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 it 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.

Since Valve’s 2018 announcement that Steam would allow any games that aren’t “illegal” or “outright trolling,” the company has shown some difficulty deciding where specifically to draw the line when it comes to adult content. Before this week, Valve’s rules prohibited games that feature explicit images of real people, adult content that isn’t labeled or age-gated, and content that is “patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers.” The guidelines also prohibit “content that exploits children in any way,” a rule that seems to have affected some non-sexual games that feature school settings or characters in school uniforms.

This time, though, it seems Valve is being pressured to implement a new rule on in-game content by outside payment processors, rather than by its own interpretation of speech laws or acceptable social norms. And those outside companies have a lot of leverage here; avoiding third-party payment processors altogether is nearly impossible for a company like Valve, which stopped accepting Bitcoin as a payment option in 2017 due to the extreme volatility of the cryptocurrency’s value.

The removal of a handful of incest games might not be seen as a major issue for most Steam gamers. But the fact that Valve apparently sees the need to bend to content rules imposed by other companies could plausibly have wider effects in the future.