You may have heard recently that payment processors — namely Mastercard and Visa — have caused certain videogames to be removed from sale. Quite why it’s up to them what you legally buy with your own money is above my pay grade to try and explain. However, it might wind up blowing up in their faces if history decides to repeat (but surely you can Nazi it coming when it does)…
Warning, this article contains some language which people might find offensive or triggering.
Why did I bring up erotic manga, often referred to as the catch-all “hentai manga”? What does ecchi (fanservice) have to do with Visa? Where does Mastercard fit into tentacle porn? Follow me down this rabbit hole for a moment.
Between the 1960s and 1989, the Japanese magazine market had a boom in manga stories focussed around naked people and sex. It went through a few forms, from more realistic art styles to an anime aesthetic — that one actually kicked off “otaku” culture. The term “otaku” is basically synonymous with the word “nerd”, as it’s someone who’s passionate about anime/cartoons/videogames/etc. Most of the magazines would feature any kind of story, so long as sex was one of the elements present, but it was generally just two people getting naked and doing the deed.
Why specifically 1989? Well, that’s when a “moral panic” happened, because sensationalist tabloids decided to alter the scene when taking photographs. The scene was the home of a serial murderer named Tsutomu Miyazaki, and the details of his crimes are horrible, but unimportant to this, suffice to say that the media was eager to get what they could out of it.
So, in a room full of manga, magazines, and videotapes, they sought out the most salacious areas to photograph — his porn and hentai. This dubbed Miyazaki as “The Otaku Murderer”. Why focus on the print media instead of the horror movies? Whatever the reason, the moniker stuck, and innocent citizens had to hide their otaku-ness from everyone, or risk being tarred with the same brush.
What does that have to do with Mastercard overreaching in 2025? Why should Visa care about murders? Well, after Miyazaki was arrested, kicking off the moral panic, magazine publishers decided to brand anything with adult material with a special mark, and require it to be sectioned off, away from any other publications.
With the magazines harder to obtain, readership numbers declined, as did the number of products available. So, how to get the smaller number of readers interested in your “adults only” product? You might be surprised to learn that the secret is to “get even more extreme”. Massive breasts, hermaphrodites, BDSM, animals — the chains had come off as far as hentai was concerned. Or on, in the case of BDSM.
Ironically, this period was soon followed by bishōjo AKA moe, which is softer, more romantic characters and stories. But that also includes “lolicon” (Lolita Complex, after the Nabokov novel), which features younger characters, or ones who look young.
Which is why I’m writing this article. The current moral panic which caused Mastercard and Visa to wet themselves (hey, that could be a hentai from 1991), is against anything with objectionable content. Similar to Japan’s criminal code against “obscene materials”, this isn’t defined, so people are scrambling to find ways to obey stupid rules. For hentai, they add mosaics over genitals, or make it an animal penis instead of a human one. For videogames… well, that’s still to be decided.
Let’s say that Steam removes all games featuring nipples or genitals. Well, the inevitable Adults Only Videogame Marketplace will certainly allow more extreme content. Yay, Visa got rid of fictionalised incest videogames, but oh no, now there are games featuring Super Porn! And the Adults Only Videogame Marketplace runs on cryptocurrency, so even Karens Shout can’t get them to back down!
The shift to adult-only magazines turned them from titillating manga to pornographic material. Does Mastercard want porn games without the game? Because this is how you get porn games without the game.