It Turns Out, Steam’s Adult Content Ban Has Been Plotted For A Year And Is Spearheaded By One Of Project 2025’s Leading Voices
To be honest, this article is a nothingburger and the title of the post is an outright falsehood. They themselves even seem to have changed the article title to a nothing statement.Article basically just says “You know how Steam removed some adult content? Well in the big Project 2025 text it also talks about restricting pornography!”. There’s no links, no plot, no spearheading, nothing.
So apart from saying “Yes, Project 2025 is full of bad things”, there’s nothing else to be said here.
2026 Bingo Card: Disco Elysium banned for promoting “pornography” (LGBTQ+ themes)
Honestly hoping this punches right into the gaming rightwing media sphere and leads to it having a meltdown. Would be funny if it was the treats being taken by overzealous christofascists that implodes the internet video game alt right media sphere.
Possible but doesn’t seem likely. Even ‘Collective Shout’ is a highly conservative group yet the chud sentiment seems to be “how dare these feminists”
So more or less they’re blaming feminists for censoring games even though it’s evangelical Christians, man the narrative really got flipped post 2010s…
Collective Shout is run of the mill radfems. Their most conservative element is one of the founders being Christian, but they otherwise espouse the same views you’ll see any other radfem org share, with anti porn/anti sex work being their loudest topics.
I think people are misrepresenting collective shout severely because of what they did, and it’s important that we recognize it as radical feminism, because this aligns with exactly what radfems want.
gaming rightwing media sphere
why is it so big
Gaming wasn’t as politicized before gamergate
There’s book that goes into this. Here is the author talking about it. https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-bannon-white-gamers-seinfeld-joshua-green-donald-trump-devils-bargain-sarah-palin-world-warcraft-gamergate-2017-7
Transcript
Bannon is a fascinating character. He kind of came out of nowhere. He’s from a Navy family in Richmond, Virginia. He served in the Navy. He kind of basically talked his way into Harvard Business School and a job at Goldman Sachs."
After Goldman Sachs, he started his own boutique investment bank Bannon & Company and he was trying to broker a sale of Castle Rock Entertainment, which owned the rights to “Seinfeld.” He was trying to broker a sale between Westinghouse and Ted Turner and when Turner got the table, it turned out he was a little short of cash and rather than let the deal fall apart, Bannon and his partners agreed to take residuals in five television shows, including “Seinfeld,” in exchange for their cash fee. At the time, “Seinfeld” was like in its second or third season, wasn’t a big deal, Bannon thought it was going to be the runt of the litter. As we all know, it became a hit and he has since made about $2.5 dollars.
Bannon had actually spent about a year in the mid-2000s in Hong Kong as the CEO of this bizarre video game company. The company didn’t actually make video games, what it did was try to profit from something called gold-mining, where you have players go in to these games, win gold and special armor and prizes, and then go sell it to gamers in the real world so they can kind of cheat and skip ahead a couple of levels.
This was a serious business, it was actually backed by Goldman Sachs, but it crashed and went bankrupt because the gamers themselves who weren’t cheating became enraged basically that these other people were doing, they put so much pressure on the gaming companies. The gamers organized themselves on these “World of Warcraft” message boards. They put so much pressure on the video game companies, that they decided to basically ban gold-farming, which killed Bannon’s business, but it awakened him to the power of what he called “rootless white males” who spend all their time online. And five years later when Bannon wound up at Breitbart, he resolved to try and attract those people over to Breitbart because he thought they could be radicalized in a kind of populist, nationalist way. And the way that Bannon did that, the bridge between the angry abusive gamers and Breitbart and Pepe was Milo Yiannopoulous, who Bannon discovered and hired to be Breitbart’s tech editor.
thanks
Mainly due to grifters being paid very well for spreading bullshit misinformation and blaming everything on “the woke” via both the algorithm and that angry young men love feeding into that sphere.
the woke when gamergate happened no one used that word ,only the word politically correct existed
Yeah it was only “PC culture” and feminists “inserting themselves” in game critique from what I remember, and then it turned out gamergate was more or less a test by weird crypto fash how quickly they could radicalize gamers.
I recall the term “social justice warrior” (SJW) being in vogue at the time.
no that came after it
I guess the gamers really were being oppressed?
Bill Ackman has also been involved in putting pressure on payment processors regarding “adult content”: https://www.ft.com/content/cff23e36-b507-4717-8830-8b06741c8fd5
There really needs to be more research/info on why this is happening.
Seems like all the worst people are involved. It’s more or less an attack on freedom of speech.
I been hacked. All my waifus gone. This just sold please help me.
The most right wing demographic losing their treats due to their own bigotry is kind of a funny prospect. This is definitely a “let them fight” scenario
There is nothing wrong with pornographic video games as a concept and everyone watches porn, not only right wingers. This is censorship by one of the most detestable abrahamic offshoots, western bourgeois christianity, because they are fucked up deluded nutcases who worship the Demiurge and want everyone to suffer, pushing greater bourgeois censorship and state surveillance as a preventative measure for any left populist action (steam censorship is part of a larger plan to clamp down on the internet more being carried out across all western governments).
This is definitely a “let them fight” scenario
No it isn’t. These are the first steps towards declaring queer existence to be pornographic, and then banning queer content from every platform entirely. I’m sorry if this comes off as harsh, but I am so fucking tired of seeing this take from people who should know better. Please think a few more steps ahead as to what this actually means and what their real goals are. Reactionaries consistently wield payment processors like a club to deplatform anything they don’t like. They’ve been doing this for basically decades at this point. To see hexbears going “haha silly gamers losing their titty slop games” without a single thought as to why this is happening or considering that this may just be the opening moves towards a larger goal, has been fucking maddening.
Editing to add some context: The Christofascists behind this have always seemed queer existence to be inherently sexual. Just take a look at their rhetoric surrounding the litany of book bans that have happened throughout US schools. This is just another prong in their “”“save the children”“” (read: erase queer people from public existence) crusade.
Also, in a lot of ways, the war on porn is even worse than the war on drugs, since drugs have an actual medical definition, whereas no one can agree on what porn is. The most famous definition is “you know it when you see it”.
every Sears catalog with underwear models is porn
no it isn’t. we need some kind of big post disabusing people of this vulgar and poorly thought out take
I’m not really equipped to write one about this issue wrt video games but I might do so regarding what I see as parallel patterns, i.e. sex negativity (in media) and disdain for atheism.
some of y’all don’t remember the Bush era and it shows.
I would love to learn tbh. I just figured that the right wingers going after gaming would mainly affect gamers, who are the just right wing losers
I would love to learn tbh. I just figured that the right wingers going after gaming would mainly affect gamers, who are the just right wing losers
I have to wonder what you even think video games are with this kind of take.
Lmao. Thank you for your input 👏
there are people who are gamers in that they occasionally enjoy a video game, and then there people who identify as gamers
🤨
Moralist nonsense
Imagine finding censorship by anglo cristofashists(on a global scale no less) good, cause the thing they are banning is something you personally don’t like.
Oh I don’t think it’s good. But gamers are going to be eating shit. And that’s still funny
i too enjoy celebrating censorship campaigns driven by theocratic fascists because of the potential to make my perceived enemies in the culture wars sad. surely this won’t be directed towards left-wing causes
How long do you think it will take for pro Palestine content online to be flagged as adult and thus censored? It’s not a matter of if but when
I mean, this affects queer people too. Like, our existence is deemed sexual and adult… and soon illegal too it feels like.
Removed by mod
No more rainbow capitalism because no more rainbow, yes more capitalism is not a good thing
I read someone say that getting rid of rainbow capitalism is the canary in the coal mine, because tokenization is one of the most prominent defenses against violence that the LGBTQ community has, and capitalists not doing it is a sign that they’re seeing the culture shift to the point that not pandering to them is more profitable.
read someone say that getting rid of rainbow capitalism is the canary in the coal mine
Target pulling all pride merch in May last year. They saw it coming
Removed by mod
Minorities are already more radicalized than the general population, and white people are not radicalized by minority suffering. What the fuck are you smoking?
FOH with that nazbol shit
The existence of blahaj.zone (and the blahaj emote here) show that even trans people have become feckless stooges of the bourgeoisie and need to be shocked back into recognising who their enemies are.
Forcibly removing minorities from the economy is a good thing in that maybe we’ll stop mindlessly living in poverty and handing what labour and value we have to the exact individuals responsible for our suffering. If it takes that level of suffering to radicalise people then maybe the people should think about exactly why it is they were willing to operate the orphan crushing machine even when they knew the orphans being crushed were their own comrades.
Much like how I support all efforts to ban minorities from participating in the military, I support all efforts to exclude minorities from the capitalist economy
I wanted to call out the absurdity of equating particpating in the capitalist economy
to directly and intentionally contributing to imperialism but on futher reflection, this nonsense screed is nothing more then Tailism and should be ignored as if it came from Infrared Haz himself. 
are you serious about an emote for a stuffed animal being a sign that trans people are feckless stooges
A few months ago this person went on a tirade about how sex is bad because it “objectifies human bodies” and apparently involves “blood and urine.”
wow thats bad, she sounds like she’s got questionable takes.
can u not degender her tho
“You claim to hate capitalism, but you use an iPhone. Curious.”
This affects companies across the board, including itch.io which has also been removing “adult games” from their platform. It also isn’t just restricted to games, but anything people pay for that may violate the arbitrary standards set by payment processors. So, if they start targeting LGBTQ content, it would likely force LGBTQ media content underground worldwide. That doesn’t seem like a good thing in any context.
steam competitors aren’t really beneficial to end-users either. it fragments everything and is analogous to when all the netflix competitors got going and now streaming is even more of a nightmare than just paying cable was.
we should seize steam.
I don’t think that’s what’s going to actually happen. In the same way that Bluesky is replacing Twitter while Mastodon comparatively languishes, whatever decentralized way of distributing games we might hope for is just going to get beat out by Epic or whatever next launcher shows up, assuming these rules don’t become reified as actual laws. Creators will still just be in a situation of making a game that plays by all these rules, or languishing in obscurity. And that’s assuming Steam even loses its grip, I’m not holding my breath on that. I think it’s much more likely they just keep dutifully enforcing these bans, and the vast majority of people simply don’t know about it or don’t really care unfortunately.
all the steam competitors suck even worse than steam does and it’s inconvenient to maintain multiple accounts so steam is pretty damn safe unless they go public or musk buys it.
Leaving the rest aside, even if steam did lose some market share, it would be like Netflix losing market share: we’ll go from one dominant bad platform to 6 or 8 squabbling platforms that are all even worse.
If we want to replace these dominant platforms (in any sector) we need to create a better alternative somehow, instead of hoping the market will
Counterpoint: if game distribution is consolidated under Steam, it’ll make it that much easier to seize and nationalize
They won’t fight because major studios would be affected last and only after a couple of rounds of racket. Games with sexual content were easy targets and those you can hardly milk. Those already problematic like Activision with CoD, well-beloved by the type of gamers you probably dislike most, would happily do an LLM Donald cameo if it means funding or easing taxes.
