Valve removes over 100 adult games on Steam due to pressure from Visa and Mastercard

By lauraharris // 2025-07-25

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Valve has quietly removed over 100 adult-only games from Steam following warnings from payment processors Visa and Mastercard, citing violations of their "rules and standards."
The removals were not prompted by any new legislation or platform policy but were carried out silently, with no public list or clear explanation of what content triggered the purge.
The takedowns are still underway, with games being delisted in real-time and developers left to guess which themes, often controversial but legal, led to their content being targeted.
Commentators, including Christina Maas of Reclaim the Net, argue this marks a dangerous form of private censorship, where financial institutions act as unaccountable moral gatekeepers.
With Visa and Mastercard dominating online payments, critics say there's little recourse for platforms or creators, warning that the real threat to digital freedom lies in the financial stack, not the platforms themselves.

Valve, the parent company of Steam, has quietly purged hundreds of adult-themed video games from Steam, the world's largest PC game store, due to pressure from payment processors Visa and Mastercard. The changes, which were only made by third-party platform SteamDB and later picked up by Japanese gaming outlet GameSpark, marked over 100 titles as "retired" in just two days since July 16. Many of the games flagged for removal are tagged as adult-only and feature sexually explicit content, particularly themes considered controversial or taboo, such as incest or non-consensual scenarios. They were digital creations, no different in tone from the content in countless R-rated movies or prestige TV shows. Some of these removals occurred mere minutes before publication, indicating that this is an ongoing process rather than a single coordinated takedown. The removals are being executed quietly, with no public-facing list from Valve or guidance for developers about what specific content may be deemed unacceptable. All this, with no public outcry, no new law passed and no formal announcement from Valve — just a quiet warning from Visa and Mastercard. "We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks," Valve wrote in its brief, boilerplate statement after developers and watchdog sites noticed the removals. "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." As of now, there is no official list of banned themes or affected developers. Developers whose games have been removed must guess what content crossed the line and whether their future work will survive the scrutiny of unnamed compliance teams and opaque "rules and standards."

Writer explains how Visa and Mastercard quietly became the internet's unaccountable censors

In line with the removal, critics argued that this is a new and deeply worrying form of censorship — one that bypasses due process, public debate and even the platforms themselves. "Valve didn't wake up with a sudden newfound sense of moral hygiene. It was the payment processors. They pulled the fire alarm, and Steam complied like any rational hostage trying to keep the electricity on. That's what happens when the pipes of global commerce are guarded by a pair of unaccountable financial institutions that somehow got into the censorship business without anyone noticing. Visa and Mastercard are no longer just companies. They’re gatekeepers of moral acceptability," Christina Maas wrote in her article for Reclaim the Net. The problem is compounded by the duopoly that Visa and Mastercard represent. Together, they dominate the payment processing industry, handling the vast majority of online transactions globally. If either company flags your content as problematic, switching to another processor is rarely viable. (Related: Federal court greenlights Texas anti-censorship law.) "When a payment processor pulls out of a platform, it's a threat: comply or die. Valve got the message. The platform isn't always the problem. The financial stack is. This is how modern censorship works. It's slow, opaque, and enforced not by government agents, but by brand safety consultants working for companies whose job was once to process payments and now includes playing God," Maas wrote. Watch the video below to see Mark Zuckerberg admit censorship in Facebook's algorithm.

This video is from the BCWILDFIRE channel on Brighteon.com.

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Writer explains how Visa and Mastercard quietly became the internet's unaccountable censors

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