itch is removing all of their adult games now
Oh things are fucking dire huh. There won't be any storefronts left
Oh so this is NEW news. Posted an hour ago???
Fucking hell this is bleak.
this is, like, an active process that is happening right now, games are as we speak being delisted, shadowbanned, or removed from people's library. the nsfw tag is no longer searchable; nsfw games only appear if you search for their exact title.
when the steam ban came down last week everyone said 'well, we'll lost a bunch of money, but at least there's still itch.' itch.io has been one of the go-to places for people making pornographic or even just lewd video games, comic books, and tabletop rpgs. just like every other platform, the pornographers were an important part of their early user base, on the buyer and seller side.
this is absolutely disastrous, and not just "oh because people can't buy porn anymore" like this is a continued assertion that laws don't actually matter in terms of what you're allowed to buy and what you're allowed to sell; forms of art and individual artists can be declared permissible or impermissible with a broad brush or at a very granular level by the arbitrary, conservative whims of the people who own payment processors. who do you want deciding what you can buy? who do you want telling you whether your game with scantily clad tieflings, your comic with a li'l too much man ass, your ttrpg about young queer people, is sexual in nature? for me the answer is 'literally no one,' but even if you accept that there ought to be laws about this sort of thing, surely you want it to be, like, legislators making the decision, and not 'some random executives, whose motives are unclear, and who are accountable to nobody,' right? right???
it's not going to stop here, mark my words. stand with the sex workers and the pornographers or the next thing VISA and Mastercard are gonna decide you can't buy is fucking pup masks and dildos and pride flags
The group that pressured MasterCard into this was a TERF organization called Collective Shout. The ACLU is collecting signatures on a petition about it:
Mastercard's new policy unfairly targets the adult content industry, making sex workers more vulnerable, especially Black trans women. It mu
I got a crash course in their operations when I posted a thread about the Steam bans over the weekend. Muted notifications on it because, while 80% of people seemed to understand that this is a bad precedent, and that the Conservative playbook is to Ban "Objectionable Content" then move the goalposts of what "Objectionable" means; the remaining 20% absolutely did not get it.
Literally all I said was "I'm an adult and I should be allowed to buy legal content with my money." I was accused of being pro-child abuse and pro-rape. Notwithstanding that content depicting non-fictional instances of those situations are generally illegal, that's also not what I said.
But, these groups are really quick to brand things as 'Objectionable', and then rally their followers around dog-piling anyone who disagrees with them. It's worse than bad-faith, because they want you to react and backpedal. They're not going to come to an understanding of you, they're just going to yell louder.
The only thing you can really do with TERFs is block and ignore.
“You deserve rape”: We won’t be silenced by gamers’ threats and abuse - Collective Shout https://share.google/plHLJBRWU9bhyND9m this is how people reacted to the van of that rape/pedophilic/incestuous game. What's there to understand? That they're misogynistic? That they are attracted to those types of content because of the way they view women? Let's pretend the opposition to collective shout is, just self righteous progressive artistic souls lol
