It’s Mastercard’s world; we just live in it. That’s my understanding based on a recent communiqué from Valve to PC Gamer, which confirmed that, yup, the company sure did recently remove a whole spate of adult games from its storefront because it made payment processors upset.
“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,” said Valve. “As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store.”
Valve’s reaching out to devs impacted by the change “and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future.” Just, you know, so long as those games get the seal of approval from Valve’s payment processors, I suppose.
To be fair to the house that Gabe Newell built, I don’t think it has much of a choice. Valve explicitly said that it was removing the offending games “because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam.” It seems quite clear to me from those kinds of statements that Valve’s chafing a little under payment processor tyranny, but I suspect even Steam can’t really go toe-to-toe with the likes of Visa and Mastercard.
Valve didn’t say which games, specifically, have been yoinked off Steam as a result of the credit card companies throwing their weight around, but I don’t think it takes Poirot to put this one together. As we noted in our original piece on Steam’s new rule forbidding content that might upset its payment processors, the appearance of the new regulation in Steam’s documentation coincided with the sudden disappearance of a bunch of adult games with a, um, theme of keeping it in the family.
There are some games that still have that focus on Steam’s storefront, so I suppose we can’t say for certain that it’s what raised processors’ hackles, but I think it’s a safe bet anyway.
One thing we can say for certain: the simultaneous delisting of a Chinese, Phoenix-Wright-esque game from Steam apparently had nothing to do with the new rule. Trials of Innocence disappeared from Steam at the same time as the adult stuff got culled, leading some to theorise that it had been accidentally caught in an overzealous net. But the devs have now confirmed that the game has been “temporarily taken down due to a DMCA claim.” So that’s something, I suppose.
Credit card processors are incredibly touchy about adult content online. Not only is it a magnet for scams and chargebacks, but they’re still reeling from the time a few years ago when popular adult site PornHub was found to be hosting content featuring underage and non-consenting performers (processors severed their links to the company, which continues to this day).
Of course, Steam doesn’t allow explicit content featuring real people on its service. All the adult content on its platform is animation of one form or another, and yet apparently payment processors are jittery even about that. It feels like an incredibly bad precedent to set; if I want anyone deciding what I can or can’t buy on Steam, it sure as hell isn’t Mastercard.
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