Itch Is Hosting Adult Games Again, As Long As They’re Free

Collective Shout, an Australian-based anti-p*rnography group, has found great success in its campaign against adult video games. The organisation says that it only targets games with “sexualised violence and torture of women”, but due to the pressure it’s placed on payment processors, many more titles have been impacted, seeing all NSFW games deindexed on Itch.

However, the site has now scaled back its response. In a new blog post, Itch reveals that some adult games will be accessible through the store once more, as long as they are free-to-play. Now, all free-to-play titles that were previously restricted have been re-indexed, meaning that they will appear in the search results and on-site recommendations once again.

Itch Issues An Update On Its Adult Game Restrictions

“Today, we are re-indexing free adult NSFW content,” the blog post reads. “We are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be re-introducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term.”

Itch will soon roll out content warnings too, which will be compulsory for all adult games. Of course, it’s unclear if this will be enough to get all adult content back on Itch, as it has already rolled out a list of content that could get a game barred from being sold on the platform.

There is some more good news to be had, however. As gamers put pressure on payment processors to support Steam and Itch’s sale of NSFW material, one such provider has issued a response. This comes from Stripe, who handles Itch’s card payments.

“Stripe is currently unable to support sexually explicit content due to restrictions placed on them by their banking partners, despite card networks generally supporting adult content (with the appropriate registrations),” the statement reads. “Stripe has indicated that they hope to be able to support adult content in the future.”

So, while nothing can change right now, it does seem that Stripe itself has no qualms about supporting adult content down the line. It will just be a matter of seeing if the banking partners reject Collective Shout’s efforts too. And with the gaming community putting pressure on Visa and Mastercard, their voices are at least being heard.

Previously, Collective Shout has defended its method of getting payment processors to threaten to pull support from Steam and Itch if its demands are not met. It argues that it did try to issue takedown requests to Steam directly, but that these requests were ignored. The group remains committed to getting games containing depictions of r*pe and inc*st banned from stores, although considering it previously targeted Grand Theft Auto 5 and Detroit: Become Human, it has a broad list of complaints when it comes to adult material in games.

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