Banks in Japan are blocking Steam payments for sex games, leaving Japanese adult game devs cut off from income

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you if you’ve ever toggled off Steam’s sexual content filters—whether out of curiosity or otherwise is your business—but there’s a lot of porn on Steam. At time of writing, of the roughly 122,000 games on Steam, almost 6,000 are marked as Adult Only. That’s about 1 in 20, and nearly half of those are tagged as Hentai games. Despite the surplus of horny anime material available for purchase, Japanese adult game devs are apparently being kept from the profits of their Steam sales.

Yesterday, Taro Yamada, a member of the Japanese Diet’s House of Councillors, said on X that lawmakers have received reports that banks in Japan are preventing Japanese developers from accessing the revenue from overseas Steam sales of games with adult content (via Automaton). “If the game in question is for adult audiences,” Yamada said via machine translation, “their remittances from abroad are rejected by Japanese banks, meaning they are unable to receive the profits.”