Both Steam and Itch.io have become the targets of a new campaign to censor certain adult games online, but the latter has gone well beyond even what anti-porn advocates say they were aiming for with new content guidelines posted over the weekend. Itch.io now bans games containing “themes” around incest, rape, and more.
The new guidelines come amid a pressure campaign from the Australian group Collective Shout, which advocates against the sexualization of women and is calling on payment processors to stop supporting any storefronts that distribute games with sexual violence in them. Itch.io quietly updated its list of banned content over the weekend with the following section on adult games:
The following is a non-exhaustive list of prohibited themes present in card processing networks. We are unable to support the sale of any works containing these topics:
- Non-consensual content (real or implied)
- Underage or “barely legal” themes
- Incest or pseudo-incest content
- Bestiality or animal-related
- Rape, coercion, or force-related
- Sex trafficking implications
- Revenge porn / voyeur / hidden cam
- Fetish involving bodily waste or extreme harm (e.g., “scat,” “vomit”)
Developers can appeal individual bans, but with thousands of listings removed and someone needing to actually play each individual title to adjudicate claims, that process seems all but unworkable in the short term. “It’s almost impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of unacceptable products to sell, so often we have to take content reviews one at a time,” Itchi.io writes on the site. “If an issue arises with your account that isn’t already covered by our policy, then we will contact you and share what options you may have.”
While Steam has also banned hundreds of games revolving around rape or incest in response to pressure from Visa, Mastercard, and other payment processors. Itch.io has gone much further in nuking “NSFW” content from the store. Its guidelines are also vague enough to blur the lines between censoring games that merely contain discussions or depictions of these banned topics and those that actually depict or encourage the behavior.
While Collective Shout has taken credit for platforms cracking down on adult content due to write-in campaigns, it distanced itself from Itch.i0 appearing to go above and beyond what the group had demanded. “We called on Itch.io to remove rape and incest games that we argued normalized violence and abuse of women. Itch.io made the decision to remove all NSFW content,” it wrote in an update on July 28. “Our objections were to content that involved sexualized violence and torture of women.”
One of the game’s pulled from Itch.io is a relationship sim called Love’s Heart. “A game that takes you inside a lesbian academy, where over the course of 10 main story chapters, you’ll help your kemonomimi roommate, Katsune, search for the Love’s Heart, a magical gem said to grant any wish,” reads the description. According to its creator, it includes the option for incestual relationships between characters but doesn’t not demand it. It remains available on Steam but was one of those games purged from Itch.io last week.
“This completely destroys me—so many games published with love on this platform, and now they won’t reach anyone new,” wrote Love’s Heart creator Capky Games in a blog post last week. “I don’t have an audience elsewhere; I depend on itch.io to grow. And the admins were already screwing me over for no reason—what am I supposed to do now?”
An ACLU petition against payment companies forcing censorship changes on game platforms is currently close to 150,000 signatures.
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