so itchio has shadowbanned any games tagged with ‘nsfw’, ‘adult’, or ‘erotic’ so they don’t show up in searches, and several devs have reported that their r18 games have been removed from the site with no warning
So itch.io/games/nsfw still shows a few thousand titles, but using traditional adult tags to search within there shows ‘no titles’. (src)
And @itch.io is now denying payouts to the creators affected by the takedowns with no notice
“Accounts that are in violation of our terms are not elligible for payouts” (src)
There’s quite a lot of examples of these in various threads now.
It seems to get a bit weird though with some games still appearing on steam.
Also worth noting: Jenny Jiao Hsia’s autobiographical opus Consume Me, which won the Grand Prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival along with a few other awards, is also delisted in itch search (but also has a searchable Steam listing) (src)
itch.io has been pretty open and transparent for their entire existence afaik and dropping all this without warning feels pretty bad
Assuming that this is due to pressure from VISA/MasterCard - like it’s been with Steam.
It’s patently bizarre how a company whose only purpose is transferring money from account A to B can then arbitrarily decide what people are allowed to buy and sell.
It’s one thing to refuse to be an acceptable payment method for NSFW games, but to forbid the store from selling them at all? That’s just megalomania, and a great pointer to why monopolies (and duopolies) are A Bad Thing™It’s patently bizarre how a company whose only purpose is transferring money from account A to B can then arbitrarily decide what people are allowed to buy and sell.
This is the whole point of capitalism. Those who control the systems, control the people, and capital exists to ensure that the people do not control the systems.
What I don’t understand is - WHY?!? They make money off of any transaction made via them. By doing this they are literally making less money. Reputation? I don’t see how it would reasonably be affected?
I want to understand why, what is their incentive to do this?
Blame Melinda Tankard Reist. She started this whole mess.
Are there trustworthy sources that it’s VISA/MasterCard, or is this speculation?
I mean, I would not be surprised at all, since they have a history of misusing their power (iirc they were the reason OnlyFans nearly went SFW), but before calling names, I’d like to be certain.
Sorry for being pedantic, but the only confirmed information in that article is “payment processors”. The author seems to just assume that this means credit card companies (what is a reasonable assumption, as said), but it does not sound like that part is confirmed…
No longer an assumption - from itch themselves: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
They only mention “payment processors”, not Visa, MasterCard, PayPal,… So, this does not answer which payment processor(s) are behind the push.
I’ll be brutal.
If folks want to actually do something about this, let’s make /c/stopcensoringmedia.
I’ve been following this story farther than most of lemmy, but I keep being read on blind eyes.
This is fascism in praxis. It is Capitalism’s final goal. If you don’t want your media to be financially coerced to be censored, you need to provide the means to share it, propagate it, and support it. This is a call for illegality, but laws are for the coercives.
So if you really feel like you want to protect something from becoming lost media, I urge folks to ensure payment processors do not engage on leveraging the means of trades.
too smart;ELI5:
it’s time beat the bad guys with guns and booty🎁
This is why Bitcoin was invented.
No, really. We’re discussing this on a decentralized technology because we know that centralized control is bad - and that applies to the technology of monetary transfers as well.
Too bad it was then mostly used for speculation instead of actually building up an internal economy where we wouldn’t now have to care what itch.io’s payment processors think.
Honestly, even if it hadn’t been abused as a speculative investment, I don’t think Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) would’ve worked basically at all as a decentralized payment alternative. Dan Olson’s investigation of it is too damning for me to believe that.
There are better cryptocurrencies than bitcoin like monero
Plenty of the ostensibly better alternatives are covered in the same documentary. I have no faith in them either.
You might like this blog on The Rise of Whatever, which encapsulates exactly what you are talking about. It’s very good.
Ooh, thank you for linking this! I’m not able to finish reading it right now, but I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read so far. It sounds like our brains work similarly, lol:
The result is something I adamantly do not want to interact with. I do not want to be exposed to LLM output at any time. It’s noise, and I feel like I get a little dumber every time I accidentally start reading it. My brain is already a bit glitchy, and I really cannot afford to have it work even more less good.
Big, big same.
Anywho, I’m hoping that I’ll remember to come back and finish reading it when I can. 😅 Thank you for sharing it with us! :)
Dude, this piece really vibed with me. And I agree, every time I use AI for something, I feel like my brain is atrophying. It’s postmodernism devaluing everything, and making nothing feel important anymore. Why study or learn anything when an AI can explain it? Crypto was turned from a potential tech feature into useless crap. And AI will go down a similar path, because it makes money.
This video is a lecture on modernism vs postmodernism, and why everything is kinda so…fucked up. It’s technically a car review, but the reviewer has a degree in literature, and goes off on a really interesting sidebar that I’ve never really been able to forget since it debuted around the time things started really going south for the world. Coincidentally, the guy is also a furry, just like that eevee blog post. Go figure, haha.
Been hearing rumors that the stuff didn’t just get delisted, some got removed entirely from the site, including from customer libraries that had paid for it with no refunds
And of course, there’s LGBTQ+ stuff getting flagged as porn because that’s the ultimate goal of each and every one of these attacks…
Itch.io had been very good for many, many years, and with their handling of this, in a single day they’re killing any good will they had accumulated all this time…
itch.io is also a lot “smaller” than Steam in terms of the teams behind it I’d wager, and they probably have a lot less money for legal representation and probably had the screws turned to them a lot harder due to that.
Yes how little was communicated sucks, but they genuinely might have not had a lot of choice if the payment processors were really turning the screws to them. They don’t have the wealth to fight something like this like Valve does, and even Valve bent over for this.
Fucking hell. But violence is still, ok, right?
I checked on steam here in Europe, I did not see any adult content disappear. But to be fair, payment processors don’t get to discriminate here
The games removed from Steam were removed globally. They didn’t remove all adult content games (yet?) though, just ones related to certain topics like incest.
When that happened i said “now its only incest, next it will be all nsfw stuff” and here we are. Didnt take very long at all.
I’ll have to find some specific examples then
You can see some examples on SteamDB’s Bluesky.
Oh nice, thank you! And yep, those do appear to be missing
This article has a screenshot listing some removed titles (and I think also a link to the original source): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/07/valve-gets-pressured-by-payment-processors-with-a-new-rule-for-game-devs-and-various-adult-games-removed/
As someone with no interest in predominantly NSFW games, it does bother me a bit that that is the most common type of game that show up for me unless I disable NSFW completely.
But my problem is exclusively with the algorithm and not with those games. I’m surprised that in 2025 a 200+ hour rpg with one implied sex scene may get tagged with the same ‘NSFW’ category as a Sex Simulator type of game, with no way to hide one without also hiding the other.
All itch.io had to do was create a “monetization-unfriendly” tag and aplly it to those games and hide them behind an opt-in toggle (with some proper notification for current users). They could even target their ads based on that toggle and get even happier advertisers with it.
Tbh it took longer than I expect for the new owners to start ducking itch.ioSorry I think I hallucinated some events.
new owners
Do you mean Itch or something else? Because Itch is, as far as I can tell, still run by Leaf Corcoran, the same guy who launched it.
I think I had a Mandela effect. I had clear memories of news breaking out about Epic Games acquiring itch.io, but googling for it now, all I see is references to when they added it to their own store.
I am very glad we live in the universe where that didn’t happen!
