We live in an era of unmitigated excess and constant suppression. The wide proliferation of machine learning image generation means that anyone can make creepy porn of their celebrity of choice. Expressions like “gooning” are widespread slang. Games like Marvel Rivals and Street Fighter 6 sell themselves on their pin-up characters. Meanwhile, books for children and teens like Genderqueer and All Boys Aren’t Blue are banned for being “pornographic.” In July, the UK introduced an age-verification requirement for internet access, ostensibly protecting kids, but mostly violating the privacy of adults. All these things, though disparate, represent a siloing of acceptable eroticism and thereby a siloing of life and art.
Independent video games are the latest front of this suppression. In July 2025, anti-porn non-profit Collective Shout pushed multiple payment processors to stop facilitating payments for some “adult titles” from Steam and Itch.io. In an attempt to halt the immediate loss of business, Steam removed Itch de-indexed thousands of not-safe-for-work games from the storefront. To be clear, this means removed from search results–the games in-question are still available if you can find them. On August 1, Itch re-indexed free NSFW games, sidestepping the participation of payment processors altogether. The quick changes have led to no shortage of confusion.
Mastercard has since denied its direct involvement in Itch’s mass de-listing, stating, “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.” The statement did claim that Mastercard “require[s] merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.” Mastercard did not clarify whether any of the games removed from Steam were illegal. Additionally, Valve contradicted its account, stating that Mastercard communicated through payment processors and acquiring banks.
Whatever exactly happened, and however big a role Collective Shout played in it, the consequences are clear: Indie developers are considering moving their work off of itch or supplementing it with their own storefronts; the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is now pleading with payment processors for “transparency;” GOG launched a NSFW giveaway to “[take] a stand against the quiet erasure of creative works from digital shelves;” Developers and artists have started a mass calling campaign to pressure payment processors into changing their position. The mass delisting and removals on both Steam and itch have spurred both fear and action.
Mass de-indexing has caused such a fervor because it is tied to broader cultural conflicts. There is no question that this silencing resembles the book bans in libraries and public schools across the US. The Trump administration uses feminist language to boost anti-trans policies in the name of protecting children and women, even as it suppresses information about the president’s well-documented ties to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. An abstract concern for “the children” or “women” drives a suppression of even the most inoffensive and benign explorations of gender, sex, and identity, all while the most extreme offenders go free.
The members of Collective Shout might argue that this is not their intention. Their campaign’s explicit target is “rape and incest games,” extreme examples of taboo sexual material, and a category that most of the games de-indexed from Itch do not fall into. On one hand, games like No Mercy, a game in which players specifically commit rape and incest and the initial subject of Collective Shout’s campaign, are misogynistic. But it is also a niche product, and one that most people have only ever heard of because of Collective Shout’s campaign against it. Furthermore, Collective Shout’s statement on Itch’s mass deindexing states that, “thousands of games glorifying rape, torture, and sexual violence against women and girls were delisted from gaming platform itch.” The statement equates every deindexed game to No Mercy, regardless of whether they resemble it or not.
It is easier than ever to find upsetting material and to extrapolate that upset to a fundamental societal ill. When the personal is political, everything is public. In her essay, “west elm caleb and the feminist panopticon,” Rayne Fisher-Quann discusses the urge to hold ordinary individuals uniquely responsible for societal woes. She writes, “the crucifixion of these individuals is ultimately a system of smoke and mirrors that obfuscates true systemic change while providing us with enough satisfaction to stop aiming higher.” Though the work of Collective Shout takes place in a different context, it is driven by a similar impulse. Most generously, Collective Shout chases the cultural and consumptive symptoms of patriarchal violence while doing little to stop its material harms or to aid victims. Founder Melinda Tankard-Reist’s own ties to religious, right-wing politics bear this out. When you cannot address causes, you are left fighting battles that don’t matter.
Although Collective Shout targets titans of softcore porn like Playboy and obscure pornography in equal measure, its campaign has more directly harmed the obscure. This is a dynamic that has played out over and over again. The work of Robert Yang–full of a playful, artistic eroticism–is still banned on Twitch. Meanwhile, big-budget games like Cyberpunk 2077–which include sex just as explicit–can be broadcast with a change or two in the settings to remove nudity and copyrighted music. The difference in scale between Steam and Itch illustrates this. Valve took down specific games that represent a fraction of the overall business on the storefront. Itch de-indexed every NSFW game on the site. The force this kind of puritanism has on smaller games is far greater than it will have on multi-million companies. And it has far more effect than just “rape and incest games” or even just pornographic games. Vile: Exhumed, a narrative game about sexual assault, was among the games which Valve removed from Steam. Even if you accept Collective Shout’s logic as a given, a game like Grand Theft Auto 6 shapes culture in a far more direct way than even the most vile niche game ever could. Yet, for the moment anyway, it remains untouched.
But the deeper problem is that anti-porn crusades are terrible at actually protecting and helping victims of abuse. Campaigns like Collective Shout treat rape and sexual abuse as deviant and abnormal, the product of twisted media distorting ordinary minds. But sexual violence is not horrifying because porn-addled monsters do it. It is horrifying because there is no category of person immune from involvement. Because these are broad, societal-level issues, it is outside of the scope of an article like this to articulate causes. But I can tell you this: I have lived in a culture where “thought leaders” policed porn consumption and sexual behavior. It did not protect women, but instead made men better able to hide, less accountable to the women they hurt, and more capable of blaming victims. If prudishness was an effective way of combating abuse, churches would be bastions of safety for women and children. They are not.
If art and video games can have any real role in combating structural misogyny, they must get stranger and more frank. The consequences of Collective Shout’s campaign is already that games will struggle to address the things that really matter, that thoughtful examinations of complex and taboo issues will be equivocated with purulent misogyny, and that marginalized demographics will struggle to find platforms while powerful men can say whatever they want. This censorship has already made the world of games worse.
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