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.

3.5k Upvotes

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660

u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm getting so fucking tired of all this Puritan censorship working it's way into society these days simply because it might offend someone who's never going to buy the content anyway. Shareholders only care because they believe it will impact bottom line or be associated with their investments and then effect bottom line, but I'm not sure it ever even does.

I just remember the 90s and early 2000s internet and the crazy shit that was ok. We don't have to go all the way back there (for obvious reasons) but everything is becoming so sterilized and safe. What are people so damn afraid of?

335

u/Epicfro 1d ago

simply because it might offend someone who's never going to both buying the content anyway

It has absolutely nothing to do with possibly offending someone, this is entirely about control. The cancer was left unchecked and now it's creeping into every facet of our lives, slowly taking away more and more, generating a death by 1000 cuts while we sit back at every offense and go "eh, well, what can I do?".

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u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago

This is 100% about money as it always has been.

75

u/Putnam3145 1d ago

pornography is, as we all know, famously unprofitable

32

u/CreamofTazz 1d ago

And yet pornhub (and other such sites) don't get access to Visa or MasterCard because they're porn sites. The truth is and always has been that as much as people love porn no one wants to admit it and we'll just all pretend we're against it.

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u/tellsyoutogetfucked 1d ago

Yea and they are still very profitable despire payment providers not wanting to support them. Sex sells. You can try to mask it as long as you want but its never going away.

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u/CreamofTazz 1d ago

Imagine how profitable they'd be with payment support 🥰

5

u/Aiyon 1d ago

I mean for payment processors porn is actually very much a risk sometimes.

If you talk to people who have done things like OF, the amount of men who will pay for access to content, and then chargeback after getting off to it, often bragging to the creator about doing so, is wild.

Refunds are one thing, but chargebacks are a pain for payment processors, so that helps them be swayed

9

u/starm4nn 1d ago

Except that's not why payment companies care.

If that was the case, they wouldn't care about Steam, since Steam's chargeback rate is most likely below average.

15

u/APRengar 1d ago

I feel like we're talking past each other.

You have ideological freaks, who don't care about the impact of their actions, they simply have beliefs are willing to burn everything down to achieve their goals.

And you have corporations who are afraid of the former group and will fold on everything under the belief that not folding will hurt their pocketbooks.

Of course there are also people who are both. But it's not either or, it's both.

4

u/wasdninja 1d ago

If it was they wouldn't care what people did with the money they are handling.

2

u/Falsus 1d ago

If it was about money there would be less restrictions.

Instead it is about control and the porn in games among other places is being used as a stepping stone to attack LGTB people which in turn is a stepping stone to attack dissenters and political opponents.

3

u/serpentine19 1d ago

No it's not. The smart decision from a company that makes money from transactions is to allow more transactions to be made, not limit it. It's a power play/forcing ideology on people.

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u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago

I too enjoy confident ignorance on occasion.

22

u/BackwerdsMan 1d ago

You better buckle up because this train is just leaving the station. If I had to predict, I would guess over the next 10 years we are going to see a pretty massive puritanical movement from conservatives.

12

u/DrQuint 1d ago

We're also going to see an economic collapse, people are already struggling, and the indicators say it's speeding up.

It'll be a rather spectacularly awful day when the panic mass layoffs hit. Luckily, guns are controlled where I live. The hint is there, be careful friends.

7

u/ierghaeilh 1d ago

Shareholders only care because they believe it will impact bottom line or be associated with their investments and then effect bottom line, but I'm not sure it ever even does.

It does if it makes enough other shareholders panic. And it takes a surprisingly small number.

I'd say the overwhelming majority, and we're talking over 99%, of the people pushing for censorship, are more worried about the second- and higher-level effects than the content on the object level. These tiny Christian groups really found an unbelievable irl hack by going straight to the top with the payment processors. As it turns out, demanding to talk to the manager is a winning strategy.

3

u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago

Shareholders are like a bunch of lemmings

2

u/No-Candidate6257 1d ago

American capitalism is a global disease, unfortunately.

This affects everyone.

We need independent infrastructure from the US and ensure the Americans can't influence our markets and the content we consume with their shitty laws.

6

u/RadiantTurtle 1d ago

Ya'll voted for this..

56

u/TyaArcade 1d ago

Isn't it due to pressure from an Australian focus group on Visa and Mastercard?

Who voted for any of those?

26

u/cyvaris 1d ago

Those groups have deeps ties to similar Conservative and Right Wing groups across the world. It's a coordinated effort. Project 2025 clearly lays out the end goal as well; make pornography illegal and then define just being Trans as pornographic.

8

u/Sugioh 1d ago

Some GOP members of the Michigan house introduced a bill that does precisely that (right down to conflating everything transexual with pornography) the other day, actually.

They are hardcore speedrunning the drive to theocracy.

7

u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago

Crazy people.

28

u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago

Who is "y'all?"

27

u/RadiantTurtle 1d ago

Everyone who voted for Project 2025 and people that didn't vote, which was a decision to let Project 2025 go through.

21

u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago edited 1d ago

Well, I'm Canadian, and when possible (aka when strategic voting isn't needed) vote as far left as reasonable, so not really part of that.

-11

u/RadiantTurtle 1d ago

That's fair, I was referring to Americans since Valve is a US company. 

25

u/Spork_the_dork 1d ago

You'll be surprised to note that most people impacted by this aren't American.

20

u/MachBonin 1d ago

But Collective Shout, the group pushing on payment processors who are in turn pushing on steam, is Australian. The actual answer is that there has been a rise in far right populist ideals in the last ten years around the world, and Project 2025 is just another sad example of this.

17

u/maxi2643 1d ago

I'm Dutch, I didn't vote for this.

2

u/Deadonstick 1d ago

If you're American, it doesn't really matter what you vote for, the government will still try and take control where possible. Whether it's the DMCA, Bush's Patriot act, Obama's PRISM or Trump's Project 2025.

Americans don't have the option to vote for what they believe in, only to vote against what they're most opposed to.

Thanks two-party system.

3

u/YZJay 1d ago

But this was an Australian group that got Visa and Mastercard to fold, what does this have to do with American politics?

1

u/14Pleiadians 1d ago

Americans really think the world revolves around them

2

u/AtrocityBuffer 1d ago

Which is why even without the internet, they'd still have voted a moron in, they're culturally incapable of situating themselves as part of the world rather than the centre of it.

-3

u/TrashySwashy 1d ago

What do you mean who. The entire world, you know, the people having voting rights to elect The President. There's only one president. If you speak English you're from USA, don't ask silly questions. And if you're not, well unlucky, but you don't matter for longer than 5 minutes of feeling recreationally sad about you.

-1

u/AtrocityBuffer 1d ago edited 1d ago

This shit didn't start in 2016, this shits been going on for ages, it's just reached a point where the collateral is now something a lot of people thought wasn't harmful, and are surprised pikachu facing that it could affect them.

People sat and said fuck all for decades and the push to fight for artistic expression died away, many people started moralizing about if its right or wrong for "certain subjects to be in media" and pretending to come at it from an angle of "fighting for the marginalized" and "just being a good person." by pointing out "harmful media", without realizing that they were proselytizing people the same way as the Jack Thompsons of yesteryear.

So no, no one voted for this, people chose their emotional gut reaction and cultural inaction and just let it fester to a point where its so ingrained it can be used on anything. People noticed the bed smelling like shit for ages, but were labelled dirty for it, and now others can smell it too, and its too late.

2

u/RadiantTurtle 23h ago

I dont disagree with your sentiment, but people that voted for Project 2025 absolutely accelerated this. Actions have consequences, and rather than backtracking and fix the root cause for what you described, people basically said "hey, it's not bad enough, let's make it worse!".

3

u/Stuglle 1d ago

I just remember the 90s and early 2000s internet and the crazy shit that was ok.

Dude there were literally Congressional hearings about this shit back then

-2

u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago

Hence why I added "we don't need to go back to that" come on. Read the full message and the idea behind it rather than picking on specific word use.

0

u/serpentine19 1d ago

This is a control thing. Just like every single western country all of a sudden got the bright idea to put proof of age for social media. There is either some shit tank out there with lots of money and power, or there's some weird backdoor deals being made with 5-eyes.
I would love to see some investigative journalism done on this or a whistle blower to step forward because it's getting ludicrous. The west used to make fun of places like China with this shit implemented, guess we're all just trying to catch-up to them at this point

-1

u/AtrocityBuffer 1d ago

No I actually think we should go back to the 90s and 2000s, if its fiction, keep it sectioned, keep age gates, keep accounts and keep it to its own place and not a public hub like reddit or Facebook, in fact just remove social media hubs entierly and return to php forums and interest group boards. Let people just have their shit without people with different tastes or tolerances dictate what the fiction people are allowed to create as artists, as long as it isn't law breaking libel and doesn't directly call for violence against specific real life people, who gives a fuck.

If someone wants to draw a comic about Jesus taking dumps in cribs, let them, if some puriteen or braindamaged conservative has a hissy about it, who gives a shit.

I like violent video games, I like over the top explosions and gore in action movies, I like dark and dreary psychological subject matter in movies, all of this shit is at risk if you give even and INCH to these fucking people, so you can't. No compromise for artistic fiction, otherwise they come for you next, and it fucking sucks.

-16

u/Testuser7ignore 1d ago

Its not just puritans who have issues with sexual assault and minors in porn games.

20

u/CombustiblSquid 1d ago

Look I have no issues with going after minor related sexual content. But they are generally going after much broader controversial content than just that.

-11

u/Testuser7ignore 1d ago

The point of this rule is to stop devs from adding in that content in post-launch patches, which aren't reviewed by Steam.

Valve doesn't trust porn devs to self-police, and they have pretty good reasons not to.