Steam's got a new rule that puts the kibosh on 'certain kinds of adult only content' that make Visa and Mastercard sad

Devs are biting their nails over a new Steam rule that prohibits—in painfully vague terms—certain kinds of content on its platform. The new rule (seemingly introduced incredibly recently, and definitely introduced since the Wayback Machine's last Steam rules snapshot from April 14 this year) forbids "Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers."

In other words: keep Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal happy or sling your hook. How do you do that? Valve doesn't say, only noting that particular care should be taken with "certain kinds of adult only content." No elaboration is offered as to what kinds of adult-only content that means, leaving NSFW devs groping in the dark to appease payments processors.

I've reached out to Valve to ask for clarification on this rule, and I'll update this piece if I hear back.

But while we wait, maybe we can connect some dots. As spotted by SteamDB on Bluesky, the new rule coincided with the sudden removal of a significant number of incest-themed adult games from Steam's storefront. Anyone who had any number of the Interactive Sex or Sex Adventures games on their wishlist should have bought them sooner: they've been suddenly and unceremoniously yoinked.

I've reached out to the dev behind some of those games, too, to ask if they've had any communication from Valve, and I'll update if I hear back.

It would seem, then, that incest might be one of the themes that falls under Valve's (or, more accurately, Valve's payments processors') new rubric of verboten games, but there's a wrinkle here too. There are still some incest-themed games available for purchase on the platform, including one from the same Interactive Sex series that was hit so hard in the removals noted by SteamDB. Could it be they just slipped some sort of automated removal net? Or was the disappearance of so many games with the same, um, theme just a coincidence?

Without clarification from Valve that goes beyond the couple of sentences that have been chucked into its Steamworks onboarding docs, it's tough to say. What's less hard to parse is the very real fear this has struck into the hearts of Steam users and devs both. Fears abound that Steam is in for the kind of turmoil that struck OnlyFans all the way back in 2021, when the site—almost exclusively associated in people's minds with the sex workers who use it to make a living—said that pressure from banks was forcing it to ban pornography on the platform.

The policy was eventually walked back after an outcry, but it was just one more thing that makes trying to make a living from sex work uniquely precarious in the age of online payments and platform-dependency.

It's not just OnlyFans that has come under the eye of Sauron for this kind of stuff, either. Tumblr, infamously, banned porn on the platform, with CEO Matt Mullenwegg bluntly stating that "Credit card companies are anti-porn." Patreon, too, has initiated crackdowns on certain kinds of NSFW content at the behest of payments processors.

Processor hostility to adult content has heightened in the wake of the 2020 scandal where popular adult site PornHub was found to be hosting revenge porn and content featuring minors. That led Mastercard and Visa to terminate service to the site—a termination that continued even after PornHub went nuclear on videos from unverified performers.

Credit card companies categorically do not want their names associated with that kind of reputation-damaging content, to say nothing of the increased risk of chargebacks and fraud that comes from online pornography.

Meanwhile, Valve categorically does not want Steam users to suddenly find themselves unable to buy games using ubiquitous payment methods like Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal, meaning it's a lot easier to simply bow to their whims than stick up for adult game devs. The fact that Valve doesn't feature live performers in the adult games on its platform—it's hentai as far as the eye can see—apparently bears little relevance here.

We might not miss the glut of incest-themed games that have seemingly (but I stress it's not been confirmed) been hit by this rule, but I fear it's the thin end of a very thick wedge. On the one hand—as much as I enjoy poking fun at the more obsessively goonerlicious games that mark our hobby—it's my position that what other people get off to is none of my business, the usual caveats about everyone involved giving informed consent applied.

On another, darker hand, there's a not-unreasonable fear that what begins as a crackdown on porno shovelware could eventually spread out to target queer creators and games of all stripes.

"It’s the quiet normalization of financial censorship and it’s going to hurt LGBTQ+ games and devs," writes NoahFuel_Gaming in a popular Bluesky post. "Banks like Visa and Mastercard are now backdoor moral authorities. They already pressured Patreon, OnlyFans, and others to remove NSFW content. Now Steam is next. And guess who they’ll target first? Queer, transgressive, or 'unusual' games.

"Queer content gets flagged as 'explicit' even when it’s PG. A trans dev making a personal story? 'Too controversial.' A surreal queer VN? 'Sexualized.' Financial deplatforming in action."

In a time of seemingly global reactionary backlash against LGBT people and queer lifestyles, it feels more important to push back on this kind of puritanism than ever.