Valve’s notoriously liberal guidelines for what video games are and are not enabled on Steam got a little less liberal today, apparently in reaction to outdoors pressure from a few of its partner business. In a Tuesday upgrade to the “Rules and Guidelines” area of Steam’s Onboarding Documentation, the business included a brand-new guideline forbiding “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.”

By itself, the brand-new guideline appears rather unclear, without any information on which of the lots of sort of “adult only content” would belong in the “certain” subset forbidden by these unnamed payment processors and ISPs. The trackers over at SteamDB discovered that the publication of the brand-new guideline corresponds with the elimination of lots of Steam video games whose titles make referral to incest, along with a handful of sex video games referencing “slave” or “prison” images.

Holding the secrets to the bank

Valve isn’t alone in having de facto limitations on material troubled it by outdoors payment processors. In 2022, for example, Visa suspended all payments to Pornhub’s advertisement network after the adult video website was implicated of benefiting from kid sexual assault products. And PayPal has actually regularly prohibited payments to file-sharing websites and VPN companies over issues surrounding piracy of copyrighted products.