[FRex]

Valve can state 2 + 2 = 5 tomorrow, that doesn't make it true.

They already have geoblocks in place for several reasons ranging from their own whim, to copyright to legal reasons. I can't buy certain animes[0] and I couldn't buy Skyrim for few years (my country's physical box retailer got exclusive deal), you couldn't get Hotline Miami 2 in Australia (their censor banned it), you are forced to use your own currency (or the next best thing like dollar or euro, but there is no free choice) when buying games.

They also banned Hatred back in the day for violating their ToS, until they said it didn't actually violate it (because there was a shitstorm over it). And vague ToS that anyone can break or not break are a staple in online businesses by now.

They also have no problem selling Witcher or Mass Effect games that have way more sexual content that is way more realistic and detailed. In just Witcher 1 you have like 30 sex cards, several topless women, topless bloodied vampire girls, prostitutes, very crude references to sex, straight up softcore porn scenes with full animation, but like 10 naked anime girls in Hunie Pop is too far and a big legal problem for them?

They also had no problem breaking customer protection regulations, sniffing your DNS cache and iterating what processes you have running to find cheats, fighting in Australian court over lack of return policies, taking 0 responsibility for anything they sell for years (Skyrim paid mods, Greenlight trash, asset flips, scams and stolen games, etc.) but now hosting a couple games with anime boobs is a big no-no that opens them up to big legal problems.

All this content was also explicitly stated to not be any problem until now up to reassuring developers themselves about their specific games, do Valve and Steam operate their multi-billion global businesses in a "shoot first, ask if it's legal later" way?

All this is is just deciding to not bother with "weaboo shit" (as many people consider anything in anime style) on Steam Direct anymore for whatever reason (money, image?) and knowing they can do that without backlash because it's niche enough. There is no legal (unless countries now specifically ban static naked images of anime girls but allow 3D softcore mocap scenes of realistic models) or technical reason they couldn't make it work.

[0] - https://imgur.com/a/2Fbm9Bl