Joining a chorus of enraged voices, Peak and Another Crab's Treasure developer Aggro Crab says "puritan" groups like Collective Shout – the Australian org behind the recent wave of Steam and Itch.io game takedowns and de-indexing – or payment processors cannot be allowed to influence what games are sold or how.
"Steam and Itch are being threatened by an anti-NSFW group in order to force them to remove any content they deem distasteful by petitioning Visa and MasterCard, who are threatening these gaming platforms to cut payment access if they do not remove the games," the studio says in a Twitter thread.
After sending an open letter and many requests to payment processors, Collective Shout has publicly taken credit for the game takedowns, though it has denied "false claims and misinformation" and insisted it only "raised our objection" to "rape and incest games" or "content that involved sexualized violence and torture of women." Beyond one controversial game called No Mercy, it did not clarify these objections, nor did it elaborate on what these alleged false claims are.
The fact is, the group's campaign demonstrably cast a wide and poorly defined net over anything that could possibly be seen as inappropriate, sexual or not, and its actions directly led to a scorched earth response from Steam and Itch.io under threat of losing critical payment avenues for all games. Steam and Itch have taken some of the fury, and their responses deserve scrutiny, but it's the invisible hand of Mastercard et al. at fault here.
Just to put these standards into perspective, Collective Shout previously tried to get GTA 5 banned in Australia by, as Rock Paper Shotgun reported, misleadingly describing it as a game "that encourages players to brutally murder women for entertainment." This mischaracterization suggests that any game depicting or allowing any violence against women would be fair game for this kind of moral attack.
Games that explore mature themes in non-sexualized ways – not that the sexualized ways are a problem to begin with – have also been caught up in this mess, further stoking fears that this sort of attack on content will be (and has been) used to bury any art supporting sexual expression, LGBT relationships, gender inequality, or other ideas that may be dubbed inappropriate by outspoken organizations.
The response from affected game devs, artists, or players – or simply from people concerned about the ability of a random Australian non-profit, or payment processors like credit card companies, to play moral police on a global stage – has skewered the very notion as well as the collateral damage predictably dealt to games far outside this group's purported "objections".
Aggro Crab continues: "By focusing on the most inflammatory games available, Collective Shout is trying to gain support for a broad ban of content. Friends of ours have had their livelihoods jeopardized overnight after having their games removed due to mature content, sexual or otherwise."
"If puritan groups are able to dictate what people worldwide are allowed to spend their money on, it threatens video games' ability to operate as art in any way whatsoever, and it'd be foolish to assume that any game is safe," Aggro Crab adds.
Aggro Crab points to a resource page titled "Protect Queer Creators and Sex Workers - Tell Payment Processors to STOP," assembled by Unbeatable developer D-Cell Games, which collects contact info for payment processors like Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, and Stripe, as well as other related resources.
Nier mastermind Yoko Taro also spoke out against the censoring power of credit companies, now being wielded as moral bludgeons, saying that a processor's power to "do such things at its own discretion seems to me to be dangerous on a whole new level."
Beyond immediate implications for games and art, Yoko Taro warned, "It implies that by controlling payment processing companies, you can even censor another country’s free speech." He added: "I feel like it’s not just a matter of censoring adult content or jeopardizing freedom of expression, but rather a security hole that endangers democracy itself."
Aggro Crab agrees that "the best thing you can do is to call these companies directly and tell anyone who answers how you feel. The more resources they spend listening and the clearer it is that public opinion is against them, the faster this decision can be reversed."
There have already been reports (per Polygon) of representatives at companies like Visa buckling under torrential call volume, so the campaign already seems to be having an impact.
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