Online auction retailer eBay has long been one of the internet's premier venues to buy and sell goods for the better part of the 21st century. The website is known for selling just about everything, with both companies and individual users able to market next to any item. However, eBay's newly implemented policies are about to make the sale of "Adult" products, including adult video games, quite a bit harder.
Strictly Adults-Only video games (the rating above the 17+ Mature) tend to be on the rarer side, but the niche market for the type of content seems to be doing well as of late. Towards the end of March this year, Studio FOW Interactive's Subverse became one of Steam's top-selling titles, becoming the second best-selling game for the platform during that period.
The shift in business practices comes as part of eBay's new "Adult Items" policy. While the new restrictive policy does ban the sale of typical pornographic materials, it actually goes much farther than that. In addition to explicitly listing the sales ban of Adults Only-rated video games, the policy pulls the plug on anything containing nudity or "displays of sexual activities." This includes adult magazines, sexually explicit anime, comics, and basically every other form of readable or watchable media. The policy addresses the many sexually explicit-adjacent products as well, giving eBay users a roadmap of where they can categorize and find adult sex toys, clothing, and accessories, so long as they don't show nudity or sexual activity.
The new Adult Items Policy builds upon eBay's "Illegal Explicit Content" policy, with the intent to prevent listings that include illegal content such as bestiality, torture, snuff films, and other illegal content, whether "real or fictionalized." The new approach may face certain complications, however, especially in the international market.
Different countries sometimes have different ratings for the same video game, in addition to particular regions varying in terms of censorship stringency. For example, Funcom's Conan Exiles features full-frontal nudity in Europe, but not in North America. This suggests the game's American version could possibly still be allowed to sell on eBay, but not the European one, potentially leading to unforeseen complications.
While eBay is surely cracking down on the presence of sexually explicit content on its website, it isn't the only major company to recently do so. Streaming platform Twitch has reportedly banned the words "Hot tub" from its official channel's chat. Twitch has long been embroiled in controversy regarding its "hot tub meta," essentially a loophole in the streaming site's policy of getting around its ban on "suggestive" clothing. Audiences remain largely divided on the issue, with some claiming the approach doesn't break any of Twitch's rules, while others deem the practice as "attention-seeking," particularly with that of female streamers.
Ebay's new policy goes into effect on July 15, so those looking to snatch up some adult-oriented products should be sure to make their purchases in the next few weeks. The new policies preventing the sale of things like Adults Only-rated games appear to be comprehensive, and should therefore be quite effective. Now eBay just needs to work on stopping the sale of product photographs, with plenty of scammers selling photos of PS5s on the site, rather than the actual console itself.
Source: eBay