Steam cracks down on some sex games to appease payment processors

Valve’s famously permissive rules for what games are and are not allowed on Steam got a little less permissive this week, seemingly in response to outside pressure from some of its partner companies. In a Tuesday update to the “Rules and Guidelines” section of Steam’s Onboarding Documentation, the company added a new rule prohibiting “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 particular, certain kinds of adult only content.”

On its own, the new rule seems rather vague, with no details on which of the many kinds of “adult only content” would belong in the “certain” subset prohibited by these unnamed payment processors and ISPs. But the trackers over at SteamDB noticed that the publication of the new rule coincides with the removal of dozens of Steam games whose titles make reference to incest, along with a handful of sex games referencing “slave” or “prison” imagery.

Holding the keys to the bank

Valve isn’t alone in having de facto restrictions on content imposed on them by outside payment processors. In 2022, for instance, Visa suspended all payments to Pornhub’s ad network after the adult video site was accused of profiting from child sexual abuse materials. And PayPal has routinely disallowed payments to file-sharing sites and VPN providers over concerns surrounding piracy of copyrighted materials.