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If you’re like me (and God help you if you are), then your Steam library is filled with the kind of stuff that requires you to make judicious use of the “Hide This Game” function when family comes over. However, there could soon be a day when adult games disappear from the Steam store entirely, thanks to pressure from credit card companies. Steam has introduced new rules to ban “certain kinds of adult content” from its store, a move which has even stranger origins than you might think.

Last week, it came to light that Steam would no longer be approving games - and may even go as far as removing existing games - with “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet providers," as the platform explained. In case that wasn't clear enough, the company added, "In particular, certain kinds of adult-only content.” You’ll note that this is an incredibly vague statement that will probably have massive repercussions for the visual novel and dating sim genres.

Sadly, this sort of pressure from credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard isn’t unusual. Most adult content publishers have had to navigate their draconian and puritan rules. These companies have an issue with their services being used by people to purchase anything to do with sex, despite the huge amount of money it makes them. However, this example gets even more odd as a specific group has taken credit for forcing companies into making Steam change its rules.

Collective Shout, an Australian group who have launched multiple campaigns against anything depicting sex in media (whether it is consensual or not), seems to have taken credit for the pressure applied to credit card companies. They appear to have taken umbrage with the content of around 500 games in the Steam library. It should be noted that this would represent less than .5% of all the 115,000 games currently listed on Steam, which makes these sweeping changes to Steam’s content approval seem more excessive.

How can one ambiguously-sized organization, which claims to have sent “more than 1000 emails from concerned individuals,” – which, again, is an absurdly small number when you consider the 132 million people who use Steam on a monthly basis – wield this kind of influence? While it isn’t clear exactly how broadly Steam plans to implement these new guidelines, those of us who enjoy adult content in our games may soon have to look elsewhere.

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