Valve has formally surrendered to the demands of global payment processors, most notably Visa and Mastercard by quietly implementing a new clause in its Steamworks documentation that will effectively outsource approval to its financial overlords.
This move, which has already seen multiple adult games removed from the platform, marks a significant shift in Valve’s moderation practices, one that has already been established as disproportionately targeting Japanese developers and the niche otaku culture built around visual novels, doujinshi, and eroge.
A new clause in Steam’s “Rules and Guidelines” for developers, added to the Steamworks Documentation, explicitly requires publishers to comply with the rules and standards of payment processors, card networks, and banks, particularly targeting content that otherwise violates the moral standards of credit card companies and other payment platforms.
While Valve provides no concrete definition of what’s now off-limits, it’s widely understood that this move is aimed at purging material involving “childlike” anime characters, rape-related themes, and other content financial institutions label as objectionable even if legally protected in the developer’s region or elsewhere.
This change, reported by Japanese publication Gamespark marks a significant escalation in the ongoing battle over content moderation, with Japanese developers and their doujinshi (self-published) works, especially eroge (adult games) and visual novels featuring “loli” characters, bearing the brunt of their censorship crusade.
The duopoly of VISA and MasterCard whom together control roughly 90% of global online transactions have continuously flexed their financial muscle to impose moral standards on digital platforms abroad.
Their primary target: Japan’s vibrant doujinshi scene, a cornerstone of otaku culture known for its creative freedom and niche genres.
VISA, in particular, has zeroed in on “moe” aesthetics, specifically targeting “loli” characters, stylized as petite, youthful anime figures by equating them as being no different to real-world children despite their fictional nature and stylized appearances. This conflation, fueled by moral outrage and a refusal to distinguish between fantasy and reality, has led to aggressive campaigns against platforms hosting such content.
One notable casualty is DLsite, the leading online platform for doujinshi distribution. Over a year ago, both VISA and MasterCard revoked DLsite’s merchant license, cutting off VISA and MasterCard-based transactions after pressuring the site to purge loli-related content.
Interestingly, “shota” content, depictions of youthful male characters remains accessible worldwide, exposing the arbitrary and uneven enforcement of these so-called child protection standards.
Other Japanese retailers and developers are being hit with the same financial chokehold. Recently, Japanese banks began withholding Steam revenue from eroge developers, hiding behind so-called “international payment regulations.”
Now, those same rules are creeping into the heart of PC gaming itself, whether you like it or not.
Despite being far from a true “free market” champion, Valve is often celebrated as one by consumers. But now, they’ve formally caved to similar external pressures. As a private company valued at around $8 billion with the ability to launch its own payment processor to challenge VISA’s stronghold Valve still chose compliance.
And perhaps it’s no mystery why: VISA and Mastercard dominate 90% of global online transactions, making them a force even giants hesitate to confront. To resist them is to risk financial blacklisting, effectively leaving its 35+ million daily active users hung out to dry.
SteamDB has already documented the quiet removal of countless adult video games and Japanese Eroge such as “Slave Doll,” “Dark Dominance,” Harem of Nurses” and “Train Capacity 300%” while countless other adult titles were purged in the days following the changes.
These titles all involve themes that run afoul of financial censorship involving rape, abuse, or anime characters likened to real life minors, content that’s par for the course in eroge, but legally protected and culturally contextual in Japan.
The controversy hinges on a deliberate misrepresentation of anime as a medium. Like in any other form of fictional story, in anime and manga, age is arbitrary. Characters can appear youthful yet be portrayed as ancient, or vice versa, with tall, curvaceous figures often labeled as teenagers.
Whether it’s otokonokos, effeminate male characters or stylized lolis that embody the moe aesthetic, Japan’s creative strength lies in its willingness to subvert tropes and challenge expectations. Yet, despite their exaggerated and fictional nature, these characters are increasingly targeted by groups like VISA, who conflate stylization with real-world harm and label them as promoting child abuse.
This logic is flawed as it ignores the fictional nature of these works, malicious actors who can’t or won’t differentiate fiction from reality weaponize these designs to paint anime as inherently pedophilic, a narrative that continually threatens the medium’s creative freedom as Japan’s anime industry continues to whore itself out to global licensers for profit.
The hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore when you contrast it with the silence payment processors maintain toward platforms like OnlyFans which, according to whistleblowers, profit from real-world exploitation and porn sites like Pornhub, repeatedly exposed for hosting illicit content involving minors and revenge porn.
Despite these serious violations, VISA and MasterCard remain fixated on targeting fictional content instead, now pressuring platforms like Steam to conform to their selective and inconsistent moral standards.
Steam’s dominance as the de facto PC gaming platform makes it a critical gateway for developers, especially small doujinshi circles seeking global reach and sales. Dubbed the “Waifu Holocaust,” Valve’s inconsistent and hypocritical content policies have long frustrated Japanese developers.
Games like Angelic☆Chaos RE-BOOT! and Tokyo Clanpool have been banned on Steam despite censorship efforts while titles like Evenicle, a raunchy eroge with loli characters and rape was permitted while it’s tamer and more timid sequel was rejected while other titles remain indefinitely stalled in the review process, sometimes for several months.
While Japanese games are banned because their anime characters are likened to that of children, Steam continues to host Western adult games, featuring bestiality and explicit content involving homosexual BDSM, anthropomorphic animal characters with anatomically correct genitalia without facing the same level of scrutiny as Japanese eroge tailored for heterosexual audiences do.
However, with the new regulations driven by payment processors like VISA, that double standard may finally be coming to an end, though I wouldn’t get your hopes up regarding Western games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and its distinctive gay bear sex to be removed anytime soon.
The addition of the 15th clause to Steam’s guidelines joining existing prohibitions on hate speech, malware, and real-world exploitation signals Valve’s surrender to payment processors’ demands.
One of the driving forces behind the new moral crusade is Collective Shout, an Australian feminist NGO that publicly pressured payment processors to deplatform a niche western erotic game by the name of No Mercy, a dark visual novel with incest and rape themes.
Their campaign openly targeted VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, JCB, and others publicly naming and shaming them while pressuring them to intervene. The result? The game was quietly pulled from Steam by its developers, but not before the game was subsequently banned by Canadian and Australian governments, the very same country that outlawed adult women with small chests in adult media, claiming it promotes pedophilia.
No Mercy’s removal effectively handed loudmouthed feminists a foot in the door.
The game was targeted, due to their campaign the game was also deplatformed from itch.io, a platform known for hosting a wide range of indie, adult-centric content, from furry games to guro and rape. But despite their tolerance, No Mercy became the scapegoat after a public shaming campaign, signaling a shift in enforcement.
This is the new face of financial activism: don’t target the platforms directly, go after the money. By pressuring payment processors like VISA, Mastercard, and PayPal, activists force platforms like Steam to bend under the threat of disrupted profits.
This is exactly how the Anti Defamation League conducts its own business, having previously harassed Valve and countless other gaming corporations over the looming threat of housing and facilitating antisemitism and hate speech on their services.
Because the result is always censorship and surveillance.
By going after companies like VISA who hypocritically despise fictional content while cashing in on real-world exploitation, NGOs and similar groups can now enforce censorship by proxy, and it’s alarmingly effective. Steam’s latest policy update merely formalizes a quiet capitulation that’s been happening in slow motion.
The message to developers, particularly those in Japan, is unmistakable: adult content is being stifled by financial overlords pushing their puritanical ideology. And it’s not just Steam. Nintendo, once a symbol of creative liberty, has now fully embraced Western censorship trends for the Switch 2 eShop, taking aim at otaku-centric content as being “harmful” to their corporate image.
The result is a chilling effect on Japanese developers, who now face deplatforming and payment blacklists, not because their content is illegal in Japan or most countries, but because it offends the moral sensibilities of unelected financial and corporate gatekeepers who dominate transactions worldwide.
Worse, anything anime- or manga-related risks being swept up in this crusade, as fiction is increasingly conflated with reality and labeled as pedophilic by default.
Valve had options. It could’ve pushed back, the company that literally prints millions of dollars with pseudo digital economies revolving around in-game weapon skins could’ve easily established its own payment infrastructure, challenging VISA’s self-imposed position as the world’s moral authority.
But instead, it chose to comply. It chose convenience and profit over standing its ground. In doing so, Valve handed over the power to define fiction, art, and morality, not to lawmakers but to corporations like VISA and Mastercard. For eroge developers, doujin creators, and otaku fans around the world, ESPECIALLY outside Japan the consequences of that surrender are just beginning to surface, as more titles will quietly disappear from Steam and or be rejected.
Not banned by law but erased by the very credit cards in our wallets. Now, Japanese creators and fans exist in a world where fiction is treated as fact, and cultural expression is filtered through the moral biases of unelected corporate gatekeepers.
Lawmakers in Japan have begun to take notice with councilman Yamada Taro, a well-known free speech advocate having openly criticized payment processors for infringing on Japan’s culture and creative industries but ultimately to no avail.
These institutions aren’t enforcing laws, they’re enforcing ideology, quietly choking off access to the media we love. Outside Japan, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to obtain this content. And the chilling effect is clear: if a work can’t be sold or distributed, it won’t be made. “Problematic” material isn’t just being suppressed, they’re being economically exterminated and all we can do is sit and watch it unfold.
