Valve has updated Steam’s rules to prohibit games that “may violate the rules and standards established by Steam’s payment processors, related card organizations and banks, or Internet service providers”, in particular “certain types of content limited to adults”. In other words, Valve is transferring to banks, Internet service providers and credit card companies the acceptable definition of “adult content only” on the Steam platform.
This may have quite dramatic consequences, given the fact that banks and payment companies have a record of pressuring the platform to lower what they consider to be “NSFW” (not suitable for the workplace). This new rule is only recently appearing on Steam’s entry page for developers.
Valve’s policy on “adult content” and how to distinguish it from “pornography” has been rather vague. Part of the reason is that it is generally difficult to reach consensus on the true meaning of “adult” and “pornography”. The platform once tried to promote a “no pornography” strategy. This practice peaked in 2018. However, Valve has issued a series of fairly arbitrary warnings to many developers and distributors to remove “pornography” from the games, ranging from horror comedy to decryption, which can be described as far below the intensity of the event in The Wizard III: Racing.
The announcement triggered strong protests at the time, when Valve announced that they would no longer enforce the definition of pornography and adult content and would instead focus on providing players with tools and systems to enable them to mark themselves and filter anything they did not want to see. Steam’s current rules require adult content to be “duly marked and age-limited”.
Nevertheless, Valve would continue to interfere with and remove “adult” games, such as the glorification of rape, in line with Steam’s other prohibitions, which include the prohibition of hate speech, games that simulate the exploitation of minors, naked or sexually explicit images of human beings, and any “manifestly offensive and intent to shock or disgust a player”.
The transfer of audit powers to banks, ISPs and other payment providers may result in more games being arbitrarily rejected. Companies such as Stripe, MasterCard and PayPal are used to promoting platforms such as Patreon to fight “NSFW” or “adult” content.
This could lead to the suppression of any form of “unconventional” games, especially in the current repressive environment in the United States. According to the media, this change in the rule was attributed to Youtube Noah Fuel Gaming, a former game developer who wrote on Bluesky to discuss the potential consequences that banks and financial companies might have for projects that deviate from gender-conservative frameworks and are therefore considered “adults”. As you wrote on YouTube, “even if the content is at the PG level (parent guidance level), the cooler content will be marked as `faceless’.
It is not clear what the impact of this new Steam code will be on the upswing of future adult games, but given all the cases of the past that could not even pass, perhaps for the player, Steam may no longer be the best option to buy adult games.
