Itch.io delists all “adult” games to keep its payment processors happy

Posted on July 24, 2025

Itch.io, an online marketplace for independently made video games among other forms of content, has, without warning, “de-indexed” all content with adult Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content, resulting in thousands of games becoming unsearchable on the platform. Developers and players were left in the dark for hours before the website released a statement revealing that they had made the decision to delist the games following ‘scrutiny’ by the payment processing companies used for its purchases, PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard.

SO YEAH. @itch.io has just enacted a massive search shadowban on adult content. I tagged my old game "Who will you save? / Who will you serve?" as "adult" and immediately got removed from search results.

Lin Codega 🔜 SDCC (@lincodega.com) 2025-07-24T03:32:48.142Z

The statement apologised for the sudden change and explained, “Recently, we came under scrutiny from our payment processors regarding the nature of some content hosted on itch.io. Due to a game titled No Mercy, which was temporarily available on itch.io before being banned back in April, the organization Collective Shout launched a campaign against Steam and itch.io, directing concerns to our payment processors about the nature of certain content found on both platforms… 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.” Following Collective Shout’s letter written to major payment processing companies, which demanded that they cease operating on gaming websites that hosted “rape, incest and child sexual abuse-themed games”, Steam and now Itch.io appear to have bent the knee to their payment processors.

Content identified as ‘adult’ has not been removed from the site completely, but it will no longer appear in searches. Itchi.io states that all NSFW games will remain delisted until it completes a “comprehensive audit of content” to ensure Itch.io can meet the requirements of its payment processors. Once the review is complete, Itchi.io will introduce its new compliance measures for the kind of content that it will still allow on its platform. Some content will undoubtedly be axed permanently.

I'm setting my @itch.io revenue share to 0% until they reverse the de-indexing of adult games and the suspension of said projects games files arbitrarily. This is unnacceptable.

Harley (@beastgoddk.bsky.social) 2025-07-24T01:23:22.497Z

Itch.io’s decision has been met with widespread criticism from its users, many of whom are LGBTQIA+ and have become used to itch.io as one of the last legitimate online refuges that will host their work. As one trans creator put it in her message to Itch.io: “‘Adult’ and ‘NSFW’ are often used to discuss queerness, as queerness almost inherently brushes against the topic of sexuality, bodies, and human desire. There are ways to create content about queerness which ARE safe for work; however, there are ongoing campaigns to cast all forms of queer life as sexualised and perverse… Itch.io risks legitimising these attitudes by suddenly displatforming immense amounts of queer art. This is a betrayal of thousands of members of your artistic community who have put faith in your website and organization that will inevitably crater the reputation and user base of itch.io.”

Banning video games featuring harmful content sounds like an admirable goal at first blush, but what exactly is Collective Shout’s idea of what is harmful, and are they applying that label correctly? Collective Shout is an anti-pornography organisation based in Australia that campaigns against advertisers and platforms that host or support content that it views as “harmful to women and girls”. While they have achieved some real wins against misogynistic content online, such as getting SoundCloud and Spotify to remove Andrew Tate’s horrific “Pimping Hoes Degree” courses, their position against ‘sexualisation’ denies that sex work is real work that women can choose and be empowered by — basically, they are a SWERF (Sex Work Exclusionary Redical Feminist) organisation, which gives them a clear bias against any media that contains sexual content, regardless of context.

Screenshot of Serre, a queer game hosted on Itch.io

Studies generally agree that violence and sex seen on a screen can desensitise viewers, but they say that it is just one of the many, many factors that decide a person’s disposition to bad behaviour. Given that fact, does the “good” of blanket banning NSFW video games with themes of assault or abuse from platforms (to say nothing of the fact that games can actually use these themes to spread awareness and empathy for such issues) outweigh the loss of thousands of NSFW games celebrating sexuality, love, and acceptance?