Itch.io is delisting NSFW/Adult-tagged games

[pbparjeter]

I don’t like censorship/media bans but it’s clear that neither left-wing or right-wing content are being targeted by this.

Steam took down hundreds of games, a small fraction of its catalogue, in line with the Collective Shout letter (ie. games involving rape and incest). It’s a slippery slope toward banning more content but one with no clear political alignment, as the left and right have each pushed for overlapping bans depending on the details.

Meanwhile, Itch io nuked its users’ content far beyond the scope of the open letter’s request because for some reason they’re incapable of managing their user content. (Itch has explicitly said it’s implementing a new policy that puts a bigger burden on the uploader — cynically, Itch knows that no crisis should go to waste and that Collective Shout and payment processors will absorb most of the backlash from this.)

Collective Shout seems to be both extremist (if you agree censorship is extremist) and bipartisan, with individual members having right wing, left wing, and centrist ties based on the member profiles listed on the site.

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Also, although payment processors have cut off other platforms before, it’s not yet clear that payment processors are directly involved in this case beyond having existing policies around these things.

Steam said it was “notified [some games] may violate the rules and standards set forth by payment processors” but didn’t say the payment processor was the one that notified the site.

Itch said it “came under scrutiny from [its] payment processors,” but this may just be referring to what the Collective Shout campaign said publicly. All of this may be preventative legal maneuvering with little real risk to the sites themselves. Or not — it may never come out either way.

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As for whether there’s anything to prevent this sort of thing, probably not. Any alternative payment processor needs to account for the same legal and regulatory risks and will likely add a similar policy (public pressure or not).

I guess Steam could use its significant revenue to open brick and mortar stores to let people put cash into their Steam accounts.

(Edit: and everyone outside of a major urban center would need to use gift cards while Steam maintains a relationship with some friendly bank for non-retail transactions … not really realistic).

[pbparjeter]

Somebody reposted this on ResetEra.

It’s from someone who claims to be a central banker (I get the impression he’s not in the US) but it describes how “risk” works and why the credit card companies and acquiring banks care about content.

Key quote:

Why do intl. card schemes care what you buy? More payments should be good for business, right? Usually yes. But high-risk merchants like porn are the exception

[One reason is] legal and reputational due to risk of financing illegal content. Card schemes have been periodically sued for facilitating payments for illicit stuff after such content was allegedly found on adult websites for which they facilitated payment.

There are several intricacies of how the rules are defined and how other banks that work with the credit card companies are involved in defining and interpretering the rules. But anyway…

Ambiguity in [international card schemes] rules forces acquirers to interpret them—under threat of fines or exclusion if they get it wrong. To stay safe, they over-enforce, pushing platforms to remove anything that MIGHT be non-compliant under strongest interpretation

[The] rules often go beyond what the law requires in any given country. Their purpose is not legal consistency, but reputational risk mitigation. The result is a private layer of content regulation—defined and enforced by [international card schemes.

The thing is. [international card schemes] don’t even like this de facto regulator role. They gain nothing and are regularly target of Civil liberties associations but if they don’t do it, they assess that they could face fines and reputation risks and they don’t want to risk it.

I don’t really agree with his enthusiasm for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) solving the problem. As the name suggests, these are issued by central banks, ie. governments, and circulated on approved networks.

On one hand, CBDCs could solve the problem of individual banks and processors enforcing regulation-based for reasons of self-preservation more than they need to. On the other hand, governments and central banks actively want to enforce their regulations and laws aggressively, which is probably worse.

If you read the guy’s thread, be sure to read until the actual end, which is ironically hidden as adult content.

[Ruber_Eaglenest]

Next year I’m going to publish a game in Steam. At first I was eager to raise the recommended age, and put interesting tags in it.

Not now.

[Monsieur.HUT]

[First and foremost, and just to make this absolutely clear (I’m not a native English speaker): to everyone whose creations are being censored by this event, I want to express my full respect and affection.]

I more or less agree with this interpretation of what’s happening. The video game industry generates a lot of money and is currently going through growing pains—not just due to the end of the post-COVID lockdown era, but also because of a kind of standardization in mainstream gameplay models, which is starting to bore people. The most invigorating and interesting sources of creativity—as well as the most exhilarating epiphanies—often come from small studios and independent developers.

In this context, the battle over control and appropriation of others’ intellectual property, already significant in the past, is becoming vital—because it’s increasingly central to the future extraction of value.

The idea that NSFW games—literally, games incompatible with officially recognized and accepted notions of “work” (meaning salaried, monitored, obedient labor under someone else’s control)—or even entirely SFW games, might be created and distributed, sometimes even for free… that, right there, is intolerable to the ruling class. What a loss of potential profit! What an insult to the religion of money and value! Their prohibition paves the way for their eventual conditional reintegration—provided, of course, that one pays for the right to publish.

There is no ideological intentionality behind all this. It’s a mechanical phenomenon (driven by greed, which itself is the symptom of a lack of free will) that currently seizes, opportunistically, on the ideological packaging offered by Collective Shoutout—both in its strictly stated form and in its broader, supposedly compatible extensions.

This allows them to target as many creations as possible that fall outside the orthodox, dogmatic view of what a game is supposed to be: a product, above all—a commodity that makes money, dammit! But definitely not something that benefits its rightful creator.

[tvil (Tobias V. I. Langhoff)]

@pbparjeter

Meanwhile, Itch io nuked its users’ content far beyond the scope of the open letter’s request because for some reason they’re incapable of managing their user content.

Note that itch.io is a very small company with just a few employees, funded by the voluntary cut each seller chooses to give to them. Nothing like Steam, which has lots of employees and is funded by a 30% cut on all sales. Itch has essentially relied on crowdsourced reports (and the DMCA takedown system) to moderate its catalogue, and is not rigged for doing something like this with any sort of granularity. They’ll probably have to scale up now (unless this situation sinks them instead).

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

Thanks, Parjeter ! perhaps you have pointed to the crux of the matter.

From the link to this resetera blog, I noted this passage, which if read with untouchables/Falcone eyes (that is, “follow the money”) gives a more definite (and in the last instance, much less sinister, the canonical “business as usual”):

On “higher price”
“Normal” merchants typically pay 0.2% to 1% in transaction fees, high-risk merchants like adult platforms often pay 3% to 10%.

and… thinking on, if there’s a platform which sells both SFW and NSFW and applies to both the low, 0.2 to 1% fee, seems to me that payment processors have all valid reasons for asking for the much higher fee rate.

I have written valid reasons, because, if one think on, there’s not your stock corporate greed, and our community known it first-hand: remember the flood of more or less automated entries to our IFdb, all linking to low-to-zero quality porn games, even fake ones ? well, all of these shit was hosted, guess where ? steam…

Needless to say, zero quality, if not fake “porn” lead straight to request of refunds, if not even court litigation, and this is why the fees for porn was so high.

if this analysis is correct, behind the delisting perhaps is a legitimate request of fees commensurate with the objectively higher risk of request of refunding. And that this australian group have pressured (read: annoyed) the processors, well, two birds with a stone… makes sense financially, or not ?

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

@pbparjeter

Steam said it was “notified [some games] may violate the rules and standards set forth by payment processors” but didn’t say the payment processor was the one that notified the site.

Today’s article:

Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games from Steam | PC Gamer

[jkj_yuio]

It says that in the title, but not in the article body. Only repeating the same quote as before, that doesn’t specifically say the notification came from the processors. It doesn’t mention who they were either.

[Mewtamer (Jeffery wright)]

Honestly, I’m bothered whenever people toss about the left/right false dichotomy… Politics isn’t a binary nor even a straight line, and its entirely possible for people who disagree on 9 out of 10 issues to still be natural allies on the 1 out of 10 issues they agree on, even if their reasons are completely different. If Lesbian content is being targetted, it’s not hard to imagine the group brandishing metaphorical pitch forks including both individuals who can’t stand the idea of a female who isn’t subserviant to her father or husband and those who are nominally cool with lesbians, but think all girl-on-girl content is written by and for straight men who objectify women and can’t conprehend the idea that actual lesbians might write or consume lesbian content… People who would probably find each other’s reasoning mutually appaling, but their end goal is the same… or more generally, the religious fundamentalist who wants all porn banned because heaven forbid anyone have sexual desire outside making babies and the social justice warrior who wants all porn banned because its all exploitative and objectivefying in some way.

And yeah, this kind of crack down usually hurts the smaller facilitators the most. Steam is big enough as to be basically invincible and can afford the manpower/algorithmic power to follow the letter of any new regulations and the users have no real choice but to put up with any missteps, while Itch.io is big enough to be scrutinized and small enough that compliance puts undue strain on them… meanwhile, any small timers still doing things the old fashioned way can mostly get by taking payment through PayPal or Cashapp and being vague about what the money is for.

[pbparjeter]

@zarf Today’s article: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games from Steam | PC Gamer

That just has the quote I referred to. As @jkj_yukio noted news publications are widely interpreting it that way, but it is in fact an interpretation.

Hopefully full details come out but it seems unlikely given how measured Steam’s statement is.

@tvil Itch has essentially relied on crowdsourced reports (and the DMCA takedown system) to moderate its catalogue, and is not rigged for doing something like this with any sort of granularity. They’ll probably have to scale up now (unless this situation sinks them instead).

Fair, but they clearly have a plan, which is to put the burden on users, making them sign off on saying that their content complies with credit card processors’ requirements.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m under the impression that it’s fairly standard. They should have done this before a crisis.

Ultimately, the actual, active moderation Itch should have to do is minimal. Better self-moderation is enough.

It would probably still be better if nobody had to do any of this of course, given how small-scale the matter ultimately is and the fact that the existing policies mostly covered things.

@Monsieur.HUT There is no ideological intentionality behind all this

Collective Shout has an ideology, but it’s a mixed one.

Itch io’s decision, though, is one that it specifically chose under duress, and not due to the ideological reasons its users are claiming.

I guess someone could argue that Collective Shout targeted Itch io in particular knowing it has more LGBT content than usual and would be unable to handle the issue, and therefore intended Itch’s overresponse.

However, since Collective Shout members seem to be in “dog has caught car” mode, going private on LinkedIn etc., that probably wasn’t the intention.

Politics isn’t a binary nor even a straight line, and its entirely possible for people who disagree on 9 out of 10 issues to still be natural allies on the 1 out of 10 issues they agree on, even if their reasons are completely different

That seems to be the case here. I wonder if Collective Shout, given its unexpected fame, will get rid of its current members and take on more neutral leaders rather than just politically varied ones.

The current leaders seem to be politically vocal beyond the scope of the group. I’m not going to go digging into their social media, and I don’t know exactly how inflammatory/aggressive/hateful they are, but I assume they’re pretty bad at a glance and based on second-hand reports.

However, the group itself seems to be pretty consistent on the issues they’re targeting (rape, incest, and child abuse).

Notably they had Andrew Tate’s podcast removed from SoundCloud and Spotify, an example of targeting far-right content. If it wasn’t for the Itch io takedown, this group would be a lot more sympathetic to a lot of people.

[evouga]

Is there a write-up somewhere explaining why payment processors are so keen to involve themselves in monitoring the content of the platforms they serve?

I don’t really buy that there is much “reputational risk”: payment platforms are an almost invisible piece of scenery to the average customer. If itch.io is selling objectionable content, no reasonable person is going to finger Visa as somehow responsible.

Regulatory risk is more plausible to me… what are the specific relevant laws?

[30x30 (Grayson)]

Unfortunately, I think we’ve rather lost the point here, and in missing the forest for the trees (arguing about partisanship or intent and fringing on conspiracy theory) is becoming infuriating. I do not need to speak and yet I find myself replying with this: we know what this is about. It is in no uncertain terms an effort by socially conservative ideological groups to suppress what they deem to be “degenerate art” in conflation of exploitative material with art discussing exploitation, leveraging the payment processors and the websites that host such art into doing the censorship for them. This affects our community, and in my completely insignificant and pissed off opinion, it’d be best to stop waffling around and try to figure out how to help support and protect those artists who are being affected.

itchio is a fantastic market for hosting games and game jams and now authors, both established and new, are going to be contending with the looming threat of progressively more and more restrictive conditions for posting their art, their stories, their lived experiences – not knowing whether they’ve crossed some invisible line from art to degeneracy. It is going to drive more and more and more people away from creating art, and yes, away from the IF space. When you combine that with the attitudes held here, the arguing in circles about what’s meant and what’s happening, the strawman arguments, all of it – you are going to drive more people away from this space, away from the IF community. We will lose artists. And that’s what these puritans want, they want homogeny of opinion and the sanitization of lived experience. It is a moral panic and those most affected are those who do not share the same morals as them, those they can deem deviant and degenerate.

We are also doing what they want when we engage in endless infighting and pointing fingers rather than trying to figure things out! Call the payment processors, talk to artists affected, do anything other than argue in little circles about “well this is fascism and this isn’t” and “we may be closer in opinion to these people than we think” and “when you consider it, art can be degenerate”, do something! Because they will keep redefining what is acceptable and what needs to be censored, and they’ve already won a victory over Steam and now itchio – what’s next? Are you next, even if you’re not one of those “degenerate artists” they’re trying to censor right now? Odds are that you’re closer to the perverts they want off the internet than their paragon of moral purity.

Have a heart. Do something other than argue. Help your friends, help the community.

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

The payment processors were previously sued (and ruled against) for allowing payments on adult sites that contained illegal material, which is probably why they’re so gun-shy.

The problem with Steam and Itch.io is that fictional adult content does not require real performers, unlike live-action porn, and so the likelihood that they’re hosting illegal content (by the standards of where the processors are headquartered) is much lower. The fact that people are using the previous court rulings to pressure payment processors about objectionable content that is not otherwise illegal is the issue here.

[Kastel]

This is a pretty good interview laying out the stakes on what’s happening to Itchio:

Credit Card Companies Are Hurting the Future of Video Games

I’m also fond of the WIRED article, which brings up the ideologies of the group and how they work. A non-paywalled version exists:

https://archive.md/2025.07.25-022322/https://www.wired.com/story/steam-itchio-are-pulling-porn-games-censorship/

International Business Times UK has also written a decent article on it:

Mastercard, Visa Under Fire As Petition To 'Not Police' Legal Content Blows Up

[Mike_G (Mike)]

I wonder what it would take to get Collective Shout defunded, i.e. dropped by payment processors?

They certainly have enough mentions of sex, rape and incest on their website…

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

@zarf

The UK “Online Safety Act” is not mentioned and is unlikely to be directly relevant.

As of today, I’m seeing reports that Itch has also added “content unavailable in your region” barriers for UK users, explicitly mentioning UK regulatory requirements.

I don’t have solid info on what’s affected.

[pbparjeter]

@evouga Regulatory risk is more plausible to me… what are the specific relevant laws?

@Encorm the likelihood that they’re hosting illegal content (by the standards of where the processors are headquartered

Visa, Mastercard, etc. are multinationals with a subsidiary/key partner/etc. in virtually every country. They’re subject to those countries’ laws and international law, plus they can be sued in civil courts for things that aren’t criminal.

As you might suspect, payment giants with pages and pages of agreements and billions of dollars are very good at avoiding lawsuits. Visa’s loss in MindGeek case is notable and “landmark” for that reason.

So the question is what laws are other companies getting sued over, particularly for reasons relating to content or at least client behavior.

After struggling to find something … I found something.

In 2012, payment processors cut off Wikileaks because it supposedly got its content illegally (not over the content itself). Note that Mastercard and Visa admitted to cutting off Wikileaks this time.

Wikileaks, meanwhile, was going to try and sue Visa and Mastercard for cutting it off and filed a complaint in the EU, alleging the processors broke antitrust laws. It failed. But then Wikileaks succeeded in a court case against Valitor, a close partner of Visa, over breaking contract laws.

It’s not a pure victory, but it is a good illustration of how things can proceed legally. Visa’s excessive, paranoid terms of agreement for what you can and can’t do are why it’s Visa and not Valitor.

Aside from that, governments are pretty effective at fining and suing payment companies when they break antitrust (anticompetition) laws.

[Mewtamer (Jeffery wright)]

The Itch.io part of the debacle isn’t mentioned(though Steam is), but here’s a YouTube video on the larger issue of activist groups putting pressure on payment processors to hurt adult content that crossed my listening while the forum was down:

The Secret War To Censor The Internet

[pbparjeter]

Over the past few days, there have been a few developments.

Itch io has issued an update

First, Itch io has added to its initial comments, admitting that its actions were greater than Steam’s and describing plans for alternate payment processors. (Even from the beginning, it had plans to reverse the deindexing over a probably lengthy period of time.)

Visa Issues Generic Responses

Visa has been sending out a generic response to people complaining. It says that it didn’t directly dictate any website’s policies (something that has always been clear) but declines to say whether it put direct pressure on Itch, Steam, or intermediate payment processors (ie. PayPal and Stripe, which Itch relies on).

Of course, you can blame Visa and Mastercard for creating the longstanding terms of service that allowed this to happen (and other cases over the past decade). But if Itch only reacted to public information and independent advice, protesting Visa and Mastercard may have little effect.

I also need to correct myself. Previously, I misunderstood Itch io’s “deindexing” policy and referred to them as “nuking,” ie. taking down, NSFW content.

I assumed Itch forcibly made those pages private. However, some users say Itch removed the pages from search/browse, but left them viewable by direct link. Adding to my confusion, it seems that Itch has also taken down other content entirely.

It also seems that some non-NSFW content has been taken down, including LGBT and minority work, which means those groups are being targeted. I overlooked @norbez’s July 24 post above. Though it is Itch io that chose which works to target…

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In case I’ve been too light on anything, I want state that I’m against the restrictions.

But at this point it’s clear that I’m most sympathetic to the faction in favor of boycotting Itch io for failing to take moderate action, at least until it reverse the current restrictions. I’ve put my … nonmonetized works where my mouth is and delisted my games from Itch io, although admittedly that’s mainly over concerns about the UK OSA.

This is probably the last time I’ll post on this, as it doesn’t seem there will be immediate developments.