Dungeon Travelers 2 Steam Release Apparently Blocked by Valve

A potential Dungeon Travelers 2 Steam release has apparently been blocked by Valve, although we don't know why


Published: June 20, 2022 10:32 AM /

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A combat shot of Dungeon Travelers 2

It looks like a potential Dungeon Travelers 2 Steam release has been banned by Valve. While no official announcement was made, a SteamDB listing suggests that the game might have been rejected from the platform, although we don't entirely know why.

What do we know about the Dungeon Travelers 2 Steam ban?

Sometimes, Valve will deny approval to a game looking to be listed on Steam. It happened to Richard La Ruina's infamous Super Seducer 3 owing to what Valve perceived as objectionable content in that game, as well as older indie titles like You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter. Although we don't have definitive proof, it looks like something similar might have happened to Dungeon Travelers 2, a PlayStation Vita dungeon crawler from 2015. If a SteamDB listing is to be believed, it looks like the game was listed for inclusion on Steam, then rejected by Valve.

Four anime girls in the dungeon crawler Dungeon Travelers 2
Dungeon Travelers 2 contains a fair amount of fanservice and ecchi, even in its censored Western form.

The listing was originally spotted by Redditor bad_spot, who explains that when a game has several art assets listed in the SteamDB backend but no store page or community page, that usually indicates it's been banned or rejected. SteamDB only shows data that's in Valve's own Steam backend, so there's no reason listed for the game's rejection from Steam. However, given the history of Dungeon Travelers 2, we can make a few educated guesses in that department.

Why was Dungeon Travelers 2 rejected from Steam?

Back in 2015, when Dungeon Travelers 2 originally launched, Western publisher Atlus confirmed that the game would have four of its images censored. These images include sexually suggestive material and artwork that skews dangerously close to depicting underage girls. The game's Western launch contained cleaned-up versions of these images (albeit still rather suggestive ones), so Dungeon Travelers 2 is a game that is not unfamiliar with censorship.

A battle scene in Dungeon Travelers 2
As you can see, Dungeon Travelers 2 is not shy about its sexually suggestive content.

A couple of possibilities spring to mind here. Either the publishers submitted the uncensored version of Dungeon Travelers 2 to Valve, which spooked them, thus resulting in the Steam rejection. Alternatively, the publishers submitted the censored version, which still spooked Valve because it still contains lots of very sexually suggestive material, particularly of characters who appear to be young. There's plenty of hentai shovelware on Steam, of course (as well as plenty of regular ol' shovelware), but Dungeon Travelers 2 is a more high-profile release, so it's possible it was subjected to more scrutiny than your average 99-cent match-three puzzler. We've reached out to both Valve and Dungeon Travelers 2 publisher Aquaplus for comment on this story and will bring you more as soon as we get it.

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Joe has been writing for TechRaptor for five years, and in those five years has learned a lot about the gaming industry and its foibles. He’s originally an… More about Joseph