Imagine waking up, opening your Steam account and discovering that your country’s government just decided that a psychological horror game with explicit scenes is perfect for your preschooler brother. This is no joke, it’s exactly the absolute chaos that happened in Indonesia thanks to its new and flawed age rating system, which turned Valve’s store into a multiverse of absurdity.

A World Where Horror is for Kids and Horses for Adults

The disaster began when Steam started applying IGRS labels (Indonesia’s official rating system). In a twist no one understands, the harmless racing and waifu-raising game, Uma Musume Pretty Derby, received a strict classification exclusively for adults over 18. Worse yet, world-class RPG titles like Metaphor: ReFantazio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 were labeled “inappropriate” and were virtually banned for sale in the region.

But the crown jewel of this technical disaster was taken by adult games. Titles that are literally pure explicit content, like the disturbing gore and horror visual novel The Song of Saya (Saya no Uta) and the very Nukitashi (a proper eroge), received an adorable green tag approving them for children aged 3 and up. The entire gaming community was left speechless, filling forums with mockery about how broken the automated filters were.

The Official Response to International Ridicule

How was such an atrocity possible? It turns out that Valve wanted to streamline the process and allowed ratings to be generated automatically based on surveys completed by developers, instead of going through a human review by the Indonesian government. Faced with a rain of mockery and complaints, the IGRS board had to make an emergency appearance, clarifying that those absurd numbers did not represent their final decisions and that they were working urgently with Steam to fix the system.

Currently, the platform had to backtrack and returned to showing the usual international ratings while they fix this embarrassing error. Seeing that automated surveys can fail so miserably, do you think Steam should implement mandatory manual reviews or was it just a temporary technological stumble?