No Escape

According to RockPaperShotgun, Valve, owner of the Steam storefront, has changed its developer-side rules to “prohibit games that ‘may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers.’” RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell confirmed this to be on the onboarding website for new devs and “verified that it was recently added using the ole Internet Wayback Machine.” It’s rule 15: “Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.”

In so doing, Valve has joined the likes of Tumblr, Patreon and at one point even briefly OnlyFans in restricting and even banning pornographic works at the behest of major payment processors. This is not new: Engadget reported on this so-called “weblining” of independent porn creators and crowdfunding websites in 2015; the Electronic Frontier Foundation called out Visa and Mastercard’s censoriousness specifically in 2020. Also in 2020, a collective of sex workers and tech industry veterans released a report detailing how US laws like FOSTA-SESTA, passed in 2018 in a bipartisan vote and signed into law by Donald Trump, have harmed sex workers all over the world.

As Evans-Thirlwell points out, after much intra-community scuffling Valve finally made it a point to take a laissez-faire approach to porn moderation in 2018, deigning only to step in when games explicitly violate their terms of service (by going further than just displaying sexual acts and getting into more heinous shit like “glorifying rape” or CSAM, or even just the images of real people getting put into portrayals of sex) while actively working on user filtration tools to remove sexually explicit and pornographic content from their feeds and search results, if they so chose. So why introduce this rule all of a sudden? It couldn’t be because fascist reactionaries have suddenly attained power and get to put all of their pet repressive policies into practice, could it?

Valve provides no justification for the rule change, only mentioning that it is the payment processors that dictated it. And so, with barely any explanation at all, Valve has contributed to a wide program of media and artistic censorship spearheaded by a gang of pedophile brownshirts in Washington D.C. and their scared corporate lickspittles. This rule change, small though it may appear to be, is one of the dumbest decisions the WA-based publisher and studio has ever made.

To be clear: these laws and corporate policies don’t protect children from being exposed to harmful material. They don’t protect people from being trafficked, for sex or otherwise. They don’t make the Internet or the material world a safer place to be. They are not going to get people to stop making porn games, selling sex imagery, or creating other types of erotic art. It is in every case the opposite: sex workers and porn creators lose the ability to safely practice and create their art because the only spaces that remain to do so are the ones where they are most at risk. This also directly creates a world where the conservative view of sex is the default one. Considering who is in power at the moment and the degree to which the ruling class wants to exact control over all our lives (especially our sex lives), this in effect puts everyone into a cultural chokehold.

Porn and porn games may not be everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve certainly occasionally gotten frustrated with the seemingly never-ending onslaught of kinda shoddy and awkwardly-posed naked 3D women staring out at me from their game icons on my Steam Deck. But regardless of my own feelings or inclinations, porn is art, porn games belong in games as a culture writ large and we absolutely cannot let companies like Valve get away with destroying a vital part of culture because they’re too scared to tell Visa to fuck off.

Listen. Right now there are people trying to make all of the awful shit the Trump administration is doing at every and all level a kind of fucked up competition for attention. Every new atrocity is “distracting from the bigger picture” where the bigger picture in question is a shifting goalpost. By comparison there is no question that active duty Marines in LA, gulags in Florida, the now-regular practice of extraordinary-renditioning people to other countries at will, and the continued gutting of the bureaucracy and consolidation of power in Washington are all much bigger relative issues than a game storefront banning porn. But they’re all part of the same picture. They all lead to the same place. The people making porn on Steam are not hurting anyone. They deserve our defense. They need it.