Steam and Itch.io, two of the largest marketplaces for games and visual novels on the Internet, have removed thousands of LGBTQ+ and “not safe for work” (NSFW) titles, in response to pressure from payment processors and an Australian “anti-pornography” group with ties to the religious right.
On July 11, Collective Shout — an Australian organization which campaigns against porn and for more restrictive online age verification laws — published an open letter calling on payment processors including Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and PayPal to “immediately” cut ties with Steam and Itch. The group claimed both platforms were selling “hundreds” of titles “featuring rape, incest and child sexual abuse.”
Days after the open letter was published, Steam introduced a new rule for publishers, banning “[c]ontent that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult-only content.” The company also began removing numerous adult titles from its platform soon after, as IGN reported. One such title was the horror title VILE: Exhumed, a game about misogynistic violence and parasociality directed at a fictional horror actress. “VILE: Exhumed was […] banned for ‘sexual content with depictions of real people,’ which, if you played it, you know is all implied, making this all feel even worse,” developer Cara Cadaver wrote on Bluesky on July 28.
Last week, Itch followed suit, delisting tens of thousands of games categorized or tagged “NSFW.” Most of the delisted games can still be purchased on Itch.io, industry newsletter GameFile noted, but cannot be found through organic search results, while others were removed from the site entirely.
“Our actions were taken to protect our payment processing abilities for as much of the platform as possible,” Itch founder Leaf Corcoran wrote in a July 28 update, following vocal backlash on social media. “In the meantime, we are actively reaching out to other payment processors that are more willing to work with this kind of content,” Corcoran added. Itch also added a list of prohibited content and themes this week, including “implied” non-consensual content, “pseudo-incest,” and “‘barely legal’ themes.”
LGBTQ+ creators have been disproportionately affected by Steam and Itch’s retreat, whether or not their work was marked as NSFW or contained adult themes, as The Verge reported this week. On Bluesky, cartoonist Yuki Clarke said that her comic series Rita and Josey, which she described as a “SFW sci fi comic tha’’s no worse than a standard Marvel movie” but which was tagged “LGBT,” was also delisted from Itch search results.
In a statement published the same day as Itch’s update, Collective Shout claimed that they only called for the removal of “rape and incest games” and titles which “sexualised violence and torture of women” from the platforms, and that it was not responsible for Itch’s decision to delist most NSFW content. But Collective Shout is also staunchly anti-porn across the board, and has called for the censorship of assorted images its members deem “porn-themed,” such as suggestive lip gloss ads. Its founder, Melinda Tankard Reist, is a longtime anti-abortion activist and a founder of the anti-trans organization Women’s Forum Australia.
Collective Shout’s open letter was signed as well by executives at other organizations including Exodus Cry and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), both of which have long histories of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-sex worker activism and were partly responsible for harsher content restrictions introduced on OnlyFans in 2021. Those organizations and others like them have pushed for laws restricting online speech and content like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), arguing that children must be protected from adult material — while conservatives also push to restrict adults’ access to such goods or materials, and to define trans identities as inherently pornographic themselves.
Predictably, the internet is not happy about any of this. Gamers of all stripes have organized massive campaigns to call in complaints directly to Visa and Mastercard, as Polygon reported this week, and a Change.org petition calling on credit companies to “[s]top censoring legal fictional content” had gathered just under 197,000 signatures at time of writing. On Bluesky, users have shared lists and bundles of Itch-deindexed titles to support their creators, like He Fucked the Girl Out of Me, developer Taylor McCue’s award-winning indie game about her own experience with sex work, trauma, and sexual assault — which, McCue noted, was also restricted in the U.K. this week due to the country’s now-effective “Online Safety Act.”
“Globally and politically, we are at a crossroads for developer rights, creative freedom, and platform accountability,” International Game Developers Association executive director Jakin Vela told Wired on Wednesday. “The right to make mature games with legal adult content is a creative right, just like the right to tell stories about war, death, or love.”
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