Controversial Opinion, But Faceless Payment Processors Probably Shouldn’t Be Able To Run The Whole World From The Shadows – Aftermath

It has not been a great couple of weeks for Steam, Itch.io, adult games, or our right to freedom of expression. First payment processors came for Steam, forcing Valve to change its policies and remove a number of adult games, and now they’ve so thoroughly backed Itch into a corner that it temporarily deindexed nearly all of its NSFW content. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about why it’s maybe not super great that payment processors wield this kind of unilateral, unchecked power. Just a thought!

This time around, we’re  joined by Isla Hinck of Easy Allies, aka the Aftermath of YouTube. Isla and I met just one week ago, at this year’s TennoCon, the official Warframe convention (yes, Warframe has an official convention), so we regale Chris with tales of our time at a refreshingly positive show attended by fans who just seem to… love a thing? In 2025? I’m as surprised as you are. We also got to explore developer Digital Extremes’ office inside a dead mall, which was a trip unto itself. 

Then we discuss a significantly more dispiriting piece of news: Payment processors, urged on by a militantly censorious group called Collective Shout, have brought their anti-porn crackdown to Steam and Itch.io, an attack on free speech that will almost certainly not end with porn. Finally, decide which kind of Hideo Kojima-created guy we’d like to be, and then we tease what Aftermath has planned for the rest of the year.

You can find this week’s episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we, too, can have an office inside a dead mall in London, Ontario – perhaps even the same one as Digital Extremes. We’ll get the (literal) inside scoop on all things Warframe and eat at Subway every day. It’ll be great.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Isla: It’s when a company can just editorialize on what they think is moral, is where things get really murky.   

Nathan: As Luke said in our article: “The idea that faceless, unaccountable payment processors – which enjoy vast monopolies over the world’s commerce, and by extension its marketplaces – can wield their power so swiftly, as they’ve increasingly been doing now for years, is downright terrifying.”

Isla: Yeah, late stage capitalism’s a hell of a drug!

Chris: Whenever you’d go to the top-selling games on Itch, you’d always see the most extreme eroge game. I remember one that was about sawing a doll lady in half. You’ve just gotta be comfortable with the fact that what people find attractive in terms of kink shit sometimes – illegal stuff notwithstanding – is gonna be fucked up. It’s not necessarily tethered to you as a person. And I’m pretty absolutist about NSFW games being there, because what? Are you gonna go to the video game store [to buy them]?

Isla: I’ve done some work in film and interfacing with horror filmmakers and stuff like that, and almost across the board, some of the nicest people I’ve ever met are horror buffs. People who are into the sickest shit you’ve ever heard of are the nicest, most well-adjusted people you’ve ever met. Whereas some of the people I’ve met who are in more repressed or controlling communities can be real assholes. So what’s better?

Nathan: Real assholes who generally want to, as a result of the communities they’re a part of, control and repress others. Because they think that’s how things have to be.

But I think it’s pretty much impossible to disconnect all of this from the larger crackdown on art and works around and by queer and trans creators. This is the foot in the door, saying, “Oh, there are these things that are obscene, and we can’t allow that.” Then you just declare any sort of queer art obscene, and then there you go: Now you also have payment processors on board with eliminating that as well. Eventually all you have left is a homogenized straight soup that is akin to what the powers that be approved of in the 1800s or whenever.

Chris: It is also funny that they finally found a way to censor video games for real. They found an actual form of censorship, which is just “You can’t buy them.” Visa and Mastercard are saying, “This is a legal liability for me, so fuck you.” It’s really disheartening that we have to live with that. And I don’t think any of this is popular. People don’t want this broadly. It’s the weird moment we’re living in: You see the swings that are happening from a very vocal right, but most of the policies being enacted are largely unpopular. 

Nathan: Yeah, and if we’re talking about the anti-porn movement, that’s been around for a minute at this point, and again, it’s a thing that starts in one place with a goal of ending in a much more repressive place. The initial messaging was like “Porn is bad for you. It distorts your mind and your views on what sex is,” but the movement is not actually anti-porn; it’s anti-sex work. And it’s not surprising that the anti-porn movement really took root around the time that things like OnlyFans were becoming popular. Suddenly sex workers were able to make money more independently and have more direct control over their lives and careers.

Isla: God forbid a woman, largely, gains any kind of financial independence. To boil it down, it’s about commodity and the commodification of women’s bodies – and owning that. If someone is doing that outside the normal channels, [powerful people] want to monetize for themselves, and if they can’t, they’ll crack down on it.

Nathan: It’s just crazy that [groups like Collective Shout] found this way to do it. You can only go so far in terms of direct censoriousness – in terms of leveraging laws that were constructed at least nominally with the idea of free speech in mind – to make sure that somebody can’t do or say something. So they’re like “Well, let’s just skip all that. Let’s go around that and go through payment processors, which have all this normal control that most normal people never think about.” They do not think about just how powerful the companies in charge of how we spend money are: some of the most powerful in the world, far and away.

Isla: Especially in a world where I don’t think I’ve touched cash in a year. I pay for everything with my phone. I don’t even use an actual card anymore. The entire structure of my getting food every day is based on Apple Pay and DoorDash – all services I’ve agreed to a terms of service on that I never read, because no one ever does. It could all just be taken away at any time because of this, that, or the other thing. The house of cards on which everything is built is so intricate and so terrifying.  

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