Steam and Itch.io Are Pulling ‘Porn’ Games. Critics Say It’s a Slippery Slope to More Censorship

Late in the evening on July 23, developers with games tagged as NSFW on itch.io, a digital marketplace, began to notice something strange. Their work—whether it was a game about navigating disordered eating as a teenager, or about dick pics—no longer appeared in search results.

“No notification or anything,” says former NYU Game Center educator and developer Robert Yang, whose work explores gay history and culture. “Just found out via Bluesky.”

Itch.io is deindexing, or removing from its search index, any and all adult NSFW games, regardless of why they’ve been tagged that way. Games are marked this way for a variety of reasons, whether it’s due to sexual themes, discussions of mental health, or stories that otherwise involve triggering topics. On the itch.io site, founder Leaf Corcoran said the “sudden and disruptive” move is the direct result of an ongoing campaign by Collective Shout, an organization critics have alleged is “antiporn.” The group has recently targeted payment processors for Itch and Steam, urging the banking services to stop doing business with those platforms because of the content they host, a tactic known as financial censorship. The move comes a week after Steam removed from its own storefront hundreds of adult titles allegedly containing instances of abuse, rape, or incest, which Collective Shout has claimed was “a result of our campaign.”

(On its site, Collective Shout refers to itself as a “grassroots campaigns movement” that protests the objectification and sexualization of women and girls.)

Corcoran did not respond to a request for comment. Valve, which owns the Steam distribution platform, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a statement given to PC Gamer, the company said it was “recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks,” and that those games were pulled as a result.

Payment processors hold a great deal of power over the companies that use them. When companies like Mastercard or Visa pull support, it impacts that platform’s ability to receive payments. Conservative groups sometimes use these financial institutions to put pressure on companies to change their services. Insiders in the adult entertainment industry, which has seen similar campaigns lobbied against platforms like PornHub and OnlyFans, call these tactics a form of censorship that can hurt, not help, vulnerable creators. Itch’s mass removals, which are being enforced on a widespread scale with apparently little consideration of context, have already affected some developers who are queer, female, and people of color, even for award-winning projects.

On Itch’s website, Corcoran called this “a critical moment” for the site. “Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform,” Corcoran wrote. “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.”

A Punch in the Wallet

In March, developer Zerat Games published an Adults Only game to Steam and Itch.io called No Mercy. Self-described as a game about incest and “male domination,” the game included “unavoidable non-consensual sex.” It garnered international outrage, including from the UK’s technology secretary and Parliament member Peter Kyle. Following the backlash, the game was pulled from UK, Australian, and Canadian storefronts, while Zerat removed it from others.

At the same time, Collective Shout—the nonprofit had previously worked with anti-porn group The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) to rally against platforms like OnlyFans and Reddit that host adult content—began campaigning to have No Mercy removed from storefronts. Collective Shout campaigns manager Caitlin Roper tells WIRED that the organization contacted Valve on multiple occasions about No Mercy but did not receive a response.