If you scroll through the front page of Steam today (after the sale that is 🙂 ), you’ll see the usual suspects: Borderlands 4, the latest Call of Duty update, and a handful of indie roguelikes that captured the zeitgeist. But there is a parallel reality on Valve’s platform—a massive, lucrative, and largely invisible economy that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue without a single “Featured” banner or mainstream marketing campaign.
Welcome to the world of Adult Only (AO) gaming. In 2025, this isn’t just a niche; it’s a high-growth industry that is currently undergoing its most significant existential crisis, driven not by morality, but by the cold, hard mandates of global finance.
The Adult Games Numbers: A Silent Explosion
According to the latest data from SteamDB, the sheer volume of adult content on the platform is staggering. Since Valve officially allowed Adult Only content in 2018, the growth has been nearly exponential:
- 2018: 100 AO titles released.
- 2021: 375 AO titles released.
- 2024: 1,004 AO titles released.
- 2025: 1,210+ AO titles released (as of December).
This represents a 900% increase in just seven years. While mainstream indie releases also grew, they didn’t see this level of specialized, concentrated expansion. Today, NSFW games account for nearly 10% of all new releases on the platform.
To put that in perspective even further, adult games now account for roughly 5-8% of the entire Steam library. But while volume is high, the revenue is even higher.
While Valve is notoriously tight-lipped about specific earnings, third-party analytics suggest that the top-performing adult visual novels (AVNs) and sandboxes are consistently clearing six-figure sums in their first month—often out-earning “legitimate” indie games with ten times the marketing budget.
I have dived A LOT deeper into the numbers on my Patreon Post.
Case Study: The “Being a DIK” Phenomenon
To understand the scale of this goldmine, look no further than Being a DIK, developed by Dr. PinkCake. It is the archetype of the “Prestige” adult game—high-fidelity, episodic, and intensely profitable.
Based on current 2025 metrics from Graphtreon, the project operates as a two-headed financial beast:
| Metric | Steam (Retail) | Patreon (Subscription) |
| Gross Revenue | **~$3.5M+** (Estimated Cumulative) | ~$40k – $60k (Monthly) |
| Units Sold / Subs | ~345,000+ (Season 1) | ~19,000+ Active Members |
| Pricing Model | One-time purchase ($14.99+) | Tiered ($1 to $100 per month) |
Dr. PinkCake has mastered the “double-dip.” Patreon acts as a Live Service incubator, where approximately 20,000 hardcore fans fund development monthly. Once a “Season” is polished, it is ported to Steam for a massive retail “cash out” from the silent majority of players.
From Pirate Forums to Patreon to the Bank
Unlike traditional indie games that rely on “Next Fest” or influencer coverage, the adult game ecosystem has its own self-sustaining pipeline. It usually starts on one of the pirate forums, these massive underground forums where titles are playtested and critiqued by an audience of millions.
- Incubation: Developers build a community “underground”.
- Funding: They move to Patreon, where the most successful creators, like the mentioned Dr. Pink Cake, earn between $20,000 and $60,000 per month in recurring revenue. (Or even more!)
- The “Cash Out”: Once the game reaches a certain level of polish, it is ported to Steam. This is where the “Silent Majority” of gamers—those who don’t frequent forums or support Patreons—buy the product.
The conversion rate is terrifyingly efficient. Because these games are often developed in direct conversation with their fans, they achieve “Overwhelmingly Positive” review scores that “prestige” AAA titles can only dream of
Steam adult game revenue numbers
In 2024, Steam generated a record $10.8 billion in total revenue. While Valve does not explicitly list “Adult Content” as a separate line item in financial reports, market analysis shows that roughly 8% of the Steam library consists of AO-rated or high-intensity sexual content titles.
- Estimated Annual Revenue: Industry analysts estimate the adult sector on Steam generates between $200 million and $250 million annually in gross sales.
- Valve’s Cut: At a standard 30% platform fee, Valve likely earns $60 million to $75 million per year from adult games alone.
Valve is essentially making “passive income” from this sector. By providing the storefront and payment processing while doing minimal active promotion of these titles
The “Higher Floor”: Adult Games vs. The Mainstream
The most startling revelation in the data is the Success Efficiency. Where even a “mediocre” adult game often finds a baseline of several thousand sales, whereas a mediocre puzzle game effectively sells zero copies.
Who is Actually Playing – AVN market trends
The “broader interest” is already here. Data from Video Game Insights reveals a surprising crossover. Players of top-tier adult games like Being a DIK or FreshWomen have a 24% overlap with titles like Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.
These are not “niche” players; they are mainstream RPG fans who have discovered that adult games often offer more complex branching narratives and meaningful player choices than “Triple-A” titles that shy away from mature themes.
The “Prestige” Shift vs. The AI Surge
The industry is currently split into two camps. On one side, we are seeing the rise of “Prestige Adult Games”—titles with professional voice acting, complex branching narratives, and high-fidelity 3D assets that rival mid-market AA games. These developers are leaning into the “Baldur’s Gate 3” effect, realizing that a mature audience is willing to pay for quality storytelling, not just explicit scenes.
On the other side, Steam is being flooded with “AI Slop“—quickly produced, asset-flipped titles designed to game the algorithm and catch a quick buck. This “slop” is what often triggers the bans and purges, creating a friction-filled environment for the actual artists in the space.
The Iron Curtain: Why You Can’t Find Adult Games?
If these games are so successful, why does Valve bury them? The answer lies in a quiet policy shift that occurred in September 2025.
The 2025 Wall: Rule 15 and the Early Access Ban
Despite the revenue, the “invisible” nature of these games is becoming a forced reality. In July 2025, Valve quietly added “Rule 15” to its developer guidelines, as reported by Windows Central.
The rule prohibits:
“Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks…”
This was followed by an even harsher shift in September 2025, where developers like Dammitbird (developer of Heavy Hearts) reported that Steam began rejecting Adult Only games from the Early Access program entirely. As noted by GameSpot, Valve’s rejection messages stated they were “unable to support the Early Access model of development for a game with mature themes.”
Recent reports from GameSpot and Automaton West highlight that this isn’t just Valve being prudish. The pressure is coming from payment processors like Visa and Mastercard. Under the influence of activist groups like Collective Shout, these financial giants have tightened their “Acceptable Use” policies.
Industry insiders point to Visa and Mastercard as the true architects of this policy. PC Gamer confirmed that Valve has been delisting titles because the “loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles” on the store.
Why is Steam not using Crypto?
As adult game developers face a “de-banking” crisis in 2025, many wonder why they can’t simply switch to cryptocurrency. It seems like the perfect escape from the “Rule 15” restrictions imposed by banks like Visa and Mastercard. Many people forget that Steam actually did accept Bitcoin as a payment method starting in April 2016. However, they killed it just over a year later in December 2017.
Gabe Newell later revealed two massive reasons for this:
- According to Newell, a “mind-boggling” 50% of all cryptocurrency transactions on the platform were fraudulent. These weren’t just simple errors; they involved stolen funds, double-spending, and money laundering that forced Valve’s lean team to spend more time on security than on storefront improvements.
- Cryptocurrency’s price swings also created a customer support nightmare. A user might pay for a $50 “Season” of a game, but by the time the transaction processed on the blockchain, the value of that coin might have dropped to $40—or jumped to $100. This made refunds and accounting nearly impossible for a platform that processes millions of sales a day.
Financial Censorship by Proxy
Because Steam officially banned all blockchain-based games and crypto payments in 2021, adult developers are now trapped in a “Catch-22.” They are:
- Banned from Crypto: They cannot use the only currency that banks can’t control.
- Squeezed by Banks: They must follow the puritanical standards of payment processors like Mastercard to remain on Steam.
This has created a “censorship by proxy” system. As long as Steam refuses to re-engage with decentralized payments, the big banks effectively hold the “kill switch” for the entire adult gaming economy.
What current Steam stance means for the Future of Adult Games?
The adult gaming industry is the “canary in the coal mine” for digital ownership and creative freedom. If payment processors can successfully dictate what Valve allows in its “Hidden” charts, it’s only a matter of time before those same standards are applied to games with political or social themes that are deemed “controversial.”
For now, the goldmine remains open, but the walls are closing in. Steam’s secret earners are making more money than ever, but they are doing so under a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that could vanish with a single update to a bank’s terms of service.
If you are interested in a more in-depth data I invite you to check out my Patreon post where l dive deeper into the numbers mentioned in the article which should give more insight to how the adult games are performing on Steam and also in comparison to mainstream titles.
