LOS ANGELES—Steam, the popular online gaming platform, recently purged scores of adult and sexually explicit games to appease payment processors. Several news outlets report that the anti-porn group Collective Shout took credit for the pressure campaign.
AVN reported last week that “certain kinds of adult content” have been banned on the platform in a clear bow to payment processors, financial institutions and the major credit card companies. However, this anti-porn group, based in Australia, has claimed responsibility for the so-called purge of games.
Kutaku reports that Collective Shout led a “grassroots campaign” enlisting child safety advocates to pressure companies like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to force Steam to ultimately censor these games.
“Hundreds of sexually violent online games that let players role-play rape, incest and the torture of women and children have been suddenly removed from the global gaming platform Steam,” said Melinda Tankard Reist, a co-founder at Collective Shout, in a social media post on X.
Reist identifies herself as a so-called “pro-life feminist” who aligns with conservative Christian beliefs and is an avid anti-pornography campaigner.
Collective Shout is Australia’s equivalent of the far-right anti-pornography group the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), based in the United States. NCOSE has a decades-long history of being aligned with anti-LBGTQ+ hate groups and campaigning for the censorship of speech that is protected by the First Amendment.
Collective Shout’s Reist explained that the group’s campaign was targeted at the payment processors for Valve Corporation, the parent company of Steam.
The policy change is currently published under onboarding documentation for developers and publishers who choose to market their games through Valve’s Steamworks program. Steamworks is Valve’s toolkit for developers and publishers to build out their game distribution model through Steam.
Listed under “What You Shouldn’t Publish on Steam,” the policy now prohibits “[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 an interesting sidebar to this story, Vice News took down the original reports by freelance journalist Ana Valens that first made the connection between Collective Shout’s campaigning and the purge of games on Steam, criticizing the group for its claims and for its fomentation of censorship.
Valens took to Bluesky, accusing the parent company of Vice, Savage Ventures, of removing the articles. Valens posted, “Vice’s owner Savage Ventures has requested the removal of my Collective Shout articles. … This is due to concerns about the controversial subject matter—not journalistic complaints.”
Valens subsequently resigned from Vice, and at least one co-worker followed suit in protest of the outlet’s removal of her stories.
In response, Reist called those critical of the Valve purge of games on Steam nothing more than “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists.”
