Corporate censorship: Steam forced to delist games
TLDR: That's why you should accept monero payments instead of Fiat.
One of the largest digital distribution platform for video games, developed by Valve, aka Steam has been delisting hundreds of games from its platform. Let's dig deeper into this.
Campaign to Steam
Steam recently updated its publisher guidelines, disallowing adult content because of issues with payment processors (in this case, Visa and Mastercard).
Steam also notified some developers that their games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set by payment processors, cards network, and banks. According to Steam revenue share information. Steam takes a 30% cut of all game sales, with the remaining 70% goes to publisher. Steam is making money from the revenue share which is strongly impacted by the rate at which people buy games on its platform.
With the issue that Steam payment processors don't want to get involved with adult rated games (which will be discussed later on). There is a decline in Steam's sells which leads to less revenue being extracted. Although in recent games posts, Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, and allow all lawful purchases.
See the history of Steam delisting games in this
What's the deal with Payment Processor?
As I mentioned above, payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard do not want to be involved with mature/adult-rated games. Turns out Collective Shout sent a letter to several payment processors (not just Visa and MasterCard). Collective Shout is an Australian activist group, founded in 2009 by Melinda Tankard Reist lobbying against the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.
In fact, they listed out to whom they sent the letter, in Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam on July 11.2025:
Mr Alex Chriss, Chief Executive Officer and President, Paypal
Mr Michael Miebach, Chief Executive Officer, Mastercard
Mr Ryan McInerney, Chief Executive Officer, Visa
Mr Bruce Lowthers, Chief Executive Officer, Paysafe Limited
Mr Michael J. Shepherd Director, Interim CEO and President, Discover
Mr Takayoshi Futae, President, CEO and Chairman, Japan Credit Bureau (JCB)
Re: Your corporations facilitating and profiting from rape, incest and child sexual abuse game sales
Collective Shout itself has a history of issues with Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V, too. If you're interested, you can read this, which involves Kmart and Target (they are now managed under the umbrella of Kmart Group). They say that GTA V encourages players to murder women for entertainment.
Though the purpose of open-world games is to provide players with a large, explorable environment where they experience freedom of choice (not predetermined-style, which forces the player to behave as expected according to the game), immersion and exploration with a suitably large map size, replayability with the concept of open world, players can progress a mission, a quest or such things that players can replay and experiment, and cognitive escapism and relaxation, meaning players can do in the game anything they can imagine, like killing NPCs, smashing cars, train robbery and else.
Without cognitive escapism, people will be all the more eager. This might just as well lead to a real life incident. The more one's mind spends time thinking about something the more likely that something is going to be turned into action.
Owning vs Renting
In some cases owning is different from buying. Including this one, which is games. What we thought to be bought and then owned, is actually licenced for personal use (ie, rented). Publishers can take back our games in our library and, in some games, we can't play even play because the main server is down. In most cases we can not run private or local servers either, as specified by the Licence's terms & conditions.
It was different back in the day when most people used DVDs. No matter what happened to the artist, band or else, as long as you had the DVDs, you could enjoy the music, repeat as much as you'd like. These days, subscription is more popular because of its ease of use, yet for most of them, you're not really owning what you consume, regardless of what type of subscription you have. You can actually see the dead game list here, if you're interested.
One example is Electronic Arts (EA) which is indeed shutting down the online servers for several of its games later this year. This includes major sports titles like FIFA 23 and Madden NFL 22, as well as Need for Speed: Rivals. Here is the list of Online services shut down. Read this for more information
Take a step back to see better
First things first, judging objectively, it all comes down to age-appropriate content consumption and purchasing mechanisms. Collective Shout sent a letter to the payment processors supporting hearsay and a slippery slope fallacy, regardless of any factual basis, thus causing the delisting of hundreds of games.
Both sides have their own issue, Steam with its age verification that can be broken just by entering a false age. Same with Collective Shout with the history of issuing GTA V because it encourages players to murder women for entertainment and completely reverses the purpose of open-world games.
How to play a game without worrying about losing access or being censored?
From whatever angle you look at it, this is corporate censorship, starting from the letter from Collective Shout to payment processors leading to Steam agreement to delist games. What's the solution?
Use XMR (Monero) as a mean of payment. With XMR, no one can force anyone to delist games. Your money remains under your full control regardless of what you mean to do with it. There are several distribution platforms for video games which accept Monero as payment like GOG and IndieGala, some of the games there are also at a lower price rather than on Steam.
Instead of worrying about, let's say, a $10 price today, which could rise to $100 the next day because of volatility, pricing the whole game in cryptocurrencies is an option. Yet, to this day, Steam does not accept cryptocurrencies for game purchases. As time passes, more and more people use cryptocurrencies on a daily basis, and they will have to adapt and update their policy. That is why we need to use Monero as individuals until its popularity forces corporations to accept it as well.
Conclusion
There are more complicated reasons the video game industry has changed over time. Yet it still has so much potential, as games fulfill parts of our life, our soul, by experimenting, or doing things that we thought could not be done in this world. With E-Sports recently boosting the gaming industry, which involves many other fields of work. Feel free to criticize this, let me know what you think? Another revolution in the gaming world maybe?
Suggest changes
cyclonus
2025-08-27
Donate XMR to the author:89aJQ4sb5w7BxixFBCNcHnDczBhCyUo7yTq2dGkT2sG9HoYHTphFWcyPZtbBXipk64Cmi39yUwcU5J3UhbqK11WgNbTFF4x