Indie video game marketplace Itch.io announced this week that it has “deindexed” adult and not-safe-for-work games, removing them from its browse and search pages.
The move, the company said, was in response to a campaign by Collective Shout (an advocacy group that has previously criticized video games, rap music, and lingerie commercials) targeting both Itch.io and Steam for selling “No Mercy,” a game that depicts rape and incest.
In an open letter addressed to executives at PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, and other payment processors, Collective Shout said that games “endorsing men’s sexualised abuse and torture of women and girls fly in the face of efforts to address violence against women.”
“We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements,” the organization added.
The campaign appears to have worked, with Steam saying earlier this month that it would ban games that “may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers.”
Similarly, itch.io said, “To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate steps towards compliance.”
It also said that “No Mercy” had been “temporarily available on itch.io before being banned back in April,” and that “the situation developed rapidly,” forcing the company to “act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure,” without providing advanced notice to creators.
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The company said it’s now conducting a “comprehensive audit” to ensure that games available on the marketplace meet “the requirements of our payment processors,” with adult content remaining deindexed until the audit is complete. After the audit, itch.io said NSFW game creators will be required to confirm that their content is allowed under the policies of their payment processors linked to their account.
On social media, users criticizing itch.io’s decision noted that its current terms declare that adult content violations are “permanent with no chance of appeal” and that any funds in an offending account “will not be eligible for payout” — or as one developer put it, “If you violate the rules, we take all your money. Not just the money from that work, ALL your money from EVERYTHING you’ve ever made.”
This is far from the first time that payment companies appear to have pressured online platforms over adult content — for example, last year Gumroad pointed to restrictions from payment processors when it implemented stricter rules around NSFW art, and OnlyFans also blamed “banking partners and payment providers” when it banned explicit content (a decision that it subsequently reversed).
A Change.org petition with more than 137,000 verified signatures criticizes Mastercard and Visa for their role in these types of decisions. Among other things, the petition demands that the payment companies “stop censoring legal fictional content that complies with the law and platform standards” and “reject influence from activist groups that promote moral panic or misrepresent fiction as harm.”