Nine months ago, payment processors were forcing Steam to scrub adult games from its storefront. This week, a $10 femboy visual novel is sitting on the homepage carousel — and Valve doesn’t seem bothered.

Femboy Next Door 🔞🚪, released May 16 by developer Lewd Star, currently holds two featured placements: New Releases and Featured Win. The premise involves a struggling blogger moving into a femboy influencer house to write an exposé, only for temptation to grow and lines to blur. Standard visual novel fare, elevated by a 95% positive rating from 40 reviews and 90 concurrent players.

The testimonials are doing more work than any marketing campaign could.

“I decided to play a little trick and bought myself this toy,” wrote one player with 2.4 hours logged. “My older brother saw what I was doing. He beat me up, took away my computer, and started playing this masterpiece himself.”

Another review at 1.7 hours follows an identical arc: brother sees game, brother steals computer, brother gets hooked. The “my brother hijacked my PC” review format has apparently become its own literary subgenre.

Steam’s carousel is now prominently surfacing adult content. That’s not an accident — it’s a trend. In mid-2025, Steam removed hundreds of adult titles under pressure from Visa and Mastercard, themselves responding to a campaign by Australian group Collective Shout, according to The Guardian. A Change.org petition protesting the purge gathered over 147,000 signatures.

The pressure has since reversed. In March 2026, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent letters to payment companies reminding them that cutting off lawful businesses from banking services violated American values, as reported by iXBT Games.

Steam got the memo. Adult games aren’t just back on the platform — they’re on the front page, pulling review ratios most AAA studios would bleed for.

Sources