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 corporate 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 each 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 ladies and girls fly within the face of efforts to handle violence against women.”
“We don’t see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial profit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent along with your corporate values and mission statements,” the organization added.
The campaign appears to have worked, with Steam saying earlier this month that it will ban games that “may violate the foundations and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or web network providers.”
Similarly, itch.io said, “To make sure that we are able to proceed to operate and supply 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 corporate to “act urgently to guard the platform’s core payment infrastructure,” without providing advanced notice to creators.
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The corporate said it’s now conducting a “comprehensive audit” to make sure that games available on the marketplace meet “the necessities of our payment processors,” with adult content remaining deindexed until the audit is complete. After the audit, itch.io said NSFW game creators can be required to substantiate 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 “everlasting with no probability of appeal” and that any funds in an offending account “is not going to be eligible for payout” — or as one developer put it, “In the event you violate the foundations, we take all of your money. Not only the cash from that work, ALL your money from EVERYTHING you’ve ever made.”
This is way from the primary time that payment corporations appear to have pressured online platforms over adult content — for instance, last 12 months 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 choice that it subsequently reversed).
A Change.org petition with greater than 137,000 verified signatures criticizes Mastercard and Visa for his or her role in these kinds of decisions. Amongst other things, the petition demands that the payment corporations “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.”