Visual Novel Publisher NekoNyan Promises They Won’t Drop R18 Content Going Forward

NekoNyan has come public to address some concerns raised by their latest release, Lorena and the Land of Ruins. Originally announced as an R18 game, the third-person shooter game faced an extraordinary situation as the developer Shimenawan decided to cut the erotic content from the game. This was not a decision of the publisher, and the developer pulled the Japanese R18 release out, making only the all-ages version officially available.

Due to this decision, multiple people started speculating what made Shimenawan change his heart about the product he had already published. These speculations led to some people feeling concerned that NekoNyan had changed their stance and would start censoring projects from now on. For that reason, the company started a Twitter thread explaining their position.

Firstly, NekoNyan points out clearly that they do not intend to stop working on R18 games. They have no plans to stop making R18 patches for Steam and standalone releases including all the adult content the original Japanese release had. In situations where the original developer would rather have only the all-ages edition available, they’ll continue to negotiate for the goal of having the complete adult release in English.

However, if they are unable to have the developer change their mind, as a company they’ll be obligated to accept their wishes. This is not the desired scenario for them, as they also wish for the R18 versions, but as a company, they can’t go against the game’s intellectual property holders and it’s very important for them to maintain a good reputation among the Japanese developer community. Acting unprofessionally when handling these situations would only make it harder for them to acquire other licenses.

On another note, going forward, NekoNyan intends to offer more transparency on their Steam builds. Though Steam Community terms do not allow them to share a list of changes and removals there, they’re looking to find other ways of sharing documents with the exact details so players may know about what the Steam version entails and use the R18 patch to fix it to the best quality build.

The company also mentions they consider these censored Steam versions to not be the ideal quality they desire, especially as some players may be unaware of the patches. However, having their games on Steam is, according to the company, “the single biggest factor in the financial success of a title.” Despite PC having various alternate storefronts, Steam remains the biggest source of income for many publishers.

For players who enjoy R18 content, this situation is unfortunate, especially as Steam’s inconsistent rules on bans still offer little to no malleability for publishers to negotiate. This seems to especially be the case for Japanese games, with even titles of significant relevance and quality unfairly banned from the platform despite Valve’s store having backpedaled on the absurd Chaos;Head ban case.

From our point of view, it’s a relief to see NekoNyan’s efforts on being transparent with their community. For eroge players, the publisher has many enticing upcoming titles such as Love, Elections, & Chocolate, Mysteries of the Heart: The Psychic Detective Case Files, Secret Agent, and Floral Flowlove, just to name a few.

Here at Noisy Pixel we’ll be sure to keep you updated on the latest news about their games as well as visual novels from other publishers.