Adult Games, Pornography, Bank Regulations, and Performative Morality

I'm not really a purveyor of adult games, ie, games that are either rated "A" by the ESRB or games that have "Adult," "NSFW," "Nudity," or "Sexual Content" as descriptive tags.  I've played the demos for Butt Knight, Lust from Beyond: Demo, and Robin Morningwood Adventure - A gay RPG, and last year I played through Lust for Darkness.  I did play the free-to-play Radiator 2 nine years ago and had a blast.  I also recently purchased Tender Loving Care because it was less than a dollar, it has an interesting concept, and I like John Hurt's voice; I have yet to play it, though.  But don't tell Lieberman or Howard Lincoln that I also purchased Night Trap on the Switch a few years back.  It's not a genre that I actively seek out, so it was only once articles started cropping up a few weeks ago that I found out that many adult games on Steam and Itch.io were being delisted due to pressure from Visa/Mastercard.

When I first started hearing about payment processors essentially not wanting to be the middleman for NSFW games and Steam/Itch.io, it immediatly reminded me of the scene from Boogie Nights (because I wasn't born until the 1980s) when Buck Swope (Don Cheadle) and Jessie St. Vincent (Melora Walters) try to get a business loan from banks but are refused solely on the basis that they're both in the adult film industry.  It was possibly/probably also rooted in the fact that Buck Swope was Black and that he and Jessie were a mixed-race couple, but that not doing business with someone who was previously in pornographic films was the one thing they could legally hang their hat on without repercussions.  And it's not like the practice of turning down people who work in the adult entertainment industry has gone away since the '70s & '80s either, as there are articles to this point from every decade since.*  This time around, however, it's primarily from the actions of Collective Shout, a conservative Australian advocacy and anti-porn lobbying group.

These actions over the recent weeks are also reminiscent of banks and credit card processors threatening to stop all payment processing for OnlyFans if they continue to host sexually explicit content.  No, not all content on OnlyFans is NSFW, as there was an account for "Saucy Victorian Ankle Pics" (SFW YouTube Link), but people are also using is similar to Patreon as an alternative method of income.  I guess those are the businesses that Collective Shout and the payment processors' respective boards of directors what to help facilitate?  I mean, who hasn't thought of starting an OnlyFans account and posting only pictures of ceiling or floor fans?**  Or maybe furniture?

This feels like a pretty similar scene, except instead of adult games being delisted on the grounds of payment processors not wanting to have their services go to pay for games that involve things such as incest or rape, there are also reports of games that have LGBTQIA+ storylines and characters that have also been delisted under the pretense of the same umbrella.  That's not to say that I think that a game that features rape, incest, sex trafficking, underage depictions of sexual exploitation, etc (it actually kind of feels wrong to "et cetera" that list) should be considered entertainment, but a blanket ban because a topic is part of a checklist isn't the way to go either.  Just because a story might have a character who was raped, had incest forced upon them, was sex trafficked, was sexually exploited as a minor, etc (see above) doesn't immediately mean that the game should be delisted because of the content within the game.  Some of these could be avenues for people processing trauma.  Remember That Dragon, Cancer?  But to also target games that feature, include, or mention LGBTQIA+ storylines because of a supposed moral superiority is the same kind of culture war bull shit that we're seeing all over the United States by way of Project 2025.

Over the last week (as of Tuesday, July 29th, 2025), I've performed several searches on both Steam and Itch.io (I have accounts on both, so it's not a default setting-type search that's purposefully excluding adult-related content), and only on Itch.io have I experienced any kind of censorship in search results and seen a page for a delisted game.  I also haven't seen any of the aforementioned titles from Steam being delisted, and after doing an "NSFW" search on both sites, there are still a lot of "adult" games on Steam versus Itch.io.  Maybe the games that were pulled from Steam are just more hardcore than 3001: A MILF Odyssey - NSFW Sci-Fi Porn?  From what I've read from several articles, the delisting on Steam has affected only "several hundred" titles, while Itch.io has pulled nearly all tagged NSFW titles as Itch.io undergoes a review process of the content in the affected games.

I could literally talk myself in circles without getting anywhere or making more of a coherent argument, so I'm going to cut myself off here.  Maybe that's a copout instead of doing a longer and better researched thinkpiece on the topic (and better written for that matter), but even just bringing up the topic is something.  Maybe?  

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

*I was unable to find historical data about banks not allowing people involved in any facet of the sex work industry, only that it's been happening for decades through a combination of self-imposed moral high ground and because banks view any type of "sex work" as a "high-risk for fraud "industry, often citing sex trafficking as a catalyst.

**In the early days of Damon Lindelof's Instagram account (circa 2012), he was only posting pictures of sinks, so it's kind of similar.

PS.  Related, a Kotaku article about a statement from Mastercard claiming that they didn't pressure Steam to pull/delist games.