Beginning in mid-July, Steam has been delisting waves of adult games, removing them from sale on its storefront entirely. The mass removal follows a new rule on Steam banning games that run afoul of the standards of credit card companies and other payment processors, pointing to a trend that could be a disaster for developers and players alike, even if you’ve never ventured into the platform’s steamier side yourself. Valve and Vice Media did not respond to Inverse’s request for comment.“Payment processor-based censorship has been a successful tactic against the adult industry for years, receiving little pushback in the process,” former Waypoint reporter Ana Valens tells Inverse.Valens reported on Steam’s removal of adult games in a series of articles that have since been removed from Waypoint after owner Savage Ventures claimed they were a “legal risk,” as messages shared with Inverse confirm. In response, Valens and multiple other members of Waypoint’s staff have resigned. The removed articles are still available via Archive.org.Valve says credit card companies forced the removal of some games from Steam. | ValveAs Valens points out in her reporting, one group in particular claims responsibility for Steam’s recent porn game takedown. An organization called Collective Shout, based in Australia, announced on social media that Steam’s new rule resulted from one of its own campaigns, which alleges without evidence that the platform was hosting content including child abuse. According to the group, members put pressure on payment processors by flooding them with emails about allegedly objectionable material, leading to the change of Steam’s policies. Valve has not answered Inverse’s questions about whether Collective Shout or any other organization played a part in the new rule or the delisting of adult games.While it’s not clear if pressure from Collective Shout or others is actually to blame for Steam cracking down on porn games, it’s a fight that’s worth paying attention to. Along with Collective Shout, Valens points to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (an anti-porn group formerly known as Morality in Media), which has previously campaigned against adult games on Steam. NCOSE executives also appear as signatories on an open letter from Collective Shout released a week before Steam’s new rule went into effect, specifically calling on payment processors to stop working with both Steam and indie storefront Itch.io, which to date has not announced any changes to its own content policies.Similar campaigns targeting payment processors led to Tumblr banning porn in 2018, a move that nearly destroyed the company. OnlyFans has faced similar pressure, resulting in a ban on adult material that was quickly canceled. In both of these cases, conservative groups have claimed that the companies they’re targeting promote harm against children, as several organizations are now claiming about Steam and Itch.io.Steam hasn’t announced a blanket porn ban, but any adult game (and potentially any game with LGBTQ content) could be under threat. | ebi-himeTo be clear, there are plenty of games among those banned from Steam that most people would find objectionable, including those with themes of sexual assault and incest. But you don’t need to agree with the content of those games to understand that a credit card company (possibly influenced by outside political organizations) should not be in control of whether or not any given game is allowed to be distributed. What starts with a ban on the most objectionable games on Steam could easily become a platform-wide ban on all adult content, or anything else sufficiently loud conservative groups deem inappropriate.Members of groups calling for adult game bans have also released explicitly homophobic and transphobic statements in the past. There’s a long history of censorship of LGBTQ content being pushed under the guise of “protecting children,” as was the case with the recent Kids Online Safety Act in the U.S., whose sponsor explicitly stated that it was meant to remove transgender content from the internet. If payment processors can deem that porn isn’t allowed on Steam, there’s nothing stopping them from saying the same thing about any game including queer characters or themes.“This is a major free speech issue that will come for LGBTQ content, art that discusses ‘difficult’ subject matters, and, in the worst case scenario, pretty much any form of art that a conservative group wishes to pull from store shelves,” Valens says. “Imagine a world where you can't even buy Grand Theft Auto. It's nuts, but it's clearly what these people want in the end."