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.

What’s not allowed?

In response to concerns passed on by those payment processors, itch.io said it is conducting a "comprehensive audit" of all its content. Following that audit, creators of NSFW content on the platform will be required to "confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account."

The early results of that audit can already be seen on the now-deleted pages for many itch.io games, which have been replaced with a simple message that "this game's files have been suspended by an itch.io administrator." Those games can no longer be purchased on the platform, and users report on social media that their previous purchases of those games can't even be redownloaded via the platform.