessively violent content
  • glorification of gore
  • torture, rape, child abuse

If I were you, I wouldn't be worried in all sincerity. If I were building a violent game with some dismemberment I would only be concerned if the policy were instead like this:

Here are some basic content standards that we apply to all apps and games. The following is not accepted in the Oculus Store:

  • Pornography, including content for the purpose of sexual gratification.
  • Excessively
    violent content (including but not limited to: torture, rape, child
    abuse, animal abuse, cannibalism, glorification of gore).
  • Hate speech, bullying, molestation, or harassment.
  • Real-money gambling.
  • Applications directed to children or users under the age of 13.
  • Dismemberment


See the difference?
🙂

LZoltowski
Champion
Yeah as @Zenbane has said context is everything, in this case

"Excessively violent content" ... it's a bit like a Movie Rating system, a PG-13 movie can have a couple non-sexual F-words in the script for example.

I just think excessive means just that, EXCESSIVE, that a game with a sole purpose of dismembering humans/animals is a big no no, but a game where the dismemberment is more of a result of the game story, like;
  • a realistic war battle
  • a cut scene depicting an accident or an attack
  • a non human (zombie, demon, ghoul, monster)

will be just fine.
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kojack
MVP
MVP
There are other stores for VR content than just Steam and Oculus.
Itch.io has VR titles, and it is without a doubt the most indie dev friendly game store. Their default cut of sales is 10% (instead of the 30% taken by Steam/Oculus/MS/Apple), but you can set the amount to anywhere between 0% and 100% (it's called Open Revenue Sharing).

Gamers Gate (not to be confused with Gamer Gate, that's VERY different) has VR titles including Skyrim VR, Fallout VR, Superhot VR, Arizona Sunshine, Project Cars 2, etc.

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