There haven’t been any report from news outlet just yet, but it’s popped up on many Forums/Subreddits (including Itch’s own community space) and reported by multiple creators over on Blusky. You might have noticed some strange things while browsing/looking for games on the platform last night/this morning.
A bunch of NSFW games have been delisted from the platform, some also getting takedown notices and payment being blocked. This includes games tagged among others with NSFW, Adult and Erotic.
itch.io has brought up Collective Shoutout, a radical feminist group from Australia, for mounting pressure on payment processors with relationships to Steam and Itch.
Incidentally, there was an article for VICE Waypoint that was about adult games being removed on Steam and how Collective Shoutout was behind that, but that had been removed by the editorial board.
It’s shocking how one group could negatively impact an entire subsection of video games, literature, and media arts. The fact that it has been this swift and sudden means there’s more to come. For many queer creators, adult media is what they want to make and thrive in. But now, it’s been put into question more than ever.
I hope that people become more united against this clearly violent takeover of the internet. More than ever, we need solidarity and reporting. This has been a deeply bleak day.
As best as I understand it, a feminist extremist group named Collective Shout found a loophole in some legislation and campaigned the payment processors (Visa, Mastercard and PayPal) to stop making or accepting payments to web sites that included NSFW content.
Rather than telling Collective Shout to go jump, the payment processors went along with this and forced Steam and itch.io to take down all their NSFW content. The situation is summarised in this article on PC Gamer.
As a consequence, itch.io was forced to take drastic measures earlier today. There was a tremendous backlash on the itch.io Discord server and one of the moderators pinged @everyone asking them to slow down. That just fuelled the fire and the Discord server went into meltdown. They enabled slowmode and there were still thousands of messages and it hasn’t slowed down all day.
The ban does not affect me, as I don’t write or play NSFW games, but I know a lot of you do. My advice would be to check your itch.io account, check that your games are appropriately tagged and keep an eye out for your games being banned.
AFAIK, the tags that are causing games to be shadowbanned (that is, unsearchable by search bar) are tags like “Erotic”. My game, Uranium Gays, is rendered invisible because I still have this tag on. Removing the tag apparently allows it to be searchable again.
As for examples of media that were suspended (i.e. virtually inaccessible), nadia nova’s games like hopeless junction are affected. There have also been reports of developers whose works were suspended being unable to withdraw payment and readers being unable to download works they bought.
It’s been a mess. Definitely consider uploading your games to IF Archive, Internet Archive, and your own websites if you can. I don’t know how to think about the situation anymore.
no komment. and I think than instead of chagrining, the best reason is a campaign asking this itchy site to disclose what are these “payment processors”, so these lowlives can be duly boycotted into bankrupt.
and a background check into that “australian radical feminist group” is also due; because not few adult games involves lesbian relationship (dunno on the specifics on the 50+1 codes of the (dis)United States of America, but seems to me that not few of these consider reference to non-cis relationship enough basis for the adult tag, or I’m wrong ?) they are actually damaging the advancement of feminism, radical or otherwise, so a careful check on this org is in order. (clarification: I consider woman-woman relationship as part of the feminist platform; but it’s my personal (and male) PoV)
on the immediate and on the specific sector, I’m wrong or the if-archive still only place an “adult” CW on these games ? I think that the IFTF can be trusted in resisting unduly pressures, so uploading on the IF archive can be an excellent, perhaps also not-so interim, solution for the immediate issue.
Itch.io uses PayPal and Stripes as payment processor, both of those using VISA and Mastercard. Like Garry said:
Unfortunately, those payment processors have almost an absolute monopoly in payment worldwide (not just on the internet). Some banks don’t offer cards others than Visa or Mastercard, and many online shops do not have a choice in payment processor either.
There is a hell of a lot of discussion on this at the moment. One article on Reddit said that itch.io has shadow banned any game with the tags ‘nsfw’, ‘adult’ or ‘erotic’. That’s why I suggested checking your tags. A lot of developers use these tags just to get indexed and draw attention to their games.
A shadow ban prevents your games from being indexed so they won’t show up in a search, but they aren’t deleted. Make sure you have a backup, just in case. Please be patient, as I’m sure this will all settle down in due course.
I feel sorry for itch.io, as they will have to sort through 1.2 million games to determine which ones need to be banned. Those that will be banned are probably those that should have been banned in the first place, things like rape, child porn and so on.
While there are certainly games that will go against the TOS, the current games that have been suspended have none of this stuff. False flags basically. It’s also logistically impossible to do all this since the Itch staff is practically three people. I expect the situation to devolve to what’s happening in Tumblr: inconsistent banning that makes everything feel unfair.
One of the reasons I brought up Nadia Nova’s games is that she doesn’t have any of this. Her games are somewhat known by queer audiences. It’s really baffling that they are removed.
I do not believe for a second that payment processors and the group are concerned about criminal matters. One of the reasons I linked the VICE article is how the group tried to target Detroit: Become Human for depicting bad parenting – apparently, this is grounds for child abuse. This is clearly a misreading in bad faith, and I think this is being generally applied to many cases like Nadia’s games.
Indeed, I am doubtful if this will be “settled in due course”. There’s a real slippery slope going on here since it’s affecting queer media on the whole and even some more. The takeover by the puritanical right is real.
I’ve been calm after hours of panicking in class/work, but I won’t downplay how it’s one of the most horrible developments in 2025. Pandora’s box has been opened, and I’m now unsure if I’ll ever upload a game to Itch after this, even if I recognize not everything can be blamed on the site.
I feel like there will be a seismic shift in the coming days on how we surf the internet. Itch being taken down so easily means very few spaces are safe for queer developers. Queer people will always be viewed as pornographic, sexualized objects by payment processors and executives; they are the most vulnerable to this kind of censorship in the name of “protecting the youth/women”. If this ever settles down, it’s to a new “normal” that is extremely restrictive on queer and adult media.
I cannot but help be concerned about the near future of the internet and even the world. Itch may weather this, but I don’t think queer people can. They need more reporting, help, and presence than ever.
pls no haste on me… (that is, few days prior of the release of the first preview of Isekai…) but in the meantime, I clarify that I’m try to keep my commenting inside the “politically neutral”, (a different animal re. “politically correct”), being the best approach I can apply, because no one outside of Italy wants a political argument with Italians, so when I suggested a background check, was a NPOV nudge toward what is obvious from reading the glee from said group reported in the PCGamer article, the lexicon used has definitively the style of US hard right-wingers.
said that, now I have a convenient excuse for testing a nifty start-up question routine (my apologies in advance to decent OZ fellows…°-) ) whose for now is by far the best immediate answer to the issue at hand…
now, my apologies for indulging into a “removing a pebble from the shoe” moment, but I recommend to put aside the “kinky” nonsense alleged to First Contact and read carefully and seriously the historical background delivered by Lan, because, well, this indeed mirrors what Kastel has posted just above, which is a major component of the core message of the Materia of Railei.
Unfortunately there’s a long history of using crackdowns like this to censor even tame LGBT+ content. I haven’t played Natalia Nova’s games so i can’t speak firsthand but based on what @Kastel has said it sounds like that may be what’s happening to her which makes me very, very worried.
It’s disgusting that a payment processor can have that kind of power, particularly since they’ve had to take down free games as well as paid ones. It would seem that there is an urgent need for a new hosting site for free interactive fiction.
I’ve been talking about this to a friend and she insists that it has to do with the UK’s Online Safety Act which comes into force tomorrow. I’ve told her it’s a worldwide thing, but this sort of legislation is certainly going to be a factor going forward.
I think that’s related at least. BlueSky has been forced to implement measures like this to “protect children”, and many similar right-wing policies masquerading as “protecting the youth” are in effect or undergoing implementation. It’s all a worrying trend.
To clarify, I don’t think her content is “tame” in the conventional sense. They are definitely “adult” but should not infringe on what Itch is alleging.
Not surprising – LGBT+ content always gets flagged as more obscene than equivalent straight content in these crackdowns. While I’m glad that they’re not considering same-sex handholding as “erotic content” (yet) it doesn’t make me feel good.
(For some recent historical reference for others who haven’t kept track of this, when Tumblr cracked down on “adult” content the basic tag “#gay” got restricted. They’ve since walked that back, thank goodness, but it’s a pattern that’s repeated time and time again. )
It could indirectly relevant, though - the letter that came to Steam and Itch was apparently from the seven or eight major payment processors all acting together; that level of corporate coordination just doesn’t happen in response to a “consumer pressure” campaign that activated around a thousand people. It’s plausible to me that the companies had stood up a joint working group on compliance with this new law, which then was able to be weaponized.
All speculation, of course, but IMO understanding in greater detail what the payment processors did, and why, would be very helpful to figuring out what happened and how to prevent such things in the future. I hope some enterprising journalist digs into these questions, though I’m not optimistic that will happen.
Payment processors have been pulling this crap for years. It’s impacted companies that sell sex toys and comic artists who write NSFW comics. The Tumblr takedown was 2022.
It’s not new, and I’m afraid it’s perfectly possible for one pressure group to make it happen.
Are you referring to me? That’s preposterous! I never watched that video with the six young women playing under-water rugby in the bubble bath, in the nude, for Christ’s sake.
Anyway, I (seriously) always thought pornography was exploitative, though that would mostly apply to photography or videos of actual people, which I would imagine is the case only for a very minor subset of the games in Itch, if any. Nonetheless, there has been a long debate on the damaging effects of pornography, mainly as regards personal consequences like addiction, body image, unrealistic expectations of performance etc. but also of misogynistic role models and the not so subtle encouragement of violent behaviour. I don’t think there can be much doubt that all of these are real to some extent. And there are people with legitimate arguments campaigning (I believe a bit naively) for bans or at least very strict regulation of the internet (of all places!).
Again, I am not convinced the above is relevant to the greater part of the NSFW games on itch, but I am also not so certain that we are dealing with a right wing false flag operation, because I really do not know what the motivation of these Collective Shout people is. After all the talk, some action was bound to happen at some point. It would not be the first time such campaigning from righteous, well-meaning people has led to regulatory overreach. In fact, de-platforming, de-funding, cancelling etc. have been weapons of the progressive grass-roots movements, just as they have been for reactionary Astroturf lobbying groups. So I’d advise not to jump to conclusions.