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Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

pcgamer.com

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Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#321

The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest. https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27 Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.

Specifically incest, rape, and child abuse-themed games.

Games/hentai about these topics are not illegal, even if they are in bad taste.

And I’m willing to bet some content removed does not fall in these categories

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the people who disagree: would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam? I think we can almost all reasonably agree that at least this sort of content should not be sold on there.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Correction: Won't somebody please think of the pixels?

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#323
post #86

It is sad that in 2025 this needs to be repeated: fiction is not real. This statement imply that: * Simulated violence is not violence. * Simulated sex is not sex. * Simulated sorcery is not sorcery

And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society. It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.

Personally, I won't miss these games either, but it just seems like such a slippery slope to normalize achieving societal/political goals through exerting pressure on infrastructure companies instead of through democratic means.

I totally support this type of pressure being exerted on companies involved in editorializing and providing an audience (e.g. I don't think Valve should be required by law to carry any form of content, just like a publisher can't be forced to print any content it doesn't agree with). But infrastructure, due to being both fundamental to doing business and generally living in a society and very often being at least regionally monopolistic in nature, should be open to anybody that's acting within the law.

And conversely, if something seems ethically or morally unacceptable to a rule-based society, what ought to change is the law.

That's all assuming a functioning democratic and political process, of course, but it generally seems to be possible even in the US, with its strong protections of speech, to limit certain types of speech under obscenity laws, so I don't really get the desire to outsource this inherently political process to private corporations.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse petition where?

All eyes on you.

Agree or disagree, it won't matter. When you let gamers vote with their wallets, the answer speaks for itself.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.

The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.

This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#326
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A red flag of what?

Defaulting on their credit card bill. Or the account ends up having been started by an identity fraudster. Which also ends in default.

That seems backward. The people I’ve known that spend a lot of money on adult entertainment are exactly the group that pays their bills.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can h…

I think that for better or worse Valve is genuinely committed to lassies faire moderation, they have historically been very hesitant to remove really heinous games. I don't think they're using this as cover.

That changed with Hatred in 2015. There have been a number of them since. It seems that anything that gives Valve bad press is on its shit list, even if the premise theme has been done before by a bigger or more well-known company stateside. If the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game has full frontal nudity and realistically depicted sex scenes, I doubt Valve would give it a second look.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#328
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.

You must be American if you think very violent games are not extremely popular.

I think they are referring to actual gore. For example, bull fighting.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "anti-abortion/pro-life" removes a right from women. Trading the rights of a developed adult for the rights of a hypothetical future person. What does ancapistanism have to do with it? Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?

> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy? Of course there is. It's not hard to construct an argument to that effect either. For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point betwe…

> No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction

That's not persuasive at all. It's not just not "bulletproof", it's blatantly wrong. Also you can make the same argument in the other direction.

> Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever.

They wanted someone to give a plausible argument that isn't religious.

> no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist

I care about the merits of positions that people actually have, not theoretical positions.

And in the general case, if nobody can be found that has a simple position, that is a reason to believe it's not a coherent position.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#330

It is sad that in 2025 this needs to be repeated: fiction is not real. This statement imply that: * Simulated violence is not violence. * Simulated sex is not sex. * Simulated sorcery is not sorcery

Violence is still considered ok in games, last time I checked. Which is possibly because violence is not as awkward to watch with your family as sex is.

Violence has no religious morality baggage - religions were extremely violent. Sex, however, has all the baggage from all the angles. Even if we aren't religious, it doesn't matter, religion still dictates huge chunks of our lives and our mindsets. It has thousands of years of inertia.
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