<
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/07/once-a-relative-haven-for-adult-games-itch-io-begins-removing-explicit-titles/>
'Indie game clearinghouse itch.io is the latest online gaming storefront to
take action to remove or limit the availability of some adult content, bowing
to pressure from payment processors spurred by an Australian grassroots group's
campaign against certain sexualized content.
Wednesday night, itch.io creators and users began noticing that many
adult-oriented games and content were no longer appearing in search results on
the platform. Other creators reported that their adult-focused titles had been
removed from the platform entirely, without any advance warning.
By early Thursday morning, itch.io had confirmed in a blog post that it had
"'deindexed' all adult NSFW content from our browser and search pages." Itch
said the move—which it admitted was "sudden and disruptive"—came in response to
a pressure campaign from Collective Shout, an Australian nonprofit that
describes itself as "a grassroots movement challenging the objectification of
women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising, and popular culture."
In an open letter to payment processors earlier this month, Collective Shout
called out Steam and Itch.io specifically for briefly hosting controversial
"sexual assault simulator"
No Mercy as well as currently hosting "hundreds of
other games featuring rape, incest, and child sexual abuse." The group claims
to have "documented content including violent sexual torture of women and
children, including incest related abuse involving family members" on both
platforms, and took companies like Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to task for
"facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these
violent and unethical games" through those stores.'
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
