Where to buy adult VR games after the 2025 crackdown: the games stayed, the card button went

Why I'm writing this

In the summer of 2025, adult games went through the biggest clean-out I can remember. In mid-July Steam quietly pulled a batch of titles and added a rule about "certain kinds of adult only content". A week later itch.io hid every adult page from its search and browse pages, and that was thousands of games. No law asked for either move. The pressure came through banks and card networks, after a campaign by an Australian lobby group.

I can see why this topic never cools down. Instagram and every other feed keep pushing this content at you, again and again, and repetition works. It's the oldest rule in sales: water wears away stone. Ask often enough and curiosity does the rest. Or a sense of adventure. Or the feeling that you're hiring someone just for yourself.

I've also heard more than one story of a couple that fell apart after one partner got into VR. I don't have numbers for that and won't pretend I do. But writing about this industry as if it costs nobody anything would be dishonest.

Still, the industry is here and so is the demand. This piece is about how the companies that move the money, and in the UK an actual regulator, shake that industry every now and then, and where you can still buy the games today.

Alex R.

Where each game is sold on 1 November 2026

We went through the stores for every adult VR title we cover. The table is the short answer; the sections after it explain the catches.

None of these is in the Meta Horizon Store, which does not accept sexual content at all. That rule is older than the crackdown, and our headset guide explains what it means for a Quest owner.

Paying: the card button is gone on itch.io

The clearest change is at checkout. On 1 November we opened the purchase page of an ordinary $5 game on itch.io and found two buttons, Pay with PayPal and Pay with Card. On the checkout pages of Deepthroat Simulator: Quest Edition, Adult VR Game Room and Holodexxx: The Club there was one: PayPal. The adult pages also asked for a date of birth, with the line "You must be 18 or older to purchase this content".

The reason is in itch.io's own post from 31 July 2025. Stripe, which ran the card option for over ten years, told itch.io it cannot support "content designed for sexual gratification", and itch.io turned card payments off on adult pages. The post says itch.io is talking to other processors. Fifteen months later, the Developer Updates board has no newer word on it, and a developer quoted on the forum in September 2026 put it plainly: itch.io "only allows PayPal payments for adult-rated titles".

For most buyers PayPal is a detour. For some it is a wall. In April 2026 a player asked in itch.io's support forum how to buy a game when PayPal is not available in their country; nobody from itch.io answered. If that is you, check whether the game is also on Steam, where cards still work, or on the developer's Patreon. Adult VR Game Room's developer says the opposite holds for some players, who cannot use Patreon and buy on itch.io instead. We did not find a source on whether PayPal lets you pay by card without an account in every country, so we are not promising that route.

Steam has its own payment story. In August 2025 PayPal stopped working there for every currency except the euro, Canadian, Australian and US dollars, sterling and yen. Valve's explanation was that PayPal's acquiring bank for those currencies stopped processing Steam transactions. Valve did not tie it to adult games, and neither do we; the timing is the only link.

Hidden from search, open by direct link

Searching itch.io for "deepthroat simulator" while logged out on 1 November returned three unrelated projects and a note: "Sensitive content is hidden from results." Paid adult pages have been out of search and browse since July 2025, and itch.io describes such a page as "otherwise fully functional": it opens from a direct link and stays in libraries and collections. Whether these pages show for a signed-in adult with the sensitive-content setting on, we could not check, because we do not sign in to stores.

In practice that means the developer's link, or ours. Our game pages that list a store link straight to the page we read.

The UK: pages blocked, or a card on file

Since 25 July 2025 the UK's Online Safety Act has required age checks for adult content online. itch.io chose to block adult-tagged pages for UK visitors instead of adding ID checks, while it looked for a "digital ID" partner it was comfortable with. Purchases stay downloadable from your library or itch's desktop app. We found no later post saying the block was lifted.

Steam went the other way and, from late August 2025, asks UK users to add a credit card before showing mature content. This is the only part of the story driven by a law.

What happened, in order

The chain started with a game called No Mercy, which was briefly on sale in spring 2025 before being banned. The Australian group Collective Shout campaigned against it and then wrote to PayPal, Visa and Mastercard about both stores. itch.io's own account traces the July changes to that campaign.

• Mid-July 2025, Steam. A new line appears in Valve's rules for developers: no "content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors and related card networks and banks", with "certain kinds of adult only content" singled out. SteamDB saw incest-themed adult games disappear (PC Gamer). The line was still in the Steamworks onboarding rules on 1 November 2026.
• 24 July 2025, itch.io. Every adult page drops out of search and browse; card payments through Stripe stop for 18+ pages. itch.io advises buyers to back up their downloads.
• 31 July 2025, itch.io. Free adult games return to search. Paid ones will come back "slowly".
• 1 to 3 August 2025. Mastercard says it "has not evaluated any game or required restrictions". Valve answers that Mastercard never spoke to it directly but reached it through payment processors and their banks, who cited "risk to the Mastercard brand" (TechCrunch). The two accounts do not match, and we have no way to settle which is closer.
• September 2025, Steam. A developer reports that Steam refused Early Access for a game "with mature themes" (80.lv), and another that released adult games can no longer add new sexual content in updates, only as separately reviewed DLC (Automaton). Neither came with a public Valve announcement.
• March 2026, SubscribeStar. The Patreon alternative tightens its banned-content list citing processors and acquiring banks, then tells users a day later that it will revert the change.

VR studios moved their builds to Patreon

The crackdown did not take the VR games we cover off sale. It changed their shape. Steam's two September rules make it a poor home for games that grow by updates, and most adult VR games do: Adult VR Game Room is on version 0.6.6 and its Steam page is still a wishlist, while ComeCloser's developer says a Steam release is "most likely" one day. The builds that change every month live on Patreon and itch.io, and Steam gets finished games, if anything.

That pushes players toward subscriptions. A one-off purchase becomes a monthly pledge, and the one-time option, where it exists, costs more: ComeCloser's developer names a $100 Patreon pledge as the lifetime route. The Patreon-only characters and builds are a separate cost again, which our Premium guide puts next to the subscription.

A thin line to hang a genre on

A few payment companies decided what adults could buy in two of the biggest game stores, and none of them had to say so in public. That is the part worth remembering. The games survived because the stores kept selling by direct link and through PayPal, which is a thin line to hang a whole genre on. Another letter to another processor could cut it.

So, practically: buy from the developer's own page, download the file, and keep it. itch.io itself, a store with every reason to want you to come back, tells buyers to keep local copies. Treat "free download" sites as what they are; the developers we cover publish their own free demos, and our game pages link to them.

What we could not check: whether itch.io shipped the content-warning system it announced in July 2025, whether its UK block has been lifted, how adult pages appear to signed-in users, and whether PayPal accepts a card without an account in your country.