Adult games platform policy tracker, 1994 to 2026

This is a dataset of dated events that changed what adult games can be sold, how they can be paid for and who can see them. It runs from the founding of the ESRB in 1994 to the Android developer verification rule of September 2026, and each of its 45 rows has a date, an actor, a summary and a source.

It exists because the record is scattered. Each event was reported on its own, in a news post or a platform announcement, and anyone writing about the subject has had to rebuild the sequence from scratch. This puts it in one place, in a form that can be sorted, filtered and cited.

What the data shows

• 45 events from 16 September 1994 to 30 September 2026.
• 19 of them fall in 2025. No other year has more than four.
• Stores account for 20 events, and Steam alone for nine. Membership platforms account for eight.
• Restrictions outnumber relaxations by 11 to 4. A further seven events are changes to how payment is taken, and three are blocks that apply in particular countries.
• Nine rows rest on a primary source, meaning the actor’s own announcement. The other 36 rest on press reports or reference works.

These are counts of recorded events. They are not a measure of how much content was affected, which no platform has published.

What counts as an event

An event is included when all three of these are true.

1. It changed, or publicly sought to change, what adult games may be sold, how they are paid for, or who may see them.
2. It can be dated to at least the year.
3. There is a public source for it.

That takes in store rules, payment decisions, age verification requirements, court rulings and laws, ratings decisions, and public campaigns and statements that were part of those changes. A few events outside games are included because they explain what followed, such as card networks cutting off a video site in 2020.

The fields

Limits

• It is not complete. It records the events the studio has found and sourced. Platform changes that were never announced, or were reported only in forums, are missing.
• It leans on English-language sources. Events in Japan are recorded from English-language reporting and are thinner than they should be.
• Most sources are secondary. Where a row rests on a press report or a reference work, the date and wording are that source’s. Older rows in particular rely on Wikipedia.
• 2025 is over-represented. The concentration of events in 2025 partly reflects how closely that year was reported.
• Dates vary in precision. Some events are known only to the month or the year. The precision field says which.
• It does not show cause. Two rows being close in time does not establish that one led to the other. Where a platform itself named a cause, the summary says so.
• It is not legal advice. Rules change, and the current rule is the one in the platform’s own document.

How to use it

The data is free to reuse under the licence below. Some things it can answer directly:

• When a particular platform changed its rules, in order.
• Which changes were to payment and which were to content.
• Which countries have been blocked or age-gated, and since when.
• How the events of July 2025 unfolded day by day.

The Journal covers the same ground in prose. The timeline of NSFW games removed from Steam and itch.io follows July 2025 in detail, how payment processors decide which adult games can exist explains the rules behind the payment rows, and Steam age verification for adult games covers the age checks.

Updates and corrections

The tracker is versioned. New events are added in a new version, and every change is listed in the changelog at the foot of this page. Rows keep their id between versions.

If an event is missing or a row is wrong, report it under the corrections standard, with a source. The research method standard sets out how every Veilwright report is made.