Steam is Now Censoring Whole Games to Appease Payment Processors

Steam appears to be rolling back its open policy on who can publish their games to Steam and have begun removing games.

There was a time when publishing your game through Steam had numerous requirements that were rather strict. Steam heavily moderated what was allowed onto their storefront and, usually, only the largest players had access. Then came the announcement (and my Google-fu is failing to determine when that actually happened for some reason) that anyone can publish their game on Steam. At the time, the rule was basically that unless your game is an outright scam, you could publish your game on there.

Moderating the games was a tag and filtering system among other things. If your game contained violence, then information on the storefront needs to have such a warning. To better determine age appropriateness, ESRB labels are also included in many listings. This allowed the consumer to determine what would and wouldn’t be appropriate to play – especially when it comes to adults purchasing games for their children.

At any rate, this opened the floodgates and developers could experiment with different game concepts. It didn’t matter if you were some random coder or a massive publishing house, you could get a spot in the store front. This likely helped the independent game space become what it is today (there were obviously other factors involved outside of Steam, but the open door policy didn’t hurt the independent game movement by any means).

What this environment created was the ability for consumers to be properly informed of what games to play and developers could be free to publish any game – good or not – they want, allowing a creative freedom that was certainly much harder to replicate before Steam was around (the CD-ROM freeware era comes close, though the reach to audiences wasn’t as strong back then).

Recently, however, it seems that Steam is rolling back a bit on its openness of who can publish a game on Steam. As far as I can tell, this boils down to anti-speech groups determined to scrub what they don’t personally like on the storefront off of Steam. The method appears to be pressuring payment processors to push Steam into censoring certain games. Earlier this month, reports started surfacing that rules have changed to say that if your game violates the rules and regulations of payment processors, then your game might be forced off of their storefront. From Engadget:

Steam has added a new rule to its guidelines that has resulted in certain games getting banned, according to a report by Automaton. The new clause states that “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” is not allowed and could result in removal from the platform.

In other words, if credit card companies get mad about something, they could actually have the power to ban a game. The clause goes on to say that this will affect “certain kinds of adult-only content.”

This has likely already resulted in many games being pulled off the platform. The vast majority of these titles have obvious sexual themes and many have the word “incest” in the title. SteamDB doesn’t give a reason for these removals, but the timing does match up.

Following questions about the decision, Steam did confirm that payment processors are, indeed, pressuring them to remove certain games from their storefront. From PCGamer:

It’s Mastercard’s world; we just live in it. That’s my understanding based on a recent communiqué from Valve to PC Gamer, which confirmed that, yup, the company sure did recently remove a whole spate of adult games from its storefront because it made payment processors upset.

“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,” said Valve. “As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store.”

Valve’s reaching out to devs impacted by the change “and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future.” Just, you know, so long as those games get the seal of approval from Valve’s payment processors, I suppose.

As the reports suggest, while few would be upset at the removal of the games that did get purged for the time being, the precedent is pretty awful. Essentially, credit card companies now have veto power over which games can and can’t get sold in the first place, meaning that Steam has even less power than before to protect the speech of game developers in the first place. Even worse is the timing of all of this. Age verification supporters are pushing to censor video games already and it’s only a matter of time before these laws get introduced in other countries at the behest of anti-human rights organizations and anti-free speech lobbyists.

While it isn’t clear who is ultimately responsible for this recent censorship effort, one group, which has been accused of effectively being a slut shaming group and being part of a broader movement to suppress the LGBTQ+ community, is apparently claiming responsibility. From PC Gamer:

Collective Shout, an Australian anti-pornography group, has claimed credit for Steam’s recent removal of a large number of sexually explicit games and new, stricter moderation guidelines regarding such material. In a statement to PC Gamer, Valve cited pressure from payment processors like credit card companies and Paypal for the move, while Collective Shout touted its open letter and consumer campaign targeting payment processors for inciting that pressure.

This was first reported by Waypoint, which has since pulled its two articles on the subject without explanation. The articles’ author, Ana Valens, has alleged that Vice’s parent company, Savage Ventures, removed the articles due to concerns over their controversial content rather than any error in the reporting.

Collective Shout began in 2009, co-founded by self-described “pro-life feminist” Melinda Tankard Reist. Collective Shout describes itself as “A grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising, and popular culture”. To date, it has been involved in:

• Unsuccessful efforts to ban Snoop Dogg and Eminem from Australia.
• A successful 2015 campaign to prevent Tyler the Creator from touring Australia.
• A successful 2015 campaign to pressure Target and Kmart to stop selling Grand Theft Auto 5 in Australia.
• A petition to ban the game No Mercy from sale, which ultimately led to the developers pulling it from Steam.
• An unsuccessful petition to ban Detroit: Become Human from sale in Australia.

So, in short, nutcases who seek to force their morality onto others and control what you can and cannot view.

Whether or not it was really them that compelled this move doesn’t really matter. Steam has already set a precedent that they can cede their power to others when it comes to what legal content can and cannot be sold on their own platform. This is part of a much more disturbing trend of platforms caving under pressure from government. We’ve seen this with Reddit, Roblox, and Bluesky where platforms simply cave to government pressure and implemented age verification systems that already have a reputation of being hacked and having the personal information stored within fall into the hands of bad actors.

At a time when platforms need to stand up to the interests of their users, platforms are, instead, increasingly folding under pressure from government regulations. It’s a bad trend that some argue is only going to continue from here.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.