If you’re a regular user of Steam, you’ll know that Valve’s industry-dominating PC games store is absolutely buried in adult-themed games. Sex stuff. Porn. So much of it. Scrolling the new release lists reveals the astonishing number of both crap and quality adult games that are released every day. But on the advent of a new update to the Steamworks Documentation for developers, it appears vast numbers of extreme adult games have been delisted from the service. Which raises a lot of questions. (Content warning: This article includes some potentially upsetting game titles.)
Steam’s front page does a pretty decent job of curating its content to appeal to logged-in users. If you’ve never shown any interest in sex-themed games, you could be forgiven for not even knowing just how many are available on the store. But, dig a little deeper and it’s boobs all the way down. As someone who regularly scrolls the unfiltered New Releases page searching for unknown indie games that deserve attention, I’m aware just how ubiquitous such games are. Some look interesting, most look astonishingly dreadful. Some just sound foul.
What’s allowed, however, has now become extremely confusing, with potential repercussions for developers looking to explore controversial territories. In Steam’s guidance for developers, under “What you shouldn’t publish on Steam,” is a list of 15 characteristics a game might have that aren’t wanted on the store. They’re things like “sexually explicit images of real people” and “applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.” The latest, added only yesterday, reads:
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.
It’s a very unclear and difficult-to-interpret statement, but as Videogamer points out, it follows Nexus Mods similarly restricting certain mods in light of the wildly unhelpful UK Online Safety Act that soon comes into force in the UK. Whether this move is related—if it’s Valve rolling out a new rule for the entire world in order to cover its backs with the implausible restrictions the British government is imposing on websites and banks—is not known. But as Automaton noticed, this rule change has coincided with a purge of extreme adult games on Steam, with hundreds marked as delisted by SteamDB over the last 24 hours.
We’re talking about games themed around topics like incest, rape and slavery, titles like Incest Tales: Webcam Daughter and Reincarnation in another world going to rape All NPCs VR. One franchise alone, called Interactive Sex, appears to have had 54 games removed, meaning you can no longer play Incest Daughters Episode 4 or Daddy Daughter Incest.
That latter example (which does not feature children) has been on sale on Steam since February 28 of this year. The Reincarnation rape-themed VR game had been available since March 14. Both are now gone. But it’s important to note this isn’t a banhammer situation. The developer of Daddy Daughter Incest, EroticGamesClub, still has hundreds of porn games on sale on Steam, and more confusingly, these still include incest-themed games, labelled as such on the store. So it’s very hard to understand what’s happening.
The vast majority of these games are utterly awful “visual novels,” barely interactive combinations of static images and briefly looped animated models, mostly depicting bog-standard porn-like sex acts. Most are priced at around $5, and have either no reviews or very negative remarks, the shovelware output not worth the wank. And look, I have my own opinions on these games and you have yours. I’m not here to pronounce my own boundaries, and your personal taste or distaste isn’t really relevant. Valve is very clear that it’s happy to host adult content on the store, and it offers options for customers to have all such games hidden from view. That’s why rule #3 on its guidelines says you should not attempt to distribute “Adult content that isn’t appropriately labeled and age-gated.”
The issues that I see come down to the complete ambiguity with which this new rule has been introduced. How is any developer supposed to be able to divine what might “violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers”? Should they email Mastercard and T-Mobile to ask the corporations if they’re happy with their sex-themed tile-sliding puzzle game? (Oh god, there are so many sex-themed tile-sliding puzzle games on Steam.) And what are the “certain kinds” of adult content? Does everyone have to guess?
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.
The UK’s Online Safety Act is a terrible, badly-constructed confusion of responsibilities, created with the pretense of protecting children, but its 250 pages are far better suited to enforcing censorship. It’s ambiguous itself, despite its enormous length—something that itself meant most politicians who voted for it had never read it. It moves responsibility for “harmful content” to internet providers and payment processors, without ever being clear what “harmful content” is, nor indeed what anyone is supposed to practically do to prevent it in the real world. You can read why it’s so bad here. And while we cannot say that this is why Valve has suddenly added this confusing new rule, it’s hard not to draw parallels. And its implications become international when it means companies start trying to crack down in such confused, extreme ways.
We’ve reached out to Valve to try to get more clarity about these changes, what’s expected of developers, and whether there’s any more clear guidance on what the mysterious “certain kinds” includes. We’ll update if they get back to us.
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