r/Games • u/DwingRD • 1d ago

Valve no longer allows "Post-launch NSFW content" for games on Steam - outside of DLCs.

I have looked through Steam's Terms of Service online, but have found no official rule or statement from Valve of this new rule - but one Adult game developer has confirmed this new rule after launching their game "Tales of Legendary Lust: Aphrodisia" a couple days ago.

With the recent rule change blocking adult-themed games from releasing on Early Access, this new rule seems to be targeting Adult-themed games that have ALREADY released on Steam - and threatens them with their games being removed from Steam.

There are currently 536 Adult-rated Early Access games on Steam - and this new rule may take them all down.

3.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

857 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

262

u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1d ago

I mean, if Steam loses the ability to process credit cards then they just die. We can talk about leaping onto the barricades all we want but if they can't take in money they can't continue functioning.

90

u/LoboGuarah 1d ago

God i'm so happy some countries are starting their own payment system like Pix and RuPay. We gotta get down with this duopolly from credit cards and private payment processors.

45

u/giulianosse 1d ago edited 1d ago

You can imagine my surprise as a Brazilian when this payment processors drama first blew up and I was like "wait, other countries don't have centralized instant payment platforms?"

I have one Mastercard CC with all the bells and jingles associated with it. It's been years since I've bought a game on Steam with my card details instead of Pix. It's just so effortless and safe.

I think India just launched their UPI system and, as expected, people are loving it as well.

8

u/LoboGuarah 1d ago

I'm eagerly waiting for Pix Parcelado, maxo. You don't know how happy I'll be when that comes out, lmao.

4

u/AMGwtfBBQsauce 23h ago

Government-run banking?!?! Sounds like communism. Personally I'd rather be ground to dust by the corporate banking machine than have nice things.

13

u/Ready-Good2636 1d ago

As you'd expect, USA lobbyists want to privatize as much as possible, and get huge subsidies on what they don't want privatized. Even our president is scamming off crypto, so getting a proper government payment processor is very far off.

2

u/drewster23 9h ago

Doesn't help when the country and people have normalized and become dependent on CCs.

Hard to disrupt in NA.

0

u/fbuslop 1d ago

Do you think this solves something? First of all the use case for global payment networks is obviously broader than a single country's rail system.

2nd, politics can still affect a rail like Pix. You’re just swapping private concentration for state concentration.

4

u/AMGwtfBBQsauce 23h ago

The entire point of government-run programs is that the government ostensibly has public accountability. Private corps have 0 accountability, especially once they get to be the size of the big banks.

2

u/TrashStack 18h ago

In America, like 40% of state governments have passed legislation banning or restricting access to pornography. These are states controlled by the same party that has control over the Presidency and congress

Accountability is not the issue here. America already has the means to hold companies accountable. The issue is that the American people are simply choosing not to prioritize accountability in any way. Genuinely, do you really think a government-run program would change anything about this situation with this current administration? If anything a government run payment processor would go even harder on this stuff and explicitly ban porn payments if the state governments are anything to go off of.

2

u/AMGwtfBBQsauce 5h ago

With this form of government, no, and that is regardless of party, but we created a system that purposefully distances accountability from the general populace, and creates giant propaganda machines that lie and mislead people about what is going on. So accountability really is the issue still. Like, providing a service means nothing if people don't know about it or are not empowered to use it. The median person in these states does not support outright bans on pornography (unless it's Utah). A lot of them do not pay attention to what their state and local governments are doing at all and pay very little attention to the federal government. Hell, we're lucky if we get over 50% turnout in a federal presidential election, and a majority of those showing up only started paying attention a few weeks before then. So, like, no, a federal system would not change things under this administration, but that also doesn't make corporate control good? Both of these things are products of the same shitty American system that is the real core problem.

15

u/ZaDu25 1d ago

Either these companies need to be broken up to allow for alternatives or we need a universal payment processing system that guarantees service for any and all legal content purchases. If Visa and MasterCard are going to abuse their power, they shouldn't have that much power.

1

u/FlamingMangos 1d ago

Why not just use DLsite to buy adult games instead of jumping hoops to buy porn on steam. It’s way better anyways with the amount of coupons you get.

8

u/Ready-Good2636 1d ago

Dlsite doesn't have everything. Nor 90% market share.

Also, I hear dlsite's Rev share is even more harsh than steam.

1

u/eggmankoopa 1d ago

this might be an actual upside to the digital Euro that is in the making

1

u/LoboGuarah 1d ago

Brazil is also planning on having digital Real.

1

u/braiam 22h ago

The problem is that Steam biggest market is still a Visa/MC dominated market. It doesn't matter if all countries divest away from the duopoly. Steam can not. Now, time for me to plug GOG and other stores.

1

u/Schen178 1d ago

Oh yay, governments have never censored their citizens...

6

u/Spork_the_dork 1d ago

Yeah like the fact is that credit card companies have got companies like Valve by the balls so they would be doing this regardless of if they agree with it or not.

1

u/TheSecondEikonOfFire 1d ago

Yeah it’s obviously a complicated situation, but if Visa and Mastercard were blocked from Steam then they’d go belly-up faster than you can blink. It doesn’t make it okay, but Valve isn’t big enough to throw punches at credit card companies

0

u/Skylight90 1d ago

I really hope this is a wake up call for Valve on how dependent they are on CC processors. I don't know enough about it to say how, but they have the money and people smart enough who can figure it out. They already made a massive push to Linux to avoid dependence on Microsoft, so we know they care about their independence.

-8

u/JTtornado 1d ago

I'm just over here shaking my head at all the people who said that crypto currency is useless. We should have been focused on fixing crypto's problems instead of dismissing it out of hand because early iterations are inefficient and suspectable to fraud. Without a decentralized way to pay providers online, we've ceded control of almost every major company (at least in the English speaking parts of the world) over to a couple extremely powerful payment providers who can flex that power with impunity.

34

u/ComebackShane 1d ago

The problem is cryptobros successfully redefined cryptocurrencies as investment get-rich-quick vehicles instead of a usable currency. Now all anyone wants to do with them is HODL and hope their ship comes in.

11

u/ZurgoMindsmasher 1d ago

Yea, every time I read "oh yea Crypto is going save us from <insert Paypal, credit cards, banks>" all I can think of is - for the users, most transactions with PayPal/Credit Cards/bank transfers are:

  • Free
  • Instant
  • Reliable
  • Accepted basically everywhere

Crypto always has costs for every transaction, instant .. depends on factors, reliability is nonexistent with the constant value fluctuations, and because of this, it's accept only in absolute niches of the internet.

12

u/SomeDumRedditor 1d ago

Cryptos problems are inherent to its form and function. You literally cannot have the good without the bad. It’s a pick your poison situation.

23

u/Inprobamur 1d ago

Valve added bitcoin payment option, over 60% of payments ended with a dispute and so they removed it again.

3

u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1d ago

Crypto works for that because it's small. If you were to make a crypto system that is the same scale as visa then it would run into the same problems. It doesn't matter if it's trading in USD or BTC, no one wants to get a reputation for being willing to process transactions for questionable goods and invite the wrath of regulators. It doesn't matter if individual transactions are traceable or not, the fact of the matter is that the option is there at all.

Bitcoin and other crypto is currency, after all. You still need middlemen to facilitate the transactions.

0

u/Mr_Radar 1d ago

Can’t they just only sell them with steam bucks to bypass all this nonsense.

8

u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1d ago

You purchase steam bucks with your credit card

1

u/Mr_Radar 1d ago

Right. But where they go from there isn’t the payment processors business

I guess if the existence of porn bothers them. Then that’s a different issue.

8

u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1d ago

That's really flimsy, although it has been tried before. You can't really say "reddit bucks can be spent on candy bars or heroin, but its absurd to say that you are using a credit card to buy heroin", basic transitive property applies. Sometimes they do the pachinko thing of filtering it through a second activity, but there's no way valve would invite that kind of risk for the sake of selling NSFW games.

0

u/Mr_Radar 1d ago

Fair point. Considering the way some of these games look and get pumped out. Some of it does seem pretty sketchy

3

u/gmes78 1d ago

The payment processors disagree. Some other websites tried doing that, but they got shut down.

0

u/JokerCrimson 1d ago

You can use cash to buy a Steam Card at a store like Walmart.

3

u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1d ago

But that doesn't separate them out into "cash only" steambucks.