Steam bans the worlds first interactive animated feature film because NFT's 0_0

11 points

5 years ago

We are an indie animation/game/music studio. We were going through the submission process on Steam with "M doll"(1467760), an interactive animated feature film wherein you can watch the film and "jump" into the scenes and explore them.

During the submission process a Steam support employee "Mary" retired our game and closed the thread with a vague explanation about crypto and Nft's

Their message is here https://i.imgur.com/zYS29p3.png

Afterwards we found 4 different games that integrate Nft's that are already on Steam and brought that up to Steam support and received no answers.

In our interactive film the "crypto integration" was just the ability to see the contract address for the one NFT we made for the film and show the wallet address of the current owner. There was also a QR for the Rarible page for the same NFT.

We would have removed the QR's if they gave us a chance to but they just retired it and closed the thread. We have since sent about 15 messages to Steam support with no answers received.

We've been through the Steam submission process before and when they have issues they let you know, you deal with them and re-submit for approval. I can't find any other instances of a support person at Steam "retiring" a developers game without their permission.

I guess they didn't like the film?! Or they feel films should not be interactive?!

We'll probably release the executable for free on Internet Archive now.

You can see how the interactive stuff works here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L16WtgpnDDc

The film was made in Unity, its actually the first animated feature film made entirely in Unity- so we rendered out the film as an mp4 which we play in the interactive exe- we created 37 interactive scenes using the cutscenes from the film itself that are mapped to times in the film- so when you press a key while watching the film it takes you to a realtime version of that scene in which you can explore, listen to commentary, play the cutscene, play music etc.

When you press that key again it takes you back to the film where you left off.

Unity doesn't support 2 hour audio files so we had to write our own dvd type player with multiple soundtrack support etc- we also wrote our own crowd sim for the film production itself etc-

There are also 4 different soundtracks, several visual "looks" you can change etc-

We did a making of wiki on github too https://github.com/mdotstrange/MDoll/wiki

Trailer for the film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHz_pQWRAu8

Anyhow, don't innovate too hard on Steam or they gone ban you!

Our substack https://imaginationrabbit.substack.com/