Thousands of creators today found their Itch.io projects missing from the online storefront – effectively delisted to anyone searching or browsing the site. Others still are reporting actual takedowns “with no notice”, halted payouts, and those who have previously purchased their games being unable to download them.
Going by one image posted on the Itch Discord and shared on Bluesky by game developer Daffodil, filtering by the site’s ‘NSFW’ category previously showed 28,114 results. It now shows 7,008.
After creators were left in limbo for several hours, Itch.io posted a statement clarifying that they’d “deindexed” all NSFW work content from their browse and search pages, following “a campaign” against them and Steam by the Collective Shout organisation, that targeted payment providers “due to a game titled No Mercy, which was temporarily available on itch.io before being banned back in April”.
Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article. They recently claimed credit for the campaign that saw payment providers pressuring the online storefronts to remove content the group deemed unacceptable.
“Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform,” reads Itch’s statement. “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.”
“This is a time critical moment for itch.io,” the statement continues. “The situation developed rapidly, and we had to act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure. Unfortunately, this meant it was not realistic to provide creators with advance notice before making this change. We know this is not ideal, and we apologize for the abruptness of this change.”
It’s not hard to empathise with the folks behind Itch for being placed in an impossible position, but their lack of forewarning has left creators blindsided and in some cases, seemingly without income. “I wish we had gotten some warning from Steam and Itch,” wrote game developer Robert Yang on Bluesky, “but we already know it’s Collective Shout + payment processors waging culture war against LGBTQ people and sexual expression. I guess there’s nothing else for Steam and Itch to say”.
Itch say they’re currently “conducting a comprehensive audit” to meet their payment processor’s requirements, and that affected pages will remain “deindexed” in the meantime. New compliance measures will follow. “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account”.
“Part of this will see some pages being permanently removed from itch.io,” the statement concludes. We can get an idea of the parameters here from Itch’s own notices sent to some creators. These include “sexualised images or videos of real-life humans”, “AI generated imagery that is designed to resemble photographic content of real people”, “content glorifying sexual violence”, and that depicting “minors, minor-presenting, or suggested minors”. Which, taken in good faith, are all in line with what you’d expect and hope for.
Personally speaking, I’d be willing to extend that good faith to Itch.io themselves, but they aren’t the one holding the gun to their own heads here. That’d be financial companies, pressured by Collective Shout, who themselves have ties to an organisation whose CEO once described gay marriage as an “unspeakable offence to God”. It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of expression these groups might decide to deem as unacceptable next.
