Gaming

Nighthawks Dodged Steam's Adults Only Label With a Week to Spare

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 17, 2026

Eight years after its Kickstarter, Wadjet Eye Games' vampire RPG Nighthawks nearly launched invisible. Days before its September 22 release, Steam classified the game as Adults Only, a label that throttled its discoverability and hid it in some countries. Valve reversed the classification before launch day. The game survived its brush with the algorithm, and the episode exposed where real power sits in PC gaming: in the labels applied behind the scenes.

The timeline is tight. Wadjet Eye announced the September 22, 2026 release date for Steam and GOG on September 2. On September 13, studio founder Dave Gilbert posted on Bluesky that Steam had classified Nighthawks as an adult game, excluding it from searches and delisting it entirely in certain countries, adding that Valve was under the impression the game was way sexier than it actually is. Kotaku picked up the story on September 15. By September 14, Gilbert was already posting that the rating had been removed and everything was set for launch on the 22nd.

The content question is where it gets interesting. Nighthawks, developed by The Curiosity Engine and written by Sunless Sea writer Richard Cobbett, carries mature themes, strong language, and stylized romance options. Cobbett told PC Gamer the sexual material amounted to a few butt shots and some other censored naughty bits, mostly connected to companion romances, and described the content as mild, sometimes comedic, and less explicit than material commonly shown on HBO. The game relies almost entirely on text description rather than explicit visual content. The sources stay silent on exactly which content or metadata triggered the flag, which is precisely the problem: an opaque classification system made a consequential call, and the studio had to reverse engineer the reasoning under launch week pressure.

Kotaku placed Nighthawks in a growing pattern of Steam classification troubles for indies, alongside similar cases like Horses. Each case follows the same arc: a storefront system applies a visibility crushing label, press attention follows, the label gets corrected. The pattern is now documented enough to serve as a playbook: public, specific reporting moves these decisions faster than support tickets alone.

Here is the twist that makes this a genuinely happy story. Gilbert called the episode a net positive: when his Bluesky post went viral, press coverage followed and the game's wishlists essentially doubled overnight. In his September 15 statement on the game's Steam community page, he wrote that Valve had been very helpful in expediting the review of the appeal, adding that the outcome exceeded everything he had hoped for.

If you backed Nighthawks back in 2018, when the campaign raised about $136,000, your patience is about to pay off on September 22. And the next indie facing a mystery label now has a precedent to point at: speak up early, document everything, and the storefront can still do the right thing.

Sources

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