Robert Yang's free Radiator Forever collection is out now — and Steam has already shadowbanned it

Robert Yang, the award-winning indie developer behind games like The Tearoom and Rinse and Repeat, has launched Radiator Forever — a free, ongoing remaster collection of his short experimental gay games — on both Steam and Itch.io. The collection is out now, but finding it is another matter entirely.

Radiator Forever launches with four games: Rinse and Repeat, which got a full control overhaul to replace its original hybrid 2D/3D VR-era system, plus Hurt Me Plenty, Succulent, and Stick Shift, all with minimal changes. More titles are coming over time — Yang calls the release model GaaS, or Gay as a Service. The Tearoom is expected later this year after a controls revamp, while Hard Lads, Logjam, and Rainbows Are Carnivores are also on the way. Cobra Club needs a much heavier rework and probably won't arrive until 2027 or even 2028. Pool Day is coming relatively soon, and Two Body Problem — currently "69 percent done" — is likely a 2027 release. On Steam, UK users need a valid credit card on file for age verification just to see the listing, and Yang says the game is geoblocked in certain countries outright.

The visibility problems are the direct fallout from last year's crackdown on adult content across PC storefronts. Conservative Australian pressure group Collective Shout pressured payment processors Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe into threatening to cut off platforms hosting NSFW games, which forced Itch.io to delist and bury a huge chunk of its adult catalog. The UK Online Safety Act compounded things further, pushing Itch to geoblock UK users entirely rather than deal with costly compliance. Yang says Itch now reaches far fewer people as a result, which is why he's back on Steam — even though Steam has tagged Radiator Forever as containing "frequent nudity and sexual content" and hidden it from the vast majority of users. "Since no one changes their default settings, this amounts to a delisting/shadowban from 99% of the Steam user base," Yang writes. He was careful to avoid explicit nudity, but says that wasn't enough: "compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor, and the Steam content reviewers have decided the game's general 'nature' was just too gay." He points to Steam's no-appeal ban of Horses as evidence that "Valve isn't interested in a nuanced conversation or in admitting any wrongs in moral judgment."

Yang also calls out what he sees as a clear double standard: "Valve loves it when Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 throw customisable genitals at you in the first five minutes, but of course I can't, because I actually have something to say about genitals." Radiator Forever is still free and still findable if you follow a direct link — but for a collection of politically charged games designed explicitly as free speech, being invisible to 99% of the platform's users is a pretty blunt message.