Valve has added new rules on Steam that should raise alarms for gamers, especially when it comes to censorship.
As reported by Automaton, a new rule has been added to the rules game developers and publishers follow to get their games on Steam. Under the category “What you shouldn’t publish on Steam”, they have now added this:
- 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.
To be clear, they have already listed these under this category as well:
- Nude or sexually explicit images of real people
- Adult content that isn’t appropriately labeled and age-gated
- Content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers
And so we have to ask the necessary question, why did Valve suddenly add this rule? And why are banks and payment processors, such as Paypal and Stripe, suddenly interested in controlling adult content?
This all stems from the start of the 2020s, in the fallout of reports revealing that the website Pornhub was replete with CSAM (child sexual abuse material). These same banks and payment processors immediately moved to crack down on Pornhub, because they allowed payments to go into the website on their systems.
However, these companies started taking these actions to the other extreme, to the point that they were bordering towards censorship, and violating speech rules on the internet. No less than the Electronic Frontier Foundation questioned and condemned the actions of companies like VISA and MasterCard in this regard.
That was in 2020, but these companies did not stop with Pornhub. In 2021, they initiated a similar crackdown on OnlyFans, upending the livelihoods of several OnlyFans creators. The issues surrounding threading the needle between protections from CSAM, and protections of speech rules, are very much the same. Unfortunately, it seems that these payment processors are just getting away with pushing their rules to businesses that depend on working with them.
That takes us to the situation with Steam now. Games like Stellar Blade, which managed to sort out their Steam release to be available on all regions, may now run the risk of being delisted because of its content. Even when this situation with the payment processor crackdown started, these banks and payment processors had seemingly arbitrary criteria for what ‘certain kinds of adult only content’ they objected to.
A minor controversy surrounding Stellar Blade could be enough, and this could also happen to games like The First Descendant, and even more ‘mainstream’ titles like Marvel Rivals, Shantae, Dead or Alive, etc. Are the ballerina twins from Mundfish’s Atomic Heart enough to catch the ire of these companies? And really, on another level, is it fair for these banks and payment processors to control these kinds of content over Steam? That is the dilemma video games are facing now in the face of this news.
