By Nelson Schneider - 07/20/25 at 05:02 PM CT
The world seems to have an Adult Content problem – Primarily that 70% of adults want it, while the other 30% are prudish scolds who want it banned. And, unfortunately, thanks to the Horseshoe Theory of politics, there’s enough power behind the desire for bans that they tend to be enforced.
A few years ago, Valve made waves in the face of Sony Bowdlerizing and censoring fairly benign and inconsequential content in Japanese games by announcing that any and all uncensored content would be welcome on Steam… then almost immediately regretted that decision. After a couple rounds of back-and-forth, though, Steam ultimately ended up as a glorious Laissez-Faire marketplace where people who were open to Adult Content in their games could opt-in to see such things, and those who didn’t want to see such content – or who weren’t officially old enough to see it – could ignore it. And that seemed to be the perfect balance between insane levels of porn everywhere (like unfiltered search results) and Puritanical bans.
Sadly, we can’t have Nice Things, apparently, and the delicate balance struck between Adult Content videogame creators and Lord GabeN has been disrupted once again. This time, the pot isn’t being stirred by grating activists from either side of the political spectrum, but rather by the beating heart of the modern Capitalist System: Credit card providers.
Apparently, Mastercard and Visa both have rules against processing purchases of Adult Content. We’ve pretty much known this since 2021, when the same thing that’s happening to Valve happened to OnlyFans, a site dedicated to the distribution of amateur porn and… very little else. Unfortunately, we can’t pin an easily-attackable mask onto the credit card companies, representing either an overzealous, pearl-clutching Christian or an insane porn-is-violence-against-women Feminazi, as it appears the reasoning behind the credit processors fear of Adult Content stems from their abject terror of accidentally facilitating non-consensual, underage, human trafficked, or other sorts of actually-illegal content.
It seems that no company that provides a fundamental service is allowed to act as a so-called ‘dumb pipe’ anymore. Perhaps this change in corporate rulesmaking follows on the heels of the death of Net Neutrality, perhaps it was the fault of questionable W-era policy (like the DMCA and Patriot Act), or perhaps it was inevitable. Either way, the massive corporations that handle these essential substrates of the modern economy are too cheap and lazy to do anything correctly, so instead of enforcing rules against actual crimes, they cast such a broad net that it catches all manner of perfectly legal – if not questionably tasteful – activities as well.
Comments
Chris Kavan - wrote on 07/26/25 at 03:30 PM CT
Itch.io - the indie game site has taken an even more draconian measure and removed ANY game that had a NSFW tag - and not just adult games - but it's stemmed from the same issue. The thing that strikes me is that it wasn't even an American group that caused this but an Australian-based group called Collective Shout - which sent like 1000 emails and suddenly all adult games disappeared. But why? Because we're in the era of Christian conservatives and Project 2025 which, if you read it, one of the main goals was to outlaw pornography - ALL of it. But what defines pornography? Is The Witcher 3 pornographic because it has nudity and sex scenes? The Grand Theft Auto Games? Anything overtly violent like Doom or even something cartoonishly violent like Fortnite? Now, believe me, there are plenty of adult "games" that are abhorrent and should be removed - just as there are plenty of illegal videos out there. But to banhammer everything is not going to stop any of that - you're just forcing more and more underground and it's a slippery slope of saying you can't play these adult games to saying you can't play games, period. Will it ever go that far or will people come to their senses. Given the current state of things, it's hard to say one way or another. If I was an Elon Musk in this world, I would create my own credit card and as screw this BS but, alas, I have to submit to whims of a few powerful to control the masses. We are forever in the worst timeline - thanks for letting me rant.
