One of Steam‘s darker underbellies would be the NSFW or adult game categories and it just so happens to be quite popular in Japan. Now, however, some Japanese adult game devs are facing an issue after their domestic banks began blocking the revenue from their adult games on Steam.
The report came from Japanese politician, Taro Yamada after a growing number of complaints from several Japanese adult game devs caught his attention. Yamada then took to X/Twitter to post about what actions he was going to undertake and to shed some light on the issue.
According to the translation for Yamada’s post, Japanese banks have been automatically rejecting remittances from the US and Valve Corporation/Steam once they find out that the money was generated from adult games. This means the developers who made the games are being denied their income, even if they earned it fairly.
The odd part is that the remittances being blocked mean the games were sold abroad (US for example), and not in Japan, meaning Japanese censorship laws shouldn’t apply. Thus, politicians like Yamada have begun investigating the matter to help adult game devs.
The Banks Have Their Own Reasoning
Meanwhile, some of the banks in question have given their answers as to why they’re blocking the adult game revenue from Steam. Some of them are treating the money made through the Steam adult games as “dirty” or technically “criminal proceeds”, according to Automaton Media’s translation.
Yamada argues back that there the nature of the income and the transfer was in fact, not illegal since it came from a legitimate business and platform. Steam notably has a rather sizable compendium of adult games whose authors hail from different countries. It appears the problem and the seemingly conservative proxy censorship from banks mostly exist in Japan.
Looking back historically, however, the very first adult video game actually came from Japan back in the 1980s where they were often called “eroge” or “bishลjo”. Japan itself even has an established culture of adult video games, which explains the strong presence of adult games on Steam that seem to originate from Japan as compared to other regions.
