Recently, Valve's Steam store has suffered a heavy blow due to pressure from payment service providers, and a large number of adult-themed games have been removed from the platform.While rival stores such as GOG are boycotting payment service providers’ demands for removal of vulgar content, Valve is still in a tough situation, as the main target of the current censorship wave.

Affected by the current new restrictions, Valve has made significant adjustments to the Steam market rules for developers.The company has banned adult content games from being released through Early Access mode in the past few weeks, and several of these games have recently failed internal reviews because Valve said that it is "unable to provide Early Access Development Mode support for games containing adult themes."

Unfortunately, this is not the only new limit faced by Steam game developers over the past week.Crimson Delight Games, a developer of adult fantasy RPG "Legendary Desire Story: Aphrodisia", revealed on Steam that Valve also bans developers from adding additional adult content to published games through patches.

Crimson Delight Games has launched this RPG on September 15, 2025. The game contains adult content tips and has been reviewed and put on the shelves.However, the studio originally planned to add more adult content to the game through updates while developing a large DLC expansion package, but Valve prohibited adding such adult content to the game in the form of free updates.

The studio told players on the Steam blog: "For applications that have passed the review and are listed on the store, Valve does not allow adult content to be added after release." According to Automaton, the developer also added on Reddit that the restriction on the day the game was released has not yet taken effect, but is a subsequent new rule.

This means that if the developer still decides to continue adding additional adult content, it will need to be launched in some form of DLC, but it is not clear whether such DLCs are available for free or must be paid content.Despite this ups and downs, the game development team did not blame Valve for Steam's new restrictions, but was working with the platform to solve related problems.

"We don't feel any threat or coercion, but we can feel that they are trying their best to help developers deal with problems in the process," the studio said, acknowledging that Valve is facing "pressure from payment service providers step by step."