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

pcgamer.com:

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.»

今度は銀行による表現規制！？”日本の銀行が成人向けゲームを排除している””銀行による表現規制が行われているのではないか”そのようなご意見・ご質問が複数寄せられています。具体的には、以下のような問題が発生していると把握しています。日本人・日本企業が、アメリカのValve… pic.twitter.com/w0Bj2hiFDRJanuary 29, 2025

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