The biggest anti-Steam censorship petition to date has surpassed 200,000 signatures and is still showing few signs of slowing down. It has thus completely dwarfed the original petition that called for forcibly censoring Steam before payment processors stepped in, granting that wish.
Shortly after Valve started delisting hundreds of adult games from its digital storefront in mid-July 2025, Steam users began rallying behind an anti-censorship petition on change.org. The initiative amassed thousands of signatures within its first few days, its momentum closely mirroring the ongoing social media backlash sparked by the actions of Australian activist group Collective Shout, which successfully lobbied payment processors to help with delisting some types of fetish games.
New Steam Petition Triples the Support of Pro-Censorship Activists in Much Less Time
Over the course of the ten days that followed, the anti-Steam censorship petition blew up from about 16,000 signatures on July 22 to nearly 224,000 as of the afternoon of August 2 (ET). To put this into perspective, in just over two weeks, the petition collected more than three times as many signatures as Collective Shout’s campaign did in four months. It has so far managed to maintain its momentum, with its change.org page showing an already sizable and still growing list of press coverage and social media attention.
Steam Users Accuse Visa and MasterCard of Hypocrisy, Not Separating Games from Reality
The petition has received several updates since its inception in mid-July 2025, largely reiterating its original talking points. Chief among them is the view that payment processors are being hypocritical in what they choose to sanction, targeting legal content featuring digital characters while overlooking industries like pornography, which petitioners argue exploit real people. “These ‘activist groups’ do not speak for everyone,” posits the petition’s creator, signed as Zero Ryoko.
These “activist groups” do not speak for everyone.
To date, Steam has removed in excess of 400 adult games as part of the ongoing censorship wave. Collective Shout claimed it only went after the most extreme fetish content, featuring themes like incest, rape, and child abuse. The group’s detractors are framing this point as moot. “Fiction is not reality,” Ryoko wrote on the initial version of his petition’s landing page. He further asserted that artistic vision and market freedom alike need to be respected and protected in any “healthy, democratic society.”
The recent wave of censorship even made Itch.io hide all adult games from its search results while it manually reviews them for potential violations of payment processors’ vague rules. The indie-focused platform also confirmed it is actively seeking new partners to handle transactions without imposing moral judgments on legal content. Given its size, Valve is unlikely to drop Visa and MasterCard voluntarily, as the two companies account for the vast majority of the world’s payment processing, apart from China. At Valve’s scale, no single alternative appears viable, so replacing them would ostensibly require integrating with numerous smaller regional processors.
- Brand
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Valve
- Original Release Date
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September 12, 2003
- Original MSRP (USD)
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N/A
- Weight
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N/A
