A sudden evil wind blew through the gaming circle. On July 16, Steam quietly removed about 500 games containing adult content without any explanation. On the surface, these were "borderline" game works being caught and thrown into the trash, but in reality, the trigger was not pulled by Valve, but by its lifeline payment flow, Visa and Mastercard.
The Flashpoint is a Women's Rights Group
The Australian women's rights organization Collective Shout claimed to be the "source" of Steam's delisting action.
Traceable to March 2025, a player reported to the organization that the adult game 'No Mercy' contained inappropriate content, including incest with a stepmother, sexual coercion, and sexual violence. The women's rights organization Women in Games also raised criticism, but the content of the game was subject to different interpretations and sparked significant controversy.
On April 7, Collective Shout mobilized supporters to send 3,463 protest emails to Steam, along with a petition of 70,000 people, but the platform did not even respond with a "received". Seeing the ineffectiveness of the pressure, the group directly shifted its focus to the payment gateway on May 25, pressuring Visa and Mastercard directly. The result quickly became apparent, and two months later, 500 works on Steam were uprooted.
The Platform Can Only Obey
The mechanism behind this game purge is hidden in Steam's new "Rule 15". According to The Gamer's report, the 15th clause states that if a payment processor determines the content does not meet regulations, even if it is legal and meets Steam's own standards, it can still be delisted.
Simply put, if Visa and Mastercard don't want to process the payment, the game cannot survive. For the platform, losing these two payment giants is equivalent to cutting off cash flow, so they can only choose to surrender.
Is Creative Freedom Cheap?
With 500 works sentenced to death at once, independent developers are the first to be hurt. In the past, as long as it didn't break the law, even the most niche topics could find players and supporters on Steam. Now, just the possibility of "causing trouble" is enough to get the axe. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has openly warned, questioning the delisting standards as "opaque and unfair" and worried about a slippery slope: today it's adult content, but tomorrow will political, religious, and sexual minority issues also have to look at the card companies' faces?
For Steam, this is the most realistic arithmetic problem. On one side are the content diversity expected by millions of users, and on the other side are two payment giants controlling the revenue gate. Trying to have it both ways, they can only choose to survive first and talk about ideals later. This is not even an issue of corporate ethics, but the pressure of facing a cut-off when the funding is interrupted.
Payment Providers Coming to 'Review Content'?
The incident has also alarmed Washington, with U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer proposing a bill to limit financial institutions' "right to refuse service" to legal merchants, preventing similar events from escalating. Different voices have begun to explore whether decentralized finance (DeFi) or blockchain payments can become a safe haven for content creators, preventing payment flows from being strangled by a few oligarchs.
Ideals are ideals, but currently, the payment infrastructure managed by Visa and Mastercard remains the most widespread and trusted globally. Through the indirect means of "no card payment, no business", they have essentially become the new gatekeepers of the digital world.
This time it's games, next time it could be streaming platforms, or even social platforms. Why are there no protests against Visa and Mastercard for the numerous fraudulent ads on Facebook?
