Update: 02-07-2025 20:16 BST - Valve has issued a statement toGamingOnLinux, detailing its decision to pull games that violate the rules and standards of payment processors:
“We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks.As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam.We are directly notifying developers of these games, and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future.”
Steam has just updated its publisher guidelines, prohibiting “Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks”.
You can read the full guidelineshere.
In so many words: Visa and Mastercard now have sway over what games are allowed onthe platform. “In particular, certain kinds ofadult only content.” We’re already seeing the new rules put into action, asa major purge was launched last night, seeing a litany of titles delisted, such as “Sex Adventures - Incest Family”, “Slave of the Police Officer”, and “Interactive Sex - Daddy Twins Incest” (pretty much any game with ‘incest’ or ‘slave’ in the title).
Steam Players Are Worried About How Much Power Is Being Given To Payment Processors
While removing these is a positive step towards cleaning the storefront of shovelware and some of its more problematic games,as many Steam users have pointed out, it’s unlikely to end there. The adult industry has seen increasing pressure from card networks in recent years;OnlyFans similarly updated its guidelines"to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers",Fansly was pushed to update its TOS and censor furriesto appease “Our payment processing partners”, whileVisa and Mastercard both stepped away from popular explicit websitesaltogether.
As with all of those examples, the changes to Steam are proving an incredibly unpopular move already, with fans decrying thatit’s a “slippery slope"to allow a payment processing company to “dictate how other companies run their business”, with some fearful that Visa and Mastercard will “want it all gone sooner or later”. Others, like@daisy-bell on Bluesky, worry that “Because queer history, sex education, and mental health resources are ALREADY being declared ‘adult content’,” they could eventually be targeted.
Whether you like R-18 video games or not and whether you condone the sexual scenarios put forward by them - this new guideline is a very big uncertainty that will certainly be felt by the NSFW game industry—u/atahutahatena.
Steam’s new guidelines are incredibly vague—only noting that “certain types of adult-only content” may be taken issue with, without ever explaining what that means or entails—so it remains to be seen what exactly card networks will flag on the storefront. If past examples are anything to go by, then it could hit the vast majority of “adult content”, a conveniently malleable label. For now, though, only a very specific niche has been hit.
