Last week was a weird one for videogames—with Steam clamping down on games featuring adult content due to the pressure of credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard which, apparently, was itself a decision made due to an Australian anti-porn group.
But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in 2021, Mastercard began a policy forcing adult websites to go through stringent requirements that were, logistically, impossible to keep up with. In Japan, Visa’s also been coming down on doujinshi and manga archives to, quote, “protect the brand”, as stated in a briefing last year.
Further proving this, Yoko Taro, creator of Nier: Automata, took to X last year to decry the practice (thanks, Automaton, for the spot and translation):
“Publishing and similar fields have always faced regulations that go beyond the law,” Taro writes, “But the fact that a payment processor, which is involved in the entire infrastructure of content distribution, can do such things at its own discretion seems to me to be dangerous on a whole new level.
“It implies that by controlling payment processing companies, you can even censor another country’s free speech.”
In a later post, Taro clarified that he felt as though “it’s not just a matter of censoring adult content or jeopardizing freedom of expression, but rather a security hole that endangers democracy itself.” Taro’s statements—again, prophetically arriving in 2024, and resurfacing on popular gaming communities today—are a reminder that these overreaches by credit card companies aren’t a recent thing.
Adult industries (that run the gamut from sex workers from sites like OnlyFans to manga creators) have been hit by, as the ACLU put it back in 2023, “vague and ambiguous policy requirements, coupled with the dangerous combination of platform over-compliance and inadequate automated tools” for some time.
This arriving at Valve’s doorstep is a delayed reaction—and while it’s easy to point and giggle at “gooners”, something we certainly aren’t above doing, I reckon we should all be very concerned at unelected CEOs with monopolies over payment processes making these kinds of decisions.
It’s an area that demands nuance, mind. No Mercy, a game I personally have zero kind words for and an even dimmer critical opinion of, was pulled from Steam due to political pressure back in April.
Whatever your opinions on whether such censorship was appropriate, this was (in the UK at least) done after a complaint by technology secretary Peter Kyle. Who is at least, you know, somebody put in charge by a government we voted for. In other words, content that’s illegal in your country is one ballgame, corporations unilaterally cutting off whole sections of the market is another.
From where I’m sat, it seems like we’re in a situation where credit card vendors have such a monopoly, they can make adult content effectively ‘outlawed’ regardless of whether or not it’s written into law first—by governments who (in theory) can be held to account if such decisions hit marginalised communities disproportionately hard.
Anyway; if you’d like to play some of these games before Steam potentially puts the clamp on them, or the inevitable cyberpunk-era credit card police come knocking on your door, we do have a list of sex games that aren’t terrible.