RimWorld delisted in Australia after ACB classification [UPDATE: It’s Back]

[UPDATE 04/23/22] Ludeon Studios announced on April 21st that RimWorld had returned to sale on Steam across Australia. The game was unavailable in the country for 47 days. The team’s announcement is below, followed by our original post from March 7th.

Hello everyone! We have great news for our Australian players – RimWorld is once again available for purchase on Steam in Australia. This means Australians have access to the RimWorld Steam store page and can gift and receive Steam keys for the game. (It also means you can read this news update. 😉) Everything should be back to normal!

For context: Back in February, the Australian Classification Board classified RimWorld as “Refused Classification (RC)” which banned the game from sale in Australia. This news was sudden and a surprise to everyone.

We appealed to the Classification Review Board and they agreed to review the game’s rating on April 20. We assembled a lot of useful evidence and had a great legal team to help us. Our community was also amazing and helped us by providing examples of games on Steam that had similar cases to us, like Disco Elysium and Fallout. The review concluded with a happy ending – RimWorld’s classification changed from “Refused Classification (RC)” to “R 18+ (Restricted)”, and now we’re back on Steam!

So a big thanks to everyone for your support, that was a wild couple of months!

– Tia

---

A new and unexpectedly extreme rating by the Australian Classification Board this past Friday has caused RimWorld to be delisted on Steam across the country. The rating of RC stands for “Refused Classification” and means that the game contains content the Board feels offends “the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults”. Ironically, the new classification (or lack thereof) comes from a potential console release of the game that was submitted to the Board last week.

After branding the submission with the RC title the game was removed from Steam on March 4th, presumably in an automated process that lumped the PC version in with the console designation. Developer Ludeon Studios is working to resolve the situation and return the game to sale. The team’s full announcement follows:

Unfortunately, we’ve just been informed that RimWorld has just been made unavailable for new purchases by Australian customers on Steam.

This does not seem to affect existing owners – it only prevents new purchases. Anyone who already owns the game is still be able to play, receive updates and access community features like the forums and workshop. The Ideology and Royalty expansions are also not affected.

EDIT: Steam keys do not work in Australia. If you buy the game on the RimWorld website, you will not be able to register your game on Steam. Friends cannot gift you RimWorld on Steam either, even if they don’t live in Australia.

We don’t have a ton of information about this since it just happened within the last few hours, it’s Friday evening, and most people we could ask are not at work.

From the info we have, this happened because a few days ago, the Australian Classification Board classified a potential console version of RimWorld as “Refused Classification (RC)”, meaning it can’t be sold in Australia.

We did not expect this to affect the Steam version because in previous similar cases, as with Disco Elysium for example, an RC rating on a console version did not affect the availability of the PC version on Steam. We’re not sure why this decision was made in RimWorld’s case.

I’m sorry this news was so sudden and for anyone who is frustrated by this. We are working to resolve this situation and make RimWorld available to everyone again as soon as possible, but we don’t yet know what that might require or how long it may take.

Thanks for your understanding everyone.
– Ty

With any luck the game will return to Steam soon but it’s hard to say at this early point. If RimWorld originally slid past the Board in Early Access — say, when it didn’t include some of the questionable content — then a re-submission of the current PC version is likely to receive the same classification.

Source: GamesIndustry.biz