GaluluGame has apparently been banned from Steam and all of their bullet-hell shooters in the ShineG series have been removed from digital storefront. You can no longer purchase the games from the Steam store and if you attempt to visit the store pages you’ll be redirected back to the front page of Steam.
This ban applies to all of GaluluGame titles, ranging from ShineG In Bumpercat to ShineG In The Bullethell. Some of these games have been on the Steam store since 2017, yet they were unceremoniously removed from the store without a peep.
It was brought to our attention when someone went to purchase a bundle pack of the ShineG games during a weekend sale, where all of the games were marked down by 45% off in the bundle. However, before they could purchase the bundle, the page was removed from Steam.
If you head over to the SteamDB page you’ll note that there’s a notice indicating that the bundle has been deleted and is only kept in the records for historical purposes.
According to the page, all of the games and the DLC were banned on May 4th, 2019.
While there’s no discussion of the bans on the forums of the games that have been removed from Steam, it turns out that GaluluGame had been attempting to evade a ban from when they were first hit with the hammer for their game Rabbit Thief.
Some of you might remember that originally GaluluGame went under the moniker HappyGame where they attempted to get an Adult’s Only BDSM title called Rabbit Thief onto Steam by posing it as a harmless puzzle title. Valve caught wind of it thanks to ResetEra mass reporting the game, where Rabbit Thief and HappyGame were promptly banned.
They attempted to come back under the name of Topaz Games with Rabbit Girl. However, in the Steam database it was discovered that they originally went by the name of GaluluGame, the same title that they launched their ShineG series under, which included the Dead or Alive Xtreme 3-esque ShineG In the Bumpercat, which contained low-rent mini-games and a gravure idol mode.
You might remember in the previous article it was noted that Rabbit Girl was originally listed under ShineG & Zombie Mincer. This would explain the connection. They were using the ShineG games to sneak the Rabbit Thief and Rabbit Girl games onto Steam. However, they didn’t expect ResetEra to catch on and foil their plans.
While some of their games were fairly low-rent, some of them were competently designed enough to garner a small audience made up mostly of Chinese gamers. So it’s easy to see how they flew under the radar given that games like ShineG In The Bullethell actually seemed like a mediocre vertical scroller.
However, it still doesn’t make sense why they decided to mess up their reputation by trying to slyly push a BDSM game onto Steam while attempting to avoid scrutiny.
Unlike other games where the reasons for the bans are nebulous and unclear, it looks like this time it was pretty obvious that GaluluGames’ skullduggery and ban-evasion schemes caught up with them and Valve dropped the hammer on all of their alternate profiles. It’s a shame because for fans of the ShineG series it means that they’re now going to have to seek them out on alternate storefronts.
(Thanks for the news tip Plake Filmmaker)
