After Valve and Steam, credit card companies spurred by anti-porn group sink their teeth into Itch, forcing countless NSFW games off the indie store under threat of critical payment failure

PC games storefront Itch.io is also under pressure from payment processors, so it's currently investigating all adult-only games on the platform before it provides "new compliance measures." In the meantime, thousands of NSFW games have been "deindexed" - essentially, they've been shadowbanned.

Itch acknowledged the situation in a recent blog post, writing that it has deindexed "all adult NSFW content from our browse and search pages," meaning games with adult tags won't appear on the storefront when searched for normally. This link still shows a few thousand games with the NSFW tag, though.

"We understand this action is sudden and disruptive, and we are truly sorry for the frustration and confusion caused by this change," it continues, explaining the move comes after "scrutiny from our payment processors regarding the nature of some content hosted on itch.io."

Steam has also been subject to the same pressures and subsequently removed tons of adult games from its own store. At the time, an organization called Collective Shout took credit for the move after it launched a campaign off the back of No Mercy, a controversial and downright gross game simulating sexual violence. Itch says the collective directed "concerns to our payment processors about the nature of certain content found on both platforms," hence what's happening now.

"Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform. To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate steps towards compliance. This is a time-critical moment for itch.io. The situation developed rapidly, and we had to act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure. Unfortunately, this meant it was not realistic to provide creators with advance notice before making this change," Itch adds.

For now, the storefront is "conducting a comprehensive audit of content to ensure we can meet the requirements" laid out by these unnamed payment processors. NSFW pages will still be deindexed in the meantime, and once the internal review is complete, Itch plans to introduce new compliance measures requiring developers to confirm whether their games are "allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account."

Itch also says "some pages" will be entirely removed as part of the review. At least some indie devs have spoken up online about their games being removed already.

Of course, payment processors, including Visa and MasterCard, are burrowed in to financial systems across the globe. That means if even one of them takes issue with a certain type of product, it essentially becomes impossible to monetize, especially with mostly digital-only products like PC games.

Nier Automata director Yoko Taro claimed it's "not just a matter of censoring adult content or jeopardizing freedom of expression, but rather a security hole that endangers democracy itself."