Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.

But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!

I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.

The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.

This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.

Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)), GTA5 is as popular there as anywhere, but game franchises like Mortal Kombat are banned.

And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.