Gone without a trace: The silent purge of indie games

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By Theresa Raine De Guzman

This is after an open letter organized by an Australian based lobby group with ties to right wing conservatism, Collective Shout.

The group has long fought against the sexualization of women and girls and its open letter called on payment processors to stop providing to gaming services like Steam and Itch.io due to hundreds of their games containing rape, incest and child abuse.

The letter claims these games endorse men’s sexualized abuse and torture of girls and women.

As stated above this has led Steam and Itch.io to remove hundreds of games being sold on their platforms. Itch has even taken the more drastic action of deindexing all games tagged as NSFW.

This means you can no longer find those games on their site unless you know the exact name of the creator or game.

According to Nicole Carpenter, a reporter for Games File, that before July 28 the NSFW tag brought 7,167 results. Today it surfaces five or fewer.

But developers have noted that games caught in this sweep include LGBT- themed games, Love Limit a teen rated romantic comedy, Dieselpunk a 1921 themed alternate history book with no sexual content, and Vile: Exhumed a horror game whose developers say did not violate those standards.

In fact, according to the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), this type of censorship can unfairly target developers that are queer, trans or people of color.

Jakin Vela, the executive director of the IGDA in a statement released by WIRED has said that the IGDA is alarmed by the delisting and payment disruptions of adult-themed games on Steam and Itch.

“The right to make mature games with legal adult content is a creative right. Just like the right to tell stories about war, death and love.”

There have even been reports on X (formerly known as Twitter) that Itch was removing games from within users’ own libraries, however Itch has denied those claims.

In response to the outrage, Leaf Corcoran, creator of Itch.io has said Itch is seeking other payment processors that are willing to work with platforms that host adult content.

Furthermore, this isn’t the first time Collective Shout has tried this type of media censorship.

According to Game Grin, in 2014 they managed to stop the sale of Grand Theft Auto V at Target Australia via a Change.org petition with 47,000 signatures.

The organization felt that the game promoted violence against women. However this ignores that the game lets you be violent against any person regardless of race or gender.

The organization also felt the domestic abuse storyline in Detroit: Become Human was unacceptable, despite the game not promoting domestic abuse and the depiction of it being a narrative decision meant to incite sympathy within the player, leading them to care for the abused.

And most recently, Collective Shout’s director Melinda Tankard Reist was appointed to the stakeholder advisory board for the Australian government’s age assurance technology trial before the social media ban that affects every minor under 16. This ban includes websites like YouTube.

This internet censorship comes in a wave of other countries doing the same, like the UK now requiring websites like Spotify and YouTube have their users verify they are over 18 to access mature content.

Spotify has warned users that accounts may be deleted if they do not complete the age verification, and YouTube has announced it will be using AI to monitor your activity to guess whether or not you are over or under 18.

If the AI thinks you are under 18 then it will restrict your account until you can prove otherwise. The UK is also thinking of banning VPNs as people are using them to get past age restrictions, a move that not even Russia has done.

Of course, this begs the question of whether or not this is really for the good of children—or just another form of government control.

(Theresa Raine De Guzman is a Bachelor of Science in Interactive Entertainment and Multimedia Computing (IEMC) student at De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde (DLS-CSB), specializing in Game Design and Development.)