It’s been about two months since Steam started cracking down on adult games following pressure from payment processing companies like Visa and Mastercard. Despite campaigns from concerned fans, things don’t seem to be getting any better. Right now, players, game developers, and even Valve itself are losing out on what’s increasingly looking like an anti-porn war being waged on the internet at large.
Much of the initial furor had to do with Steam’s decision to delist adult games, and the way Valve’s shotgun approach saw titles that featured mature themes — not necessarily explicit sex — caught in the crossfire. Despite playing nice with payment processors, Steam’s still getting pushed around by them. Nowhere is this more evident than with PayPal’s decision to pull out of a swath of countries who do business on Steam, which it directly attributes to the wider Visa and Mastercard adult games debacle.
More recently, the fight against censorship has transitioned from dealing with games that were already greenlit by Valve and on sale to nipping their prospects in the bud. The developer behind a video game called Heavy Hearts say they were recently informed that their application for Steam Early Access was rejected by Valve because the company could no longer support the model for games with “mature themes.”
Heavy Hearts is an RPG with lewd content that sets itself apart from the visual novel adult games scene by instead providing an action-oriented fantasy game. Notably, Heavy Hearts already has a page on Steam, where the platform lists it as “coming soon.”
The developers behind a fantasy RPG called The Restoration of Aphrodisia, which features tactical hexagon battles, say they received a similar message from Valve regarding the game’s acceptance to the Early Access program. The rejection came as a surprise to both devs because there is nothing currently in Steam’s documentation that seems to prohibit this type of content from Early Access. What’s more, there are already adult games in the Early Access program, which suggests that this is a recent pivot on Valve’s part.
Developers who make adult games seem to be getting thwarted left and right from seemingly every step in the sales process. Getting on Steam at all is the first hurdle. Should a game succeed there and get sold on the world’s most popular PC gaming platform, there’s no guarantee that developers will see the fruits of their labor. In August, one anonymous Steam game developer went viral after posting on Reddit, claiming that PayPal was withholding £80,000 in earnings made from programming an adult game on Steam — allegedly after the payment processor discovered the nature of the unnamed game. The developer says they were told they’d violated PayPal’s terms of service, and have since spent weeks trying to recover the money. What makes this situation particularly painful is that the game developer resorted to PayPal after having issues with regular banks, which forced them to find alternate means of doing business online.
“I’ve had my business accounts closed down by 3 major high street banks and rejected by almost every ‘app bank’ like Wise, Revolut, etc,” the developer wrote.
All the while, Steam’s reputation with gamers continues to plummet. In particular, gamers in the U.K. have voiced dissatisfaction as the platform implements age-verification measures before allowing users to view adult content. The move comes in the wake of the U.K. Online Safety Act, which purports to keep children safe on the internet. The legislation hopes to curb access to illegal material as well as age-inappropriate content, which includes pornographic media. As a platform that disseminates games with NSFW content, Steam falls under the purview of the law.
By its nature, age verification was not destined to be embraced by a community that’s been repeatedly riled up over the censorship of adult games. But the biggest issue with Steam’s implementation of age verification is that Valve is asking people to use credit cards to confirm their age. While credit cards are common, some people elect not to have them. Others simply aren’t eligible to get a credit card, as many providers require a specific amount of income before someone is eligible to apply for it. A credit card requirement may hit students the hardest, as some young adults with full course loads cannot meet the minimum income requirements even if they work part-time. Steam is also not accepting debit cards as proof.
“Forcing people to get credit cards is very wrong!” reads one incensed Reddit thread. “It’s such a long extra step and irresponsible to force people to potentially spend more than they have.”
The credit card verification snafu follows another high-profile age verification misstep levied against gamers, when Discord required its U.K. users to upload a photograph of themselves. Discord users soon found that they could bypass age verification by uploading pictures of realistic video games, including Norman Reedus as Sam Bridges in Death Stranding. In both cases, the companies implementing age verification were trying to comply with the U.K. Online Safety Act.
Though both of these age-verification attempts have had mixed results, they elucidate a wider trend to tamp down on pornographic material on the internet. The timing of it all is increasingly raising eyebrows, especially as people pay more attention to the tactics described in Project 2025, a conservative initiative developed by a right-wing think tank called The Heritage Foundation. Leaders of the U.S. government have publicly distanced themselves from Project 2025, but whether they claim it or not, many of the laws and initiatives spearheaded by the Trump administration seem to mirror the Project 2025 playbook closely. The initiative details actions like mass deportations and incarcerations, cutting Medicaid, eradicating abortion, and the curbing of progressive climate policies, among a variety of other shifts. The initiative often proposes these actions to be carried out via presidential executive orders, all with the purpose of consolidating power in the executive branch of the government.
One of the key pillars detailed in Project 2025 has to do with pornography, and how it is prosecuted. Apparently, the aim is to try and shift most of the responsibility onto the shoulders of the companies rather than the users who create or disseminate the offending material. In this way, companies will feel pressure to limit or censor pornographic material to avoid potential liabilities and fines.
“We came up with an idea on pornography, to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website getting to just certify that I’m 18,” Russell Vought, a U.S. government official who co-authored Project 2025, said in 2024. “We’ve got a number of states that are passing this […] and the porn company then says ‘We’re not doing business in your state’, which is, of course, entirely what we’re after. We’re doing it from the backdoor, starting with the kids. We would have a national ban on pornography if we could.”
Vought’s statements at the time validate the fears some gamers have expressed regarding the long-term effects of Steam’s adult games censorship. While some are upset on principle, or because their favorite games are being taken down, there’s an audience segment that views these policy changes as the tip of the iceberg. The more companies give in to pressure, the easier it becomes for the goalposts to move. Collective Shout, the group which most publicly claimed responsibility for alerting payment processors of “problematic” material on Steam, ultimately intends to get games like Grand Theft Auto pulled from shelves. Already, a leader of the group has admitted that it does not see the actual legality of a game as the determining factor in whether it should be allowed to exist. Instead, it more broadly wants to push against any games that feature “violence against women,” with little care for the context of the content. Judging from the fact Collective Shout celebrated the delisting of games in the summer, it appears that the group is feeling emboldened right now.
Similarly, if Vought gets his way, it sounds like the real goal is to use these initial anti-porn measures to eventually pass more extreme measures regarding what is or isn’t permitted under the law. After all, the initiative outright says that the danger of pornography is that it acts as a vector for the “transgender ideology.”
It’s easy to reduce what’s happening on Steam as a gooner meltdown over hentai games the average person doesn’t care about, but the true stakes go well beyond anime girls. Losing this fight is an ominous augur for restrictive policies that will impact everyone down the line, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or preferred hobby.
The anonymous game developer who is out £80,000 says it well, referring to PayPal’s ability to withhold their funds: “We don’t make anything illegal, but when almost every bank is collectively saying ‘we don’t do business with you if you make content X or Y,’ then the content almost becomes functionally illegal.”
