tldr: Australian pressure group Collective Shout has claimed responsibility for the recent Itch.io and Steam developments that have seen the platforms change how they deal with - and in some cases remove - NSFW games and content from their respective platforms.
The group had already been closely linked with the situation, which has seen Itch.io and Steam scramble to appease payment providers like Visa as they suddenly took an interest in the kind of games available on the platforms, especially those which contravened rules and “standards” the payment providers apparently had. It led to Itch.io deindexing all NSFW content from its browse and search pages, and Steam introducing vague new rules about adult content, while removing a slew of games.
“In response to false claims and misinformation about our campaign, we’re setting the record straight,” wrote Collective Shout in a Facebook update. "Some have asked why we involved payment processors, and others have claimed we are responsible for Itch.io removing all NSFW content.
"We raised our objection to r*pe and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months. We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.
“We called on Itch.io to remove rpe and incest games that we argued normalised violence and abuse of women. Itch.io made the decision to remove all NSFW content. Our objections were to content that involved sxualised violence and torture of women.”
Collective Shout shared a timeline of the campaign on its website, noting how it began with No Mercy, a game which involves extreme sexual violence, being brought to its in March. The group’s actions - a mixture of petitioning, emailing, and lobbying - began in early April and led to the game being removed from sale later that month.
Theocratic dickheads and the proscription of sexual expression. Name a more classic pairing.
Yes, rape/abuse games are gross gooner bullshit but to paint all adult content with the same brush is just asinine. Huniepop is as much a rape/abuse simulator as it is a racing a game.
Maybe, just maybe, Steam stops spamming me with low-effort-porn-slop game recommendations.
Maybe then try to not look into those yourself?
I’ve never gotten those reca because I don’t look for them.
We need to ignore them, they’re obfuscating from the real issue. Payment processors should not have the ability to police content, full stop, end of discussion.
The person who tattled is absolutely irrelevant and a distraction
Ahem, you may want to listen to this: https://pca.st/episode/007323a5-a2ba-4b4c-ab18-5307e0d31164
Steam ignored them, presumably, because they sell their products in accordance with the law, and that’s all that ought to matter.
hot take: people ought to start forming morals outside of legal morality. a Lotta freaks are gonna end up illegal otherwise and the freak factor certainly includes some thing you do that your prudish neighbor doesn’t like
They are ok with murder and war simulation then? ROFL Smells like another religious pressure group tbh, haven’t looked into them yet.
They should go after all violence in games and media then; we’ll see how well they can fend of the pressure… Not sure if they have the ressources to survive that, so I would LOVE to see them try.
By all accounts they aren’t religious, we don’t have *gestures broadly to American Evangelicalism* going on here in Aus. They just seem to be TERFs and SWERFs.
The religion of pure bigotry seems to be the most popular one these days, especially online
As they should have. Why should Steam or Itch.Io have to respond to every tiny cult of religious nutjibs making ridiculous requests?
it’s really wild that payment processors have decided to be the arbiter of content on the Internet.
they’ve been doing it since the late 90s/early 00s. Visa and MC have a list of “rules” for porn companies and have had them for decades. Why the vast majority of adult entertainment companies use third party processors like CCBill to specifically deal with that shit.
These dumb fucks in Australia think they’re ahead of the curve or doing “something that has never been done before” but nah man they probably did talk to Visa and MC but highly doubt they pushed them to anything. it was more like Visa/MC said “oh yeah we did this before…yeah we should probably apply what we did to Porn to the gaming industry.”
Australia is pretty weird about porn too. For years their rules basically ensured all female porn actors get boob jobs and took scissors to their labia.
Next they are banning sex toy purchases, r rated movies, tabacco, vape and alcohol.
Someone down under needs to send some complaints about them in. There is no way anyone who projects that much isn’t guilty of something.
The only thing dumber than your comment is the amount of up votes you have.
Thanks coming from someone with your post history it means a lot.
At least sarcasm isn’t dead!
Its not but that wasn’t sarcasm.
So my post did mean a lot?
Oh its a lot of posts confirming what I suspected.
Well at least you are a good judge of character.
Why is their logo a pink asshole?
Because they’re a bunch of fake feminist arseholes?
You know if we’re doing a numbers game Australia really exports a lot of shitty stuff. I mean the trade imbalance of fucking garbage Australian bullshit it’s pretty severe.
…whut? Are you American? Because if so that’s bloody rich. I’ll cop to Murdoch, that’s on us, I’m sorry for that. But what the hell else do we export that’s “fucking garbage”?
The biggest TERFs in the planet seem to be either Australian or British, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Also, Murdoch has caused untold damage to America that is gonna take decades or even a century to fix.
The biggest TERFs in the planet seem to be either Australian
What?? As a trans Australian that’s just completely rubbish. We aren’t having the same anti-trans rhetoric issue here that the US and UK are. In fact the biggest issue we had with TERFs was when Posie Parker came and did a speaking tour.
Seems like while Australia doesn’t export that much bad stuff, the stuff that does get exported somehow manages to be even worse than other places, for some reason. Collective Shout is a group of TERFs, and Murdoch… well we don’t need to talk about him. And also another bad thing Australia exported was videogame censorship, like the time they banned Hotline Miami 2.
Sure, Collective Shout is a TERF group but you tried to make the claim that Australia is one of the biggest sources of TERFs on the planet and that’s just rubbish. I’m going to assume you’re American as well.
I’m Brazilian actually, but I don’t appreciate organizations from ANYWHERE in the world interfering with legal purchases.
That doesn’t mean you get to try and say Australia is one of the biggest exporters of TERFs because of this one incident mate. It’s not like we don’t have 'em, but they aren’t destructive to the level of the Yanks & Brits.
I don’t think any country in the anglosphere has a monopoly on exporting shitty people, but I’m hardly going to throw stones what with this glass house I live in.
The trade imbalance? With the US?
Take back your war on drugs, the war on terror, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, your insane tech broligarchy, rhe 2008 global financial crisis, your Evangelical hate brigades (actually you know what take back Mormons and Scientologists and 7th day adventists while youre at it), the GLOBAL trade disasters & inflation caused by Trump and his pissy tarrif wars, the global derailing of climate agreements again by Trump and his idiot Republican allies.
I’ll stop now because I could literally type all day the shit coming out of the US that has been causing immense damage to the rest of us.
What’s Australia’s shit?
Murdoch? He gave up Aussie citizenship and moved to the US in 1985, he’s spent the majority of his working career as an American living in America - we can at best take half ownership of him.
This handful of censorship wowsers taking down some rapey video games?
Mel Gibson?Enlighten me because I think the numbers of your “trade imbalance” don’t even come close to adding up.
I’ll add as well, the only reason any of this was possible is FOSTA/SESTA and that’s entirely on the US.
sounds like it’s time to bring the 90s back. rotten.com here we go.
they want to stop the sale and purchase of adult content, so just give it away for free. shareware that shit and spread it like VD.
Unironically it will bring more people to dark corners of the net, foul content was always free. Now i’m not going for these games, but also comparing the entire nsfw genre to specific games is disingenuous. At the same time violence and shocking real life images are fine, right?
Nsfw involves adult themes that aren’t sexual.
That means censoring the self expression of consenting adults.
This creates a huge bottleneck that eventually just leads to this growing in the back of the visible. Porn addiction is a problem, sure. How did pre-teens gain access to this content? Didn’t parents give them a fully capable computer at all times?
Back when i used a computer, I only had access to research and office, also flash games. Other than that I had other devices and offline games, on cd.
Modern devices have better parental controls but nobody uses them, old computers had virtually none. Turns out you can do your parenting.
The dangers of this privacy invasive solution is the exposure of personal ID to questionable places, while bringing people towards bad places, that don’t ask for things.
Kinda like pirating a game as a kid, because you couldn’t buy it, but you only got viruses afterwards. Same deal.
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Have you played any of these sexual violence games? You aren’t comparing apples to apples here, and there are plenty of books that are much more graphic than acotar or haunting Adeline.
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I’m expecting many services to accept alternative payment methods soon, just to beon the safe side from meddling ex-monopolies.
Stable coins on the rise, buy while they are cheap!
I thought more of Wero or Taler.
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So I appreciate the pushback, but for those of us with the option, what should we choose? Amex? Discover? Bitcoin is non-viable.
I just want a solution, not another problem. I live in America, and we have WAY too many problems already.
Discover seems to be the best bet to me so far.
Discover is on the JCB, UnionPay, Troy and RuPay. (japan, China, turkey, and India respectively). Probably many more.
Similarly, a JCB card should work wherever Discover is. It’s a billateral alliance.
Oh, and all Discover cards work on Diners Club International because those two networks completely merged.
Alliance members are not 100% acceptance. It seems like 95%+ acceptance though (most JCB will accept most Discover cards and vice versa, though you will get confused looks from the locals). It sounds like there’s a lot of old equipment around the countries that break compatibility but cities and other urban areas with new equipment shouldn’t have any problems.
I’ll probably get a Discover card and start testing this out. I already have Visa and Mastercard but this new censorship issue seems serious enough to make me start supporting a 3rd place competitor.
Between Discover vs AmEx, it seems like AmEx is about elite club / customer service / returns etc. etc. nice features but I’m not sure if it’s worth the price.
Discover is free of annual fees, reasonable cash back, mediocre costs for the merchants (better than AmEx anyway and comparable vs Visa) and a surprisingly huge offering of international compatibility (RuPay, JCB, UnionPay, etc Etc). It seems like the winner to me as a 3rd card to experiment with.
Thanks for the info! I’ll start looking into this as well.
People outside of USA don’t even have Amex or Discover as options.
It’s either Visa, MC, or Bitcoin.
Yeah, that sucks. I’m open to non US options as well, as long as I can use them here.
