The Impact of the Itch De-Indexings

The Impact of the Itch De-Indexings

CW : This article discusses lobbyists using games depicting rape and incest as a core part of their platform. It also expresses concern for the rollback of LGBTQ rights and personal freedoms.

NB : I have chosen to link to the Steam pages for most of the games discussed as I feel they are less likely to become dead links as Itch continues its review. That said, I encourage you to look them up yourself and buy them in whatever way supports the artists the most.

On the 24th of July, digital games store Itch hid thousands of games hosted on the site after payment providers threatened to pull their support from the site. This comes after lobbyist groups like Collective Shout alleged that the site was filled with “hundreds of games featuring rape, incest and child sexual abuse”.

As of right now, most of these games are “de-indexed”, meaning that they are not searchable within the site’s internal search engine, although still findable through a browser search, effectively hidden if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. Some games have been pulled from the platform entirely without a word of warning. On these pages, it simply states that “this game’s files have been suspended by an itch.io administrator”. In addition to games, various tabletop RPGs, literature and other forms of art hosted on the store have been removed or hidden.

Over the last few years, payment processors like Stripe have become notorious among artists for pushing against their source of income. Gumroad, once a haven for creative works, barred all sexual content on its platform at the behest of payment providers. Sound familiar? In an age where those with far right sentiments are taking to office around the world, those who seek control are more and more emboldened to force puritanical policing on the arts with “think of the children” as their Trojan Horse.

In the case of Itch and fellow game store Steam, this began in April with the now-delisted visual novel No Mercy (Zerat Gamers). The self-proclaimed “fan favorite in the NSFW Game Incest community” garnered controversy immediately, with Collective Shout’s petition quickly picking up momentum and the story breaching the mainstream with British right wing radio station LBC’s coverage and politicians taking notice. Soon enough the game was taken off of both Itch and Steam, although it can still be accessed from Zerat’s website. 

After this, Collective Shout and their allies aimed their new audience at lobbying the payment processors that sites use, claiming they were profiting off of hundreds of rape and incest laden games. When speaking to Wired, their campaign manager Caitlin Roper claimed there were “almost 500 games tagged with rape or incest” on Steam and speaking with The Australian, the figures 232 for rape games and 149 for incest games were given. Outside of a small selection spotlighted in their recent victory post (which also claimed that 1067 of their supporters went through with ringing the payment providers) the group has not shared this list with anyone to my knowledge. It’s also suspected that this counts games in both categories twice, as well as demos.

After drumming up passion amongst their supporters for a few months, the group published an open letter addressing the CEOs of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Paysafe, Discover, and JCB, requesting they “demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games”. This led to said companies issuing an ultimatum to Steam and Itch : remove the games the the store or lose a way to process payment. Soon after, Steam complied and added a new rule to their game publishing rules :

15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.

They then began removing many games tagged as NSFW from the store that violated this new rule. As with all games “retired” from the storefront, those who have purchased them are still able to access them. It should be noted that “certain kinds of adult only content” is incredibly vague and up to the interpretation of whomever is enforcing it. Like their lax regulation of games that don’t disclose AI usage, the rules are in the eye of the enforcer : “I know it when I see it”.

With Steam compliant, Itch was the new target of the panopticon, and not for the first time. Games stopped appearing when searching for them at an alarming rate without a word. In a statement issued hours later the site’s founder Leaf Corazon said : 

This is a time critical moment for itch.io. The situation developed rapidly, and we had to act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure.
Melinda Tankard Reist, co-founder and Movement Director of Collective Shout.

As a result of Itch’s hasty compliance there has been inconsistency between it and Steam’s content. For example, the upcoming diet culture survival sim Consume Me (Hexcecutable) was hit by the Itch shadowban simply for labelling itself as Adult due to the game’s themes, while its Steam page is as accessible as ever. Similarly, Lovely Lady RPG (DAS POPPY UND MIA KUNSTKOLLEKTIV) begrudgingly released on Steam the prior week (reminder that Steam takes a 30% cut) and has also been hidden on Itch thanks to its adult labels. This cull ironically occurred amidst the Toxic Yuri Jam hosted by Nadia Nova, who has had several of her games completely removed from the platform, despite being up on Steam. We will likely see most of these return to Itch’s public end as the review process goes on, but this is not guaranteed.

The chaos has not been helped by the misinformation spreading without much official word – it was believed that itch was refusing to send the money from the sale of games that were impacted; a statement was later issued clarifying this to not be the case. However Itch has updated its Creator FAQ to highlight various subjects its payment providers are opposing and assert that any art violating this will not receive payment. 

Many have pointed out how these rules would ban The Bible from the platform.

In the past CS have lobbied to prevent the sale of games like Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games) and Detroit : Become Human (Quantic Dream) in their home country Australia, as well as blocking musician Tyler, the Creator from touring in the country in 2015. Founder Melissa Tankard Reist describes herself as a “pro-life feminist” and they have allied themselves with anti-porn groups, focused specifically on media influencing “male adults” and aligning with regressive figures and groups. Much of this was highlighted by now-former Waypoint reporter Ana Valens, whose coverage made the industry at large aware of the group, especially after her employer removed the articles without a word and the majority of the team quit.

Time and again the group has leveraged people’s moral concerns and platform moderation issues to lobby against adult platforms and works that don’t comply with their members' worldviews. When the penny dropped on Steam and people began expressing concern over the ramifications, Reist took to Twitter to paint them with an extremely broad brush, calling them all “porn sick brain-rotted pedo gamer fetishists”. Other ongoing crusades from CS include getting retailers to stop stocking Playboy-branded clothes and banning porn from Twitter, disagreeing with the platform’s assertion that "sexual expression, whether visual or written, can be a legitimate form of artistic expression”.

I’ve been talking about the context around this wave of de-indexing and the actors behind it, but I’d like to focus now on those most affected by it : the artists. 

A sticking point has been the lack of communication from Itch regarding the art being hidden or removed. Ebi-hime, developer of the now-delisted visual novel Sweetest Monster Refrain told Memory Card : “There was no communication from Itchio about this. I received no emails or any correspondence, and only realised my game had been banned when I checked my own developer page. Naturally I'm not happy with this and I think Itchio handled the situation incredibly poorly.”

Although some feel that Itch should have communicated better or been more prepared after the No Mercy debacle, most have been focused on the payment processors. Speaking with Memory Card, developer NomnomNami (Bad End Theater) said “I think itchio is doing everything it can to defend itself from getting completely shut down, so I’m not upset at my games being hidden – I'm also not as financially vulnerable as many of the other creators on the platform who really needed the visibility and community offered by this platform. It's such a shame this is all happening! I really hope the public outcry can do something to reverse the decision, similar to what happened with OnlyFans.”

Sex Advice Succubus was briefly the top NSFW game on Itch after the rest were de-indexed.

One of the first games I thought about when this started rolling out was He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me by Taylor McCue, an autobiographical game about her sex work and trauma made to work on the GameBoy. Although the game is still searchable through a browser, it was hidden without a word, McCue unaware of it until I reached out. On the broad delisting of NSFW games tackling hard topics like hers, she said :

There has been a small but growing movement for years of indie works like Wednesdays, A Butterfly, and others that had been making a small space to talk about sexual trauma and violence through the medium of games. It's really depressing to see all of that work being set back by a group of people claiming to be devoted to ending sexual exploitation. 

I don't think these games will disappear completely, I think more we are going to go back to a time where it'll be harder to find works about trauma. Ultimately I think it's going to result in people like me feeling so much more alone.

Beyond the immediate impact of thousands of games being either hidden or removed from the platform, most developers were concerned about the precedent being set by the storefront being at the mercy of Visa and Mastercard.

“It's 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,” said AP Thomson, one of the developers on Consume Me, “That they're doing so at the behest of fringe right-wing 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.”

“I do firmly believe this will eventually reach SFW queer games eventually unless people take action.” said Adrienne Bazir, developer of In Stars & Time and the upcoming Truth Scrapper, “To people like Collective Shout, two women holding hands, or a trans person walking down the street, or any queer person living their life, is considered NSFW.”

Speaking with 404 Media, Naomi Clark (Consentacle) said : “I think that [moral lobbyist] playbook could be replicated in ways that could get really dangerous for LGBTQ communities, especially in this political environment, where anybody can weaponize the opinions of a banker or a payment processor against certain types of content.”

Clark’s former NYU Game Center colleague Robert Yang (That Lonesome Valley) said : “Like many, I’m alarmed and worried for the future of LGBTQ content and sexual expression online. Conservative culture warriors like Collective Shout aren’t going to stop until they erase us from the internet completely. Payment processors need to stop abetting this anti-LGBTQ censorship immediately.”

Screenshot from The Tearoom, a game by Yang about 1960s gay culture.

With trust in the platform shaken, some have taken steps to ensure their art will be otherwise available. Nadia Nova has made a page on her website just for spotlighting her banned visual novels, for instance. Via email, Taylor McCue mentioned that she had already taken steps to keep her work available : “I've had a feeling this day would come for a long time so I tried to get HFTGOOM set up on ROM piracy sites since I thought that was the best chance the game had to survive.”

In their public Patreon post, Nami expressed concerns for the future of her NSFW comics “I can't guarantee that [they] will continue to be available on the platform while this situation evolves, but for now they are still accessible from my page (and linked on my website). I intend to keep them available on itch.io as long as they're allowed to be hosted there. I truly do not know where else I would be comfortable selling them, but that's not something I need to figure out right this second (or hopefully at all!)”

At the time of writing, I am unable to look at age-gated materials on Reddit or Bluesky without providing a private company with my ID (or using a VPN) thanks to the unrolling of the Online Safety Act in the UK. (Can’t even DM on Bluesky now, so don’t bother reaching me there). When going to check many Itch pages today, I was met with this :

A similar act in the US is backed by senators hoping to separate people “from the transgender in the culture”. Control and surveillance is packaged as “safety” by groups like Collective Shout and we can’t simply allow it to continue. Yesterday the sex workers and adult artists, today the NSFW games and tomorrow any non heterosexuality.

To state the obvious, no-one here is in favour of crimes like rape (not even the developer of No Mercy). Depiction is not endorsement and enforcing a culture of purity and presentability out of discomfort is only to our detriment. People’s kinks are not going to stop just because the artists making work catering to them is being suppressed; hiding the sex scandals in the Catholic Church didn’t stop them, after all. Even speaking as an aspec person, sexual arousal is as natural as hunger or anxiety or any other human experience and all of that has had a home in games from the start. Those who punch down on transgressive art are just as likely to do so to queer art if the Overton Window allows them to look righteous doing it. And they are doing their best to shift that window of what’s deemed societally acceptable in their favour.

If you feel moved to do something about the payment processors but feel helpless, here are some things you can do. First of all you can sign the ACLU petition if in the US and the change.org petition if elsewhere, as many of the developers I spoke to have suggested. Beyond that, you can ring up and email the payment providers to register a complaint like those at Collective Shout did. Adrienne Bazir has shared a script if you’re unsure what to say. Be polite, be direct and be considerate of the person on the other end. Definitely don’t prove CS right by sending threats or harassment. Unbeatable developer DCell Games has collated a list of the phone numbers to ring and other resources here. If the success of the 1067 lobbyists has shown anything, it’s that collective action leads somewhere. Finally, send some money an artist’s way if you have the cash.

For more on these topics, I’d suggest :

And if you are an artist impacted or concerned by this, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’ve omitted some cases I was waiting on quotes for to get this article out post haste but plan to either publish a follow-up or update it with more if necessary.

Thanks for making it this far. If you appreciated this article or anything from Memory Card, consider supporting me on Patreon or with a one-time donation on Ko-Fi to make my work sustainable. You can follow me on BlueSky if you want to, and of course make sure to sign up for the newsletter if sent this by a friend or foe. See you next time!

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