Who gets to pick what you can buy? Seems like an easy question to answer. After all, there’s only two parties involved - you, and the government that draws lines between legal and illegal content.
Unfortunately, there’s someone you forgot to ask. Who? Visa and Mastercard, of course! And also a group of prudish Australians, but it’s the big American companies that are enabling their behavior.
This non-governmental power throuple has struck before - whenSteamwasforced to crack downon adult-rated games due to pressure from payment processors. Itch.io is the latest target of their campaign, and it’s a hefty blow.
Steam Payment Change Is Purging Adult Games From The Store
Changes to Steam’s payment policies have led to a mass purge of adult content, with games being taken off the store for not complying with standards.
Collective Shout, the Australian group in question, has been credited with the near-total shutdown of adult content on Itch.io - a site once viewed as a haven for offbeat indie games that other platforms might not host.
“We have ‘deindexed’ all adult NSFW content from our browse and search pages.” Itch.iosaid in a statement. “We understand this action is sudden and disruptive, and we are truly sorry for the frustration and confusion caused by this change.”
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.
Steam and Itch.io Cave To Pressure - But What’s Next?
Typically, content-crackdowns at this scale only come from things like governmental regulation. Storefronts want to sell all the content they can, but must comply with any laws thrown their way.
These actions were not taken as a result of laws. No democratically-elected leaders pitched, drafted, or wrote legislation to cause these actions. This is the result of an advocacy group teaming up with the might of big corpo, sidestepping little things like “laws” entirely.
It’s not just adult content at risk.Thetransfemininereviewwrote their own deep-dive on this situation, and described the impact on trans creators as follows:
“While only a few trans authors seem to have been outright banned, I am getting completely inundated with reports from authors whose work has been delisted. These include many of the most prominent trans authors on itch.io, frequently for works only tagged ‘Adult’ for heavy or potentially triggering themes.”
Collective Shout has also targeted games like Detroit: Become Human and Grand Theft Auto in the past, and after recent events, they’ll likely be emboldened to take more action in the future.
Also notable is theremoval of a journalist from VICE, who reported on Collective Shout’s activity. The removal was, reportedly, not because of fact-of-the-matter “journalistic complaints” - but instead because the company that owns VICE wanted all of this person’s Collective Shout articles gone.
Should payment-processing corporations have the power to determine what people can and cannot buy? Do you trust them - or the people in their ear - to be able to make the calls on what is and isn’t immoral to purchase?
Personally, I miss voting. Much more fun than a corporate overlord, I think.
Steam Data Leak Confirmed But Accounts Are Safe
Steam wasn’t hacked, but there’s been a report of data being sold on the dark web.
