Itch.io have announced that they are seeking out new payment processing partners who are more willing to handle the purchase of NSFW games, after delisting or removing a vast swathe of games in accordance with the content restrictions of companies such as Paypal and Stripe. They’ve also offered an explanation for why they’ve recently delisted so many more “infringing” games than Steam, which has carried out its own cull of sexually explicit games under pressure from finance firms. Finally, Itch have acknowledged that their recently posted list of newly prohibited adult material is far too vague to be useful.
To catch you up, all this began earlier this summer, when Valve quietly updated Steam’s terms and conditions to give banks, payment processors and internet service providers control over the platform’s definition of “adult” content. Following this change of policy, they delisted a number of projects, including a bunch of incest-themed sex games.
In the wake of Valve’s policy change, Itch also began removing thousands of games from search results in the course of a catalogue-wide audit. Itch.io have been asking developers to comply with payment processor regulations for a while, but they have not hitherto tried to enforce this systematically.
According to an addendum to Itch.io’s latest statement about NSFW content, the difference in scale between each platform’s banwave is the result of, firstly, Valve being a much larger corporation with greater capacity to challenge the payment firms, and secondly, Valve exerting tighter control over adult game developers to begin with. On Steam, product pages have to be approved before they will appear on the store. “Because they were generally aware of the content they host, they could identify and act on specific pages,” Itch conclude.
By contrast, Itch.io is an open-ended platform where “anyone can publish content at any time with minimal barriers”. It’s possible to tag Itch.io game pages as having adult material, but Itch comment that “we could not rely on user-provided tagging to be accurate enough for a targeted approach, so a broader review was necessary to be thorough.”
There’s no timeline for when Itch.io’s audit will be complete, not least because they’re waiting on “final determinations from our current payment processors, Stripe and PayPal”. They are, however, now getting in touch with alternative payment processors who are more willing to handle the kind of material Stripe and Paypal consider objectionable. They’re also looking at stricter age-gating for Itch.io and better content classification.
Not coincidentally, the International Game Developer Association have just put out a statement in which they appease all sides by “calling for greater transparency and fairness in how adult games are moderated and actioned across major platforms”. The statement lists a couple of “adult-industry-compliant processors” you might want to partner with, if you’re platforming a game the likes of Paypal won’t touch: Verotel and CCBill. I have minimal familiarity with either, but I’ll look into them.
In their latest missive, Itch also tackle some user complaints about the delistings. They note that even if game pages are removed from search, you can still visit them and download the game if you already own it, even if it has been slapped with a “content notice”. Itch are not, they insist, removing previously bought games from player libraries as part of the audit: people who can no longer access their games should get in touch with Itch support. The blog post also encourages players to “download and backup your games and don’t let any corporation dictate what you can own”.
As for complaints that Itch are already withholding payments from developers who infringe their new, albeit rather makeshift rules and regs, the platform holders comment that this reflects an older practice of blocking transactions in the case of an account breaking their content policies, “to address bad-actor situations where a user joins the site and blatantly violates our terms to make sales before being banned”.
As for yesterday’s list of prohibited themes and topics, which ranges from “animal-related” NSFW material to “real or implied” non-consensual sex, Itch concede that the list is very WIP, and that “we understand the problems that come with a list like this, as it’s easy to argue the semantics”.
“We decided it was better to give you more information to work with instead of less, even if many of the items on the list can be argued either way,” the post continues. “We intend to refine this part of the site with more care, but since there are still unknowns, this is the information we can provide for now.”
Why have Itch and Steam’s payment processing partners suddenly decided to push for a crackdown on games that infringe their policies? It’s apparently the result of an open letter to the payment companies from Australian activist group Collective Shout, who campaign against the sexualisation of women and depictions of sexual violence.
Collective Shout have called for games featuring incest and rape to be delisted, but haven’t shared specifics of the individual games they find objectionable, and seem pretty suspect in their motivations. They’ve mischaracterised certain games they want banned in the past, and have connections to rightwing Christian organisations with queerphobic leaders who want to criminalise all sex work. You can read up on a little of the backstory here. Whatever you may think of Collective Shout, or of Valve and Itch.io’s previous moderation of NSFW games, the overarching point is that vast finance firms shouldn’t get to police the definition of acceptable sexual material.
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