The big purge: Valve makes hundreds of porn games disappear on Steam with new rules forced by banks
The public looks on with concern at the scope of the new rules on Steam.
Valve, the company responsible for Steam, the world’s largest digital store for PC video games, has begun to massively remove titles with explicit sexual content from its platform. The measure responds to the implementation of new and ambiguous internal guidelines, which would be directly influenced by the demands of credit card companies, banks, and even network providers.
The rule, which would have been added quietly in recent months, prohibits developers from posting games that “may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks.” However, Valve has not specified what type of content falls into that category, merely suggesting that “certain types of adult content” be avoided.
Although the company has never been particularly transparent in its publishing policies, the change has set off alarm bells among developers of games with adult content, who are seeing titles with themes such as incest or extreme fetishes being removed without warning. According to data collected by SteamDB, hundreds of such games have already been removed.
A troubling trend
There are several troubling elements to this new move. While Valve has been somewhat erratic in the past about which games can be sold on Steam and which cannot, the company’s natural tendency has been to give some leeway and not set itself up as a sort of moral policeman about what is appropriate and what is not. This new regulation means giving in to an outside influence that no one has given authority to set standards.
However, the issue goes back a long way. Large payment corporations, such as Visa and Mastercard, have in the past pressured platforms like OnlyFans and Patreon to remove explicit content, often spurred on by pressure groups targeting such content. The main problem is that these pressure groups are not just content to attack the crudest content, but may target other kinds of games.
Collective Shout, the group that is boasting of having forced this change, is an old acquaintance that already tried, among other things, to ban the sale of Detroit: Become Human back in the day. That reactionary groups like these hold the keys to what can and cannot be published in a digital store is a dangerous precedent that is already putting a part of the gaming community on the warpath.
Meanwhile, Valve shrugs it off. The only official statement made has been to GamingonLinux, which reads: “We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks. As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam. We are directly notifying developers of these games, and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future.”
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