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."

Additionally, Yamada said that Japanese companies who "deal with adult games" are being prevented from opening bank accounts.

According to machine translation of reporting from Japanese gaming news outlet GameSpark, both Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) have confirmed the reports. In interviews the FSA conducted with Japanese banks preventing the transfer of Steam revenue, the banks said the decision was "a comprehensive judgment" based on Japan's Act on Prevention of Transfer of Criminal Proceeds and its Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act, which aim to verify and regulate international commerce that could be used to fund illegal activity.

In a YouTube broadcast discussing the issue, Yamada questioned the relevance of those acts, as the Steam transactions are related to legitimate sales. The issue, Yamata said, is that Japanese law currently doesn't have procedures in place to address the nuances of international Steam sales, which leaves Japanese banks in a position to apply their own restrictions that raise concerns about freedom of speech in media production.

As Automaton reported last year, Yamada—described in his X profile as specializing in "freedom of expression"—has previously expressed concerns about censorship when Visa abruptly halted credit card payments to Japanese platforms hosting adult content to "protect the [Visa] brand."

Those concerns echo ongoing disputes in the US over restrictions on adult content, in which activists and organizations like the ACLU have argued that the "vague and ambiguous policy requirements" of companies like MasterCard and Visa, alongside growing state efforts to regulate access to pornography, threaten the livelihoods and free speech rights of sex workers and adult content creators.