Business Steam rules updated to prohibit content that violates rules set forth by payment processors and banks - Valve's rules regarding what developers "shouldn't publish on Steam" have a new clause regarding standards set forth by payment processors.

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Valve's rules regarding what developers "shouldn't publish on Steam" have a new clause regarding standards set forth by payment processors.

2025-07-16 17:17
Amber V

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Valve has updated its rules regarding content that developers aren’t allowed to publish on Steam (as reported by Game*Spark [archive]). The “Rules and Guidelines” section of Steamworks Documentation now has an extra clause, and it suggests that publishers are required to comply with rules and standards set forth by various third parties involved in processing electronic payments. The rule seems to be predominantly related to adult content.

What you shouldn’t publish on Steam:
15. 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.

Prior to the update, the list included 14 clauses, prohibiting things like hate speech, malware, sexual content depicting real people and any form of exploitation of children. The new 15th clause suggests that Steam may additionally have to crack down on specific types of adult content in response to the requirements of payment processors and banks. There are currently no specific examples of what this may entail.

Update (2025/07/15 at 18:30 JST): According to SteamDB [wayback], a large number of games has been removed from the platform in the past 16 hours. Judging rom the list, it appears “sex simulator” type games with keywords such as “incest” and “slavery” make up the majority. There are some confusing cases like the removal of the Ace Attorney-inspired investigation game Trails of Innocence, although this could be a coincidental deletion.

On a related note, various video game and manga hosting platforms in Japan have in recent years run into trouble with payment processors and credit card networks. Due to certain content on the platforms going against the (often undisclosed) rules and standards of third parties handling payments, the platforms ended up without support for credit card payment. This has led to loss of revenue and even the closure of platforms like Manga Library Z. It is possible that Steam’s new rule is a means to prevent such complications from arising, however, as the specific “rules and standards” of the payment processors are also unclear, publishers might need to be extra cautious with releasing their games on the platform.

Related articles: “It’s a security hole that endangers democracy itself.” NieR creator speaks out against payment processors pressuring Japanese adult content platforms

Visa Japan’s CEO says disabling card payment for legal adult content is “necessary to protect the brand”



Niche Gamer: Steam updates rules to comply with payment processor censorship (archive)
Wccftech: Steam Publishing Guidelines Updated With Clause Prohibiting Content That Violates Payment Processor and Bank Rules (archive)

Rock Paper Shotgun: Valve change Steam's rules to let banks and credit card firms prohibit "certain kinds of adult only content" (archive)
In particular, this could lead to a stifling of games that are in any way non-conforming, particularly given the current climate of repression in Valve's home country, the USA. I know about the rule change thanks to Youtuber and self-described former game developer NoahFuel Gaming, who has posted on Bluesky about the potential fallout for projects the banks and financial corporations consider "adult" because they deviate from reactionary framings of sex and gender. As the Youtuber writes: "Queer content gets flagged as 'explicit' even when it's PG. A trans dev making a personal story? 'Too controversial.' A surreal queer VN? 'Sexualized.' Financial deplatforming in action."

GamesRadar: Steam now prohibits games that violate the "rules and standards" of payment processors, banks, and more, and users are worried it might affect more than just "certain kinds of adult-only content" (archive)
"Yeah... this is something that looks innocuous at first glance but it's a trojan horse," another believes. "LGBTQ+ has a habit of being mysteriously flagged as 'adult only.'" On ResetEra, similar points are being shared, as one writes: "Today it's porn games, tomorrow any game with LGBTQ+ content because it ends up labelled as 'adult.'"

Notebookcheck: Steam tightens adult content rules after pressure from payment giants (archive)
As spotted [archive] by TheGamer, this triggered a mini-purge according to the Steam Database, with many problematic games such as "Incest Tales", "Wolf on Rail", "Sex Village", "Slave of the Police Officer", and many more, being delisted from the storefront.

GamingOnLinux: Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed (archive)
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Wanna bet that the Feminist group is actually a European Union/UN front as well?

This sounds absolutely like something they would do and for all we know the credit card companies serve their European masters even if their HQ is in California.

Remember that they do not need to force Japan lawmakers, the Internet is in their beck and call since 2016.

These are the exact same group people smuggling children from Kosovo to Epstein Island (or the likes of it) while they cancel you for one small innuendo that crosses the line.

There's no turning back for this unless all of the globalist groups somehow vanish off the face of the earth and their leaders being locked behind bars never to come back again.
 
I don't support this in principle but I wouldn't be surprised if steam didn't fight it very hard because they saw all of the lazy goonslop infesting their platform and were tired of it. While they're at it, the payment processors should make steam compile a list of the people who actually play those ugly 3D porn games with paid assets made in some shitty character creator program and send a guy out to beat them with a hammer.
 
Doesn't matter what most people in this thread think.
It's not about protecting kids, or about defending the rights of drawings not to be sexually exploited. It's 100% about the jewish-run western porn industry being mad about Japan taking all their business away. Everything "anime-themed" is going to be targeted by this, but a bunch of you won't care because that drawing was labeled 17 years and 364 days old you sick fuck! Because you got lumped in with weeaboos in school and need to spend of your life cheering on filthy kikes who are opposed to weeaboo shit for entirely different and extremely immoral reasons.
 
Wanna bet that the Feminist group is actually a European Union/UN front as well?
I don't personally believe the EU is behind this, the issue is more of an American one. I've done work for the EU BIK+ in the past, and the topic of video games never came up. The EU is generally more concerned about what goes on in social media (grooming, sextortion of minors, CSAM proliferation) than what video games are being played.

One key point to keep in mind about this entire thing is that it's all about brand image and the bottom line for these companies. Blackrock & Vanguard own 16.13% of Visa and 21.94% of Mastercard, making them absolute majority in both companies. These management funds aren't nefarious per se, but their entire investment strategy hinges on avoiding risks that will drive market value down. And when Feminist groups start lobbying to have certain things banned for ideological reasons, they see little to no risk in granting them their requests if it can be framed around something such as "protecting the children", thus boosting their brand image.
 
making them absolute majority
Making them the majority*

I need more sleep.
What makes you believe that they won't or didn't extend the definition to nearly everything beyond (the obvious exception of) hags?
The EU bureaucracy is so inefficient, it makes Sumerians carrying clay tablets on donkeys to relay messages look better in comparison. They only implemented age verification (Are you 18+? YES/NO) a year ago, good luck trying to get them to come up with a united definition of something that every member state can agree upon.
 
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I love how this page now features a conversation between a poster who talks about cunny in multiple topics and another poster who has already been dorito'd for making pro-lolicon arguments.

Thus proving my (implied) point from a few pages ago.

Being right is a curse, I tell you.
 
The EU bureaucracy is so inefficient, it makes Sumerians carrying clay tablets on donkeys to relay messages look better in comparison. They only implemented age verification (Are you 18+? YES/NO) a year ago, good luck trying to get them to come up with a united definition of something that every member state can agree upon.
It's because there is no concrete definition that it becomes way more fucked up than it already is. Essentially any game with an incest or cunny subtext can be blacklisted from Steam. Explicit Incest or Cunny hentai games not withstanding, sooner or later things like Danganronpa V3, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley or Digimon Cyber Sleuth will get hit.


It's not about protecting kids, or about defending the rights of drawings not to be sexually exploited. It's 100% about the jewish-run western porn industry being mad about Japan taking all their business away. Everything "anime-themed" is going to be targeted by this, but a bunch of you won't care because that drawing was labeled 17 years and 364 days old you sick fuck! Because you got lumped in with weeaboos in school and need to spend of your life cheering on filthy kikes who are opposed to weeaboo shit for entirely different and extremely immoral reasons.
It's about control. I cannot find the original post where CPS arrested a guy trying to have his son get checked up for a penis infection (trying to find it now gives another case where google locked all of the guys accounts but no arrest was made instead) or arresting people for taking pics of their newborn children, but the idea is very similar.

Basically the entire point of these bad laws is that you have to lay your head low on all times because you don't and never will know when you're tripping the line. It has nothing to do with protecting children, it's to make sure people get hit on complete accident.
 
So I missed it earlier, but the Notebookcheck article actually mentioned Collective Shout probably being responsible for this, and they definitely are:

Collective Shout: Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam (archive)
Posted by Collective Shout on July 11, 2025

Mr Alex Chriss, Chief Executive Officer and President, Paypal

Mr Michael Miebach, Chief Executive Officer, Mastercard

Mr Ryan McInerney, Chief Executive Officer, Visa

Mr Bruce Lowthers, Chief Executive Officer, Paysafe Limited

Mr Michael J. Shepherd Director, Interim CEO and President, Discover

Mr Takayoshi Futae, President, CEO and Chairman, Japan Credit Bureau (JCB)

Re: Your corporations facilitating and profiting from rape, incest and child sexual abuse game sales


We the undersigned are writing to request that you cease processing payments on gaming platforms which host rape, incest and child sexual abuse-themed games.

In April, we exposed the sale of rape simulation game ‘No Mercy’ on both Steam and Itch.io gaming platforms. In the game, players assume the persona of a man who rapes his female family members, including his mother and his aunt, as punishment for his mother’s infidelity. It was marketed as follows:

In this game, you’ll either become every woman’s worst nightmare… or rather: the best dick they'll ever have. Your goal is simple: leave no pussy non-fucked, since that's the only thing they all want. Never take 'no' for an answer.

Fuck your mom, fuck your auntie, and even fuck your friend’s mom. Why not?

Take what’s yours and show No Mercy.

The game was geo-blocked in Australia following Collective Shout’s complaint to the Australian Classification Board. Following our global viral campaign including a change.org petition signed by over 70,000 concerned individuals and attracting international media attention, the game was taken down in Canada and the UK, and pulled from Steam by the developer. (Read about the campaign here).

However we have since discovered hundreds of other games featuring rape, incest and child sexual abuse on both Steam and Itch.io. Our research has shown many of these games would breach Australian classification laws. Most of the content found within the games, including the graphics and the developers descriptions, are too distressing for us to make public.

A Collective Shout team member has conducted extensive research using a Steam account set up for this purpose. She has documented content including violent sexual torture of women, and children including incest related abuse involving family members.

These games endorsing men’s sexualised abuse and torture of women and girls fly in the face of efforts to address violence against women. We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements.

We request that you demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games.

We await your response.

Yours sincerely
  • Melinda Tankard Reist, Movement Director, Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation (AUS)
  • Haley McNamara, Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Programs, National Center on Sexual Exploitation (US)
  • Michael Salter, Professor and Director of the Childlight East Asia and Pacific Hub, University of New South Wales (AUS)
  • Helen Taylor, Vice President of Impact, Exodus Cry (US)
  • Dr Tegan Larin, Public Officer, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia, CATWA (AUS)
  • Gemma Kelly, Head of Policy and Public Affairs, CEASE (UK)
  • Kelly Humphries, CSA survivor, speaker, advocate, DV & sexual violence consultant (AUS)
  • Sally Jackson, Trustee, Global Lead for Male Violence Against Women and Girls (MVAWG), FiLiA (UK)
  • Jon Rouse APM, Professor at AiLECS Labs Monash University and Childlight Hub (AUS)
10 July 2025

This is the article Melinda Tankard Reist mentioned in The Australian, maybe impossible to access/archive: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ed...t/news-story/b30c59f85ff22934844269cb3beff538
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The same group tried to get Andrew Tate content off of Spotify a while ago.

The Internet tattletales over at 404 Media wrote about it:
Steam Bends to Payment Processors on Porn Games (archive)
The update is yet another signal that payment processors are lately becoming more vigilant about what online platforms that host adult content they’ll provide services to and another clear sign that they are currently the ultimate arbiter of what kind of content can be made easily available online, or not.
In April, I wrote about a “rape and incest” game called No Mercy which the developers eventually voluntarily removed from Steam after pressure from users, media, and lawmakers in the UK. The majority of games I saw that were removed from Steam recently revolve around similar themes, but we don’t know if they were removed by the developers or Valve, and if they were removed by Valve because of the recent policy change.

Ars Technica mentioned that Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin in 2017:
Steam cracks down on some sex games to appease payment processors (archive)
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.
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Kotaku: Steam's Wildly Unclear New Rules On 'Adult Content' Have Already Seen Hundreds Of Games Delisted (archive)
Honestly, I couldn’t care less about all these dreadful, smutty sims. They’re churned out by content factories, presumably hoping to catch the attention of horny customers, and everyone gets what they deserve when they pay $5 to watch two barely-animated custom nude models rutting back and forth. Whatever. But what concerns me is the collateral damage.

One of the real positives of Valve’s incredibly liberal approach to what it will sell is that it allows incredibly complex and difficult topics to be explored by brave developers. People regularly interrogate their own traumas through visual novels and interactive fiction, while others explore their sexual kinks via similar mediums. Victims of incest might want to create incredibly challenging games that process such experiences in healthy and productive ways—what happens here if it’s to turn out that “certain kinds” of adult themes includes such topics? And who’s deciding what’s allowed? Valve, or Visa?

And then what comes next? If we start deciding this is unacceptable, then where does that stop? Of course LGBTQ+ developers will be the most immediately vulnerable to such entirely ambiguous rules, where moral authority appears to have been handed to vast banking corporations.

So no, yeah, I’m grossed out by Daddy Daughter Incest, and don’t want to play that. (And managed not to for all the months it was available.) But that’s not the point. The point is that rules like this are deeply concerning when they’re so unclear and vague.

Anime News Network: Steam Updates Guidelines on Adult Content (archive)
The update follows Manga Planet's announcement in January that its account with payment method provider Stripe was suspended and banned due to R18 (Restricted 18+) content on the subscription service.

Over the past few years, numerous sites and services in Japan have had to disallow payments from various services such as Visa and Mastercard, due to customer payments being refused through those services. Such sites include, but are not limited to: Nico Nico, Melonbooks and Toranoana, DLSite (which also disallowed American Express), Fantia, Manga Library Z, and Fanza, among others.

Niconico ended its Niconico Shunga mature illustration service on January 29. The company explained that it would be difficult to continue the service due to the current social environment and international situation.

Cietan Kitney, President of Visa Worldwide Japan, confirmed in December that while Visa wants to make its payment service available to legal and legitimate products and services as much as possible, it may sometimes decline purchases to "protect the brand."
 
Sounds like dumb astro turfed Australia government horseshit. Same government that wants to troon kids doesn't want them playing video games.

This game being banned in Australia, then unbanned once it became more popular is proof everything is wicked
 
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On one hand, this is retarded and the beginning of a slippery slope. On the other hand, all the games that were pulled are low effort gooner slop that I can't bring myself to give a single shit about. Porn games should've never even been allowed on Steam in the first place, if you're a gooner why would you want your friends to know you're one too? Half the sales of these games are people buying them for friends as a joke as is.
 
They'll start with demanding people not sell "extreme adult-oriented content" but once this is accepted the envelope of prohibited material will grow to encompass anything that they claim causes "harm." For example, a game with no obese blacks on the cover is racist and reinforces body-shaming. Every main character must be a girlboss who's never wrong.
Literally never happened. Just admit you like child rape.
 
How much longer before the payment processors decide that games that aren't "diverse" enough are considered promoting white supremacy and therefore banned?
Considering that Fink and his friends over at the WEF are the ones heavily pushing DIE, (despite the fact that 'forced behavior' is completely fucking up society) won't take long at all. And once regular games gets encroached even further by Payment Processor bullshit, people will be forced to notice the Jew in the room and Heebs will wonder why all of a sudden, for no reason at all, people start talking about Jews even more.

And how it seems everything bad seems to come back to a group of Jews.
 
For any other content I would agree, but games about rape and incest should not even exist, much less be so readily available, so no, I don't think the solution is filtering. Especially since I personally never saw any, and there seems to be PLENTY. The content is just too fucked up for me to see it as "ah its not for me, but to each their own", you know?

"Ok, you can play as the Mongols and kill everybody, but you cannot rape anybody in the city"
 
I wonder how Null feels that this site loves debanking and the fact that payment processors get to control what people are allowed to buy as long as it agrees with their values considering the same thing has happened to Null?

Maybe we should let the store decide what legal products they want to sell and not the banks and payment processors that have no oversight?
Null has said when it comes to pedophiles vs payment processors he considers it a third rail, where any side you take is a loss. He would prefer less censorship in general but he's not going to bat for pedophiles for obvious reasons.

Personally I disagree, fuck pedophiles and fuck the people who support them. If free speech means pedophilia I'd rather side with the boot than pedophiles and I'd wager so would 99% of normal people.

This ain't a winning fight and If you actually care about free speech and aren't in this fight for some other reason (whatever it may be) then you're not doing it any service by associating it with pedophilia because its literally a lead fucking brick tied around its neck.

Yes, amazing fantastic fucking job retards. By all means keep spreading the message that if you support free speech you also have to support pedophilia, this is DEFINITELY helping the cause and DEFINITELY helping turn people over to your side.
 
the internet in general is not for children. youtube and steam are not babysitters
Steam is for children you dumb nigger. Who said it's for babysitting?

"Hey dad, anything cool on steam we can buy and play together"
"I dont know son, lets check it out"

>Anime titties everywhere.

You're missing the fucking point. I should be able to open up my steam account with my children in the room and not have a chance to see cartoon titties. I'm not against it, it shouldn't be on a video game platform that children have access too... because you know steam is for kids. and because i can tell you're a low iq faggot, teenagers are still kids. every major video game published on steam is for teenagers.

24 hours later it has since been moved to 'New & Trending'
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I dont give a fuck if these games are made and consumed by adults. It just shouldn't be on steam. OR if you fucking coomers must have your cartoon tittes on steam then there should be a different account that needs to be made that a verifiable adult made the account. i dont give a fuck how it's verified that youre an adult. it's adult content.

when i was a child i couldn't go buy porno mags without an ID, why is this different?
 
I know anti porn people are shortsighted retards, but surely even they can see that letting some unnamed corpo Jews decide how you are allowed to spend your money is fucking insane, right?
I know that the gooners that are the primary customers for "loli gangbang simulator 69" don't really think beyond their next goon sesh, but surely, even they can see that associating child pornography with free speech is quite possibly the most counterproductive thing in the fucking history of activism when it comes to actually promoting free speech right?
 
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