Last week, Itch.io delisted thousands of games featuring various kinds of “NSFW” material, rendering them invisible to anybody searching or browsing the site. Other developers reported that their games had been taken offline entirely. Among the games delisted was Mouthwashing, Rock Paper Shotgun’s game of the year 2024.
In a statement, Itch.io explained that they had delisted or removed NSFW games in response to pressure from payment processors and a campaign from Australian activist organisation Collective Shout, who broadly want games that glorify sexual violence and the sexualisation of girls removed from sale, but who also have connections to certain right-wing Christian groups that aim to abolish legal sex work and punish queer sexual expression.
Collective Shout had previously succeeded in forcing Valve to change their Steam policies to give banks and payment processors control over the definition of “adult” content on Steam. A number of Steam games have been delisted or removed from sale as a consequence, though nothing like the deluge of de-indexification we’ve seen on Itch.io.
Many of Itch.io’s delistings may be temporary. The platform holders may re-index them following “a comprehensive audit of content to ensure we can meet the requirements of our payment processors”. Once the audit is done, they’ll implement “new compliance measures” whereby NSFW game creators “must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account”.
Ahead of announcing any new regulations, Itch.io have silently updated their developer terms and conditions with “a non-exhaustive list of prohibited themes present in card processing networks”. Devs will need to comply with that list in order to publish their work on Itch.io. It’s rather open-ended, even without the caveat that it is “non-exhaustive”. Here you go:
- 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”)
To continue my thoughts on Collective Shout’s arguments from last week, I don’t think games that glorify rape and actively contribute to a culture of would-be or actual rapists deserve exposure on storefronts like Itch.io or Steam. Still, there’s nothing in this list to distinguish such a game from a game that tells a story about rape without endorsing it, or from a BDSM fantasy that stresses the importance of consent in real-life sex. “Sexual trafficking implications” is similarly ambiguous as to whether a game is allowed to feature trafficking as a plot theme without advocating for it.
Still, I can say with some confidence that Mouthwashing infringes on some of these prohibitions. So, I would argue, do Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, The Sims, Sonic The Hedgehog 2006, The Crush House, Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy VII, and Viva Pinata. Itch claim that they are reviewing games case by case, but still, if your work is remotely NSFW, perhaps it would be safest to avoid releasing games on Itch.io for the time being.
Collective Shout have now confirmed that they “called on Itch.io to remove rape and incest games that we argued normalised violence and abuse of women”. They have also, interestingly, distanced themselves from many of the Itch delistings, arguing that they didn’t demand that the platform remove “all” NSFW content, and that they are now receiving additional abuse and threats online as a consequence.
“We called on Itch.io to remove rape and incest games that we argued normalised violence and abuse of women,” Collective Shout write. “Itch.io made the decision to remove all NSFW content. Our objections were to content that involved sexualised violence and torture of women.” They also cite an article in The Australian from 26th July in which founder Melinda Tankard Reist claims (in the paper’s paraphrase) that Itch have gone “far beyond her request to ban sexually violent games”.
As with the Steam delistings, Collective Shout’s case might be stronger if they published full details of the individual games they’ve asked Itch.io to delist, and why they consider them harmful – particularly given their track record for mischaracterising other games they’ve tried to have removed from sale, like GTA 5 and Detroit: Beyond Human. It might also help if they voiced their support for the many queer creators who’ve been swept up by Itch.io’s mass-delisting, in keeping with their previous condemnations of homophobia.
