Why itch.io didn’t really turn its back on porn

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This article originally ran as part of Issue 18 of Back Alley Games, the censorship issue. More of my work and the possibility of receiving ’90s-style demo disks with your issue can be found on their website.

Gamers, we have a sitchuation on our hands.

On July 24, Itch.io unlisted all NSFW and adult content on their site in response to “scrutiny from [their] payment processors.” To say the response was overwhelming would be an understatement.

Creators and consumers alike felt betrayed and took to the internet, attacking Itch, the supposed culprits MasterCard and Visa, and a nonprofit called out by name in Itch’s first statement on the matter.

Then Itch reversed course. A July 31 statement from the site’s administrator announcing the reindexing of free adult NSFW content included excerpts from their conversations with Stripe and the statement that Stripe “hopes to be able to support adult content in the future.”

And with that, the situation at hand has come to a rather unsatisfying end, though many questions still remain.

Perhaps most relevant is whether Itch.io has truly turned its back on the creators of adult content. Many critics online are certain they have. Others, like game design professor and developer Anna Anthropy, disagree.

“I think it’s wrong to say that Itch has betrayed adult and queer creators,” Anthropy said. “But I also understand that people who make adult content and sex games are very used to having platforms that they lose access to. This is not a new process.”

She also pointed out that many online felt that Itch was immune to this pressure and would act differently when challenged. That level of community trust goes a long way in the effort to understand why the reaction to this situation has been so large.

However, a look to the past dispels any notion that Itch was even capable of acting differently than their peers.

Just a week before Itch’s crackdown, Valve added a new clause to Steam’s guidelines prohibiting “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks.”

In response to this addition, a long list of adult-only games were removed from the platform entirely.

While Steam may be the most high-profile platform to recently bend the knee to banks, they are by no means the first.

Last year, Japanese doujinshi retailer DLsite severed ties with both MasterCard and Visa in response to demands they remove large amounts of NSFW content from their platform.

While that relationship was eventually reinstated, users in the Japanese adult gaming space were bracing for the next hit, with many predicting that hit would be directed at Itch.

Kastel, a media critic and creator of interactive fiction games, criticized Itch’s lack of preparedness given what happened to DLsite.

“It was really obvious Itch was going to get hit,” they said. “I do trust the Itch people, but I wish they had taken it more seriously that they would be targeted next. To use an analogy, it feels like a country that has been hit by natural disasters not preparing for the next one.”

Outside the gaming space, DeviantArt also recently cracked down on “fringe sexual content,” ramping up historically lax enforcement of their terms of service. Though in contrast to Itch, this crackdown was not linked directly to corporate payment processors.

Instead, a look to growing societal and cultural pressure might provide clarity.

If Itch’s first statement is to be believed, this whole situation can be traced back to one nonprofit organization’s opposition to one game, Zerat Games’ No Mercy, a visual novel centered around incest and rape.

The nonprofit is Collective Shout, a self-described “radical feminist” organization that penned an open letter to MasterCard, among other banks, and drew the attention of UK technology secretary Peter Kyle.

For Collective Shout, this campaign is part of a larger push to remove games “endorsing men’s sexualised abuse of and torture of women and girls.” Their campaign has also targeted titles such as Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar, 2013) and Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream, 2018) to little success.

Kastel said the difference between No Mercy and those Triple A titles is purely monetary. Payment processors are particularly risk-averse, and they tend not to touch popular properties they stand to profit from.

“There’s a lot of incentive to support bigger games that are arguably safer than your average queer trans game,” Kastel said.

This popularity-based loophole is borne out even in the case of Stripe, one of the payment processors at the root of the Itch crackdown. After a similar controversy in 2021, the processor continued to work with OnlyFans, a haven for independent sex workers, despite Stripe’s own terms of service restricting any sort of adult content.

For politicians like Kyle, however, the crackdown on adult content is less about money and is instead one more link in the chain of internet censorship that began in conservative activist spaces and has culminated in global laws.

Australia recently reclassified content that is considered “commercial” and “professional” to include free online content, meaning that content can now be rated and restricted by the government’s Classification Board.

In the UK, the Online Safety Act of 2023 went into effect this July, creating a surge in demand for VPNs across its population and alarming free speech activists.

The kinds of age verification these laws require claim to be narrowly tailored toward violence and pornography, but journalist Taylor Lorenz reported in The Guardian that they actually have much more far-reaching consequences that amount to censorship.

“Tech companies find it easier and cheaper to simply remove mass amounts of information than have something slip through and be deemed non-compliant,” she wrote.

Anthropy, whose Itch.io storefront is currently age-restricted in the UK, agreed.

“I have not experienced the internet as a British person,” she said. “But it seems pretty likely to me that their current censorship is going to deny a lot of young queer kids access to community and resources they don’t otherwise have.”

That’s not to mention the United States, which began its own journey of censorship with the death of net neutrality in 2017 and continued with legislation like SESTA/FOSTA (the creator of the Tumblr nipple ban, for those in the know) and the attempted passing of age verification laws in 11 states.

This legislation is increasingly common and shockingly popular, with many Democrat politicians and those claiming to be leftists supporting these restrictions in the name of protecting children from exploitation.

According to Anthropy, though, that mindset is an inherently conservative one.

“If payment processors can force platforms not to carry content at the behest of some Christian Nationalist group, then they can define what counts as pornography in such a way that it includes queer content that isn’t pornographic,” she said.

However, she added that people should not protect porn just because it is a “trojan horse that the right is using to get at wholesome queer content.” Instead, pornographic games should be considered art whether or not they resonate with people on an individual level.

Access to pornographic content and their creators’ ability to make a wage from them is a simple matter of free speech and censorship. This is true for Itch, who, it can be argued, did not censor their platform.

Itch never removed any content from their site as a whole, instead removing users’ ability to search for and find works creators have marked as “containing sensitive content” and tagged with categories such as “porn,” “fetish,” or “eroge.”

That removal is called deindexing, something that has since been reversed for free content, supporting the site’s claim that processing payments for these works is in fact the issue at hand, rather than some greater ideological shift.

In Anthropy’s view, the website’s initial response amounted to someone “going into panic mode” and that Itch “probably just started hitting buttons” in an effort to retain their relationship with their payment processors.

But because of their history of being welcoming to adult content – one of Apple’s lawyers once referred to parts of their catalog as “so offensive [they] cannot speak about them in court” – Anthropy said the platform’s response is best chalked up to sloppiness rather than ill intent, especially given their speedy reindexing of many removed projects.

Kastel supports the reindexing but called discoverability on Itch even before the controversy as “a joke.”

“A lot of people are up in arms about the deindexing, and I kind of agree,” they said. “But Itch search is really bad. I cannot understand how anyone finds a game there.”

Because of its precarious position, the future of Itch.io, beloved as it is, is uncertain. Many have lost trust in the platform and believe there is no space for subversive content on an increasingly corporate internet.

Kastel is not optimistic about the internet as a whole, but said they were heartened by the shifting of the vibe on Itch from an atomized storefront full of competition to something more like a farmers market, where creators support other creators.

“It feels like Itch’s design isn’t very solidarity-friendly,” Kastel said. “It’s not like something you share; it’s something you sell, and that competition has infiltrated into the world.”

Competition, according to Kastel, allows people to push things they don’t like – like adult or NSFW games – away, since they don’t feel a connection to or community with their creators. Because of that, solidarity in the gaming space is the only way to move forward for independent and queer creators.

“In the end, we’re all trying to make games together,” Kastel said.

Anthropy also emphasizes solidarity but said that moving offline may be the only response for queer people on an increasingly corporate internet that is only getting more restrictive.

“All the tools we have for having community and facilitating community on the 2025 internet are owned by corporations,” she said. “That has put us in a very precarious situation.”

Solutions for this problem must revolve around new systems of distribution, especially offline.

Kastel mentioned distribution of games through floppy disks and pointed to the history of adult games being distributed on secondhand hardware to bypass corporate censors, specifically the case of Zico Soccer cartridges being used as a distribution vehicle for adult games.

Anthropy is thinking more about zines and other print publication methods, especially for TTRPG works. She said that creators need to look for platforms they have more control over, but that the corporate internet will never provide easy solutions for small, queer creators.

“I think people who feel angry at Itch are justified in feeling that way, I just also think it’s a little more productive to think about who really holds the power in this situation,” she said.