I was slow to report on the latest wave of pornocalypse bad news for a number of reasons. For one, the pornocalypse stopped feeling like any kind of actual news to me years ago. The freshness of the outrage has died, and I’ve started greeting it with an emotional shrug. For another, the one-two punch of “AI and chatbots are replacing search” combined with “pornocalypse comes baked in to AI search tools” means that my level of emotional investment in ErosBlog as a reporting platform is variable. Some weeks, it can feel like I’m talking to myself, especially in the summer when things are quiet. If ErosBlog isn’t already 100% invisible on commercial search and commercial social media, that’s the future, right? It’s a motivational challenge.
Enough whining. The news is the news, and nobody else reports on #pornocalypse consistently, so here we go.
Pornocalypse Comes For Steam
On July 15th, the large games distribution platform Steam quietly updated its terms of service, adding an impossibly-vague paragraph prohibiting:
Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or Internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
Various sources subsequently began to report the removal of incest, slave, sexual assault, torture, and prison themed games. It’s unclear to me, at the distance where I sit, whether there was a particular objectionable category beyond “incest”, or whether we are looking at different vanilla reporters trying and failing to describe a variety of games with BDSM, rough sex, non-consent, or dubious-consent elements for which they lacked a sufficiently-precise descriptive vocabulary.
Steam apparently tried to ignore the social media outcry for three days of eternity, but was eventual forced to release a statement that acknowledged little and clarified nothing:
We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks. As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam.
We are directly notifying developers of these games, and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future.
Reporting on the Steam pornocalypse was on my to-do list for the last week, but it’s the summer doldrums, I’m busy with gigwork, I’m not sure we’ll have an adult internet a year from now, I’m not sure how much longer ErosBlog is going to be in regular publication, and I just didn’t have the spoons. But I was gonna get to it, I promise. And then I started seeing — maybe three days ago? — a drumbeat of complaint on social media that adult games on itch.io were being shadowbanned hard as fuck. Basically, if they had an NSFW or Erotica hashtag, or a few others, they were vanishing from search. No announcement, no change in TOS, just hard search invisibility.
At the same time, I started hearing mentions of an Australian anti-porn activist group called Collective Shout that’s been going after Visa and Mastercard in connection with online erotic games for awhile now. By this morning, I knew I was doomed to spend today doing another pornocalypse post. And then, ta-da! Itch.io fessed up to what it was doing, and made the Collective Shout connection explicit:
Pornocalypse Comes For Itch.io
This morning itch.io posted the following “Update on NSFW Content” announcement, which to their fair credit is far more informative than Steam’s weasel paragraph:
We have “deindexed” all adult NSFW content from our browse and search pages. We understand this action is sudden and disruptive, and we are truly sorry for the frustration and confusion caused by this change.
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.
Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform. 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 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.
We are currently conducting a comprehensive audit of content to ensure we can meet the requirements of our payment processors. Pages will remain deindexed as we complete our review. Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. 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 review will see some pages being permanently removed from itch.io. Affected accounts will be notified via their account’s email address from our support address. You can reply to that email if you have any follow up questions.
We ask for your patience and understanding as we navigate this challenging period. I’m sorry we can not share more at this time as we are still getting a full understanding of the situation ourselves. We will post a follow up on our blog if the situation changes.
Thank you.
You’ll notice itch.io went with the nuclear option. They completely banned adult content from being found, just nuked it all from searches and listings. A report on The Verge saying “it’s unclear if customers are currently able to access games and visual novels that they had paid for prior to the update” links to mixed reports on social media, some saying yes, some saying no. Likewise some people who know the direct links to things say you can still follow bookmarks to otherwise unfindable games, but other people say some of those were actually deleted/removed. It’s early days; clarity will presumably emerge.
Meanwhile the itch.io announcement sort of implies that the removals might not all be permanent, and that “new compliance measures” will allow creators to “confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors”. However, never once, not one time, in the entire history of the pornocalypse, has a platform under pressure from payment processors been ready, willing, and able to spell out to its users what the applicable processor policies actually are, in particular detail. It’s never happened. There’s suspicion in the adult industry that the credit card processors prohibit sharing this information. Be that as it may, I can guarantee you that itch.io is not going to be the first platform in history to actually share in clear and explicit terms the processor policies it expects creators to confirm compliance with. No, my friends, that’s not going to happen. Quote me on this. I am confident, me. Wrong sometimes? Sure. But not this time, probably.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
Image credit: Image is a screenshot from the No Mercy game banned from itch.io in April.
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