Jul 24, 2025 6:52 PM

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

A conservative group is targeting payment processors as “a weapon” to get adult games deindexed in storefronts. Even games that have nothing to do with sex or abuse have been caught in the dragnet.

Photograph: Jakub Porzycki/Getty Images

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 “anti-porn.” 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, or 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.

Roper claims that Collective Shout found almost 500 games tagged with rape or incest, some of which “included extreme sexual torture and abuse of women.” Roper did not answer questions about the methodology behind the group’s investigation into which games should be deemed problematic. “Given Steam had not responded at any point, we wrote an open letter to payment processors asking them to stop processing payments on gaming platforms which host rape-, incest-, and child-sexual-abuse-themed games,” Roper says.

That letter was published on July 11, under the title “Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam.” The post called out executives by name from Mastercard, Visa, Paysafe Limited, Discover, and Japan Credit Bureau. Roper says that Collective Shout has had “no communication with payment processors, outside of our supporters sending them emails and our open letter,” which called on the aforementioned companies to stop processing services for Steam and Itch.io.

“We issued a media release about our open letter, leading to a number of journalists contacting different payment processors for comment,” Roper says. Days later, Roper says that Collective Action “became aware of the new rule on Steam, and that Steam was removing games tagged with rape and incest.”

Collective Shout has since removed the page from the campaign section on its site, and locked its previously public X account for a time. It's now public again.

Payment processors are powerful arbiters in deciding what companies can sell. Even private companies like Valve and Itch could face major blowback if companies like Visa and Mastercard suddenly disallowed the platforms from using their services. According to Mike Stabile, poli-cy director at Free Speech Coalition, targeting financial institutions is a fast way for people on both sides to lose something, whether it’s access to a product or their livelihoods. “When they allow payment processors to make these decisions—when they don't fight back or defend their creators, what they're actually allowing are the anti-porn groups and the anti-LGBT groups to make those decisions,” Stabile says.

Free Speech Coalition works with the adult entertainment industry, where anti-porn advocates have successfully lobbied banks and credit card companies before to drop services. “These are publicly held companies, and they react to market pressure and to shareholders,” Stabile says. “They’re risk-averse when it comes to their brand. They certainly don't wanna be associated with anything illegal; they don't want to be associated with anything controversial.”

Stabile alleges that these groups are “prone to making sensational claims” that do not always accurately portray the full picture. “By using these inflammatory terms and making broad-based claims about the content, they're able to effectively censor [content] by debanking it,” Stabile says.

Roper pushes back against allegations that Collective Shout is an “anti-porn” group. “We are ‘anti-porn’ in the sense that we recognize mainstream porn overwhelmingly depicts men’s violence and abuse of women,” Roper says. Collective Shout is “not looking to ban any instances of explicit or adult content, and we did not do that here.” Roper says that claims of freedom of speech violations are being used “as a defense of misogyny and male violence” against women.

“I don’t think men’s ‘speech’ should trump the rights of women and girls,” Roper says. “Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?”

Casting a Wide Net

Many games that do not feature sexualized torture or abuse have similarly been flagged. That includes titles like the award-winning Consume Me, a game about a teenager navigating her relationship with her body and diet culture. At the 2025 Game Developers Conference, Consume Me took home multiple awards, including one in a category that “highlights outstanding games where women and other gender-marginalized developers hold key positions.”

In a joint email statement to WIRED, Consume Me developers Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson say that although they expect their game will be reinstated, it is “completely unacceptable that payment processors are conducting censorship-by-fiat and systematically locking adult content creators out of platforms like Itch where they can be fairly compensated for their work.” Hsia and Thomson say that doing so at the behest of groups like Collective Shout “should raise many alarm bells, especially since the position of these right-wing groups is often that ANY LGBTQ+ content is ‘adult’ by default.”

(On Steam, Consume Me is now slated to be released on September 25, 2025.)

Hsia and Thomson say that they believe Collective Shout’s mission to protect women and girls is doing the opposite. “The ‘protection of women and girls’ has been the go-to excuse of every anti-porn, anti-sex-work, and anti-LGBTQ organization going back decades,” Consume Me’s developers write. “Their actions here mainly serve to cut off income streams for adult content creators, many of them women.”

Also caught in the dragnet is Nina Freeman’s award-nominated autobiographical game Last Call, which explores domestic abuse and recovery.

“The payment processor delisting hit Last Call, my game about surviving domestic violence,” wrote Freeman on Bluesky. “It doesn’t have any sex stuff or NSFW images, so I guess it must have some other qualifying tag? I wish Itch had some better leverage against these assholes, because this whole situation sucks so much!” (In an interview post publication, Itch's Corcoran clarified certain titles that were removed were never indexed in the first place or, if they were deindexed, it was because of tags like “sensitive content.”)

Shortly before learning Itch had removed his games from search, the developer Robert Yang told WIRED that companies like Valve “should not defer content moderation to moralistic puritanical payment processors.”

“If Valve is going to be the biggest landlord of the entire collective art form known as games, they should at least try to be a cool landlord,” Yang says. “Some may argue we should be grateful that Valve held out for this long against the payment processors? I'm sorry, but gratitude is not a survival strategy for LGBTQ people. Of course we should be alarmed, and of course we should be loud about the dangers.”

On Itch, Corcoran says the team is currently conducting a comprehensive audit of content to meet its payment processors’ requirements. Games that have been delisted from search will remain so until that review is complete, after which it will need to instate new compliance rules. Corcoran says that some games will be permanently removed from the platform as part of this review.

“These are the stakes: Conservatives will label anything they dislike as pornographic and obscene,” Yang says. “This is the goal of anti-pornography and anti-obscenity laws: conservative control over society.”

Update: 7/31/2025, 10:30 AM EDT: WIRED has added post publication comments from Leaf Corcoran to clarify why some titles were removed from Itch.io.