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Steam's Updated Guidelines Allow Banks To Enforce Standards On Adult-Only Content

Valve's ubiquitous PC gaming storefront, Steam, may soon experience a purging of its adult content after a significant change to its guidelines this week.

In a quiet update to its terms, Valve has now provided that, "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 In particular, certain kinds of adult-only content" should not be published on Steam.

The move, which invites banks and similar institutions to exercise an unprecedented degree of power in the kind of content that goes up on Steam, seems to have been made to appease the payment processors that work with Valve. This tactic, while relatively new to games, has been used in the past to go after porn and sex work sites like OnlyFans.

This change to Steam's guidelines has already brought down several games from the store. In a response to GamingOnLinux, Valve claimed that it was already notified of certain games violating the new standards set in place by its payment processors, saying, "As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam. We are directly notifying developers of these games, and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future."

This shift in policy comes as multiple digital storefronts, like the Nintendo eShop and Steam, begin cracking down on a glut of content that's been dubbed "slop" of late. Many of these titles, which seem to blatantly infringe on the aesthetics and naming conventions of existing popular games and feature sexual (see: adult) content, have popped up in great number over the last several months. Many believe these games are largely made by developers capitalizing on generative AI and large-language models to quickly produce content masquerading as the games they're ripping off.

However, the language used in the update leaves many factors unclear and open to a potentially disastrous amount of interpretation. For example, it is never clarified what "kinds of adult-only content" will not be permissible on Steam now. Moreover, the updated guidelines stress that these payment processors are enforcing new rules that should be adhered, but never makes clear exactly what the new standards of these companies are.

Despite the fact that a lot of these "slop" games lead with sexual content, there are also plenty of developers making adult-only games that touch on similar subjects. Following these changes, there are now many developers at risk of being penalized or being removed from one of the largest digital gaming storefronts.