Two of the biggest digital games stores have stopped selling thousands of titles following pressure from a coalition of anti-porn advocates and the world’s biggest payment processing companies. It’s happened before, will likely happen again, and is suppressing art, free expression, and marginalized creators.
Last week, the indie gaming storefront itch.io sent out a sudden notice to the creators that use the site to sell their games, books, art, and other media; it had “deindexed” all content with the NSFW (not safe for work) tag, meaning works with that tag would no longer turn up in itch.io searches, effectively making it impossible to discover or purchase them. Last week, Steam did similarly, removing a swath of games from its platform after implementing stricter policies related to adult content.
In its announcement, itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran explained that the reason for this drastic action was pressure applied to the company’s payment processors by Collective Shout — an Australian nonprofit organization that describes itself as “a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls.”
“Due to a game titled No Mercy, which was temporarily available on itch.io before being banned back in April, the organization Collective Shout launched a campaign against Steam and itch.io, directing concerns to our payment processors about the nature of certain content found on both platforms,” Corcoran said. Released in March before being delisted by both Steam and itch.io in April, No Mercy was described by Collective Shout as a “rape simulator.” Its developer, Zerat Games, denied this, describing it as a “3D choice-driven adult visual novel with a huge focus on blackmail and male domination.”
Consume Me, a game that explores themes of eating disorders and body image, was one of the games caught up in itch.io’s deindexing event. Image: Jenny Jiao Hsia
As a result of Collective Shout’s actions, in tandem with the payment processors, over 20,000 games, books, comics, and other creative works — confirmed via the Internet Archive — functionally ceased to exist on the site (though purchased content remains in users’ libraries so long as it doesn’t violate itch.io’s new guidelines), imperiling the creators who depend on sales from itch.io. In addition to NSFW content, notable projects that didn’t have the tag were caught up in the purge as well. One example is Consume Me, a game about disordered eating and the recent recipient of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2025 Independent Games Festival, which was delisted.
There’s also concern that this deindexing event will have a disproportionate impact on queer creators, and in the immediate aftermath there has been confusion about the distinction between “NSFW” and “adult” content, with a lot of LGBTQ+ stories and games falling under the umbrella of the former. “My SFW sci-fi comic that’s no worse than a standard Marvel movie also got deindexed... but it had the LGBT tag,” wrote Yuki Clarke, a comic artist, on Bluesky.
Several itch.io creators have said that their SFW content with the LGBT tag have been deindexed. Itch.io has responded to some of these claims on social media, saying, “The deindexing was determined by how creators classified their pages: specifically if the page was tagged as NSFW and as having adult content.”
However, there have also been reports that content with the LGBT tag but not the NSFW or Adult tags were still getting delisted, creating confusion about just what kind of works itch.io was pulling from its store and why. The Verge has reached out to itch.io for clarification. On Bluesky, in response to a creator claiming their LGBT books were delisted despite not having any adult or NSFW tags, the itch.io account answered, “We have a series of automated heuristics that can flag pages for review based on account behavior to help prevent abuse.” It further explained that the LGBT or queer tags wouldn’t affect that system.
Itch.io acknowledged that the blanket delisting of all its adult content wasn’t ideal and has created concern among its users. But the threat of losing its payment processors required emergency action. “The situation developed rapidly, and we had to act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure,” Corcoran wrote. Typically, payment processors take actions like this to ensure their products aren’t being used to purchase illegal content. In Steam’s case, it updated its guidelines to include a rule that prohibits publishing material that “may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors.”
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