Crackdown on sex video games goes wide, alarming developers and impacting award-winning titles

Thousands of NSFW games currently can’t be found when searching the popular itch.io marketplace

Before Itch.io’s de-indexing of games tagged NSFW from its marketplace. Days later, there were just two games that appeared with that tag.

Thousands of games labeled “not safe for work” no longer show up in the search results for two of the biggest online marketplaces for PC games, following a crackdown that ostensibly involved hundreds of games featuring rape, incest, and child sex abuse on Steam. But the mass de-indexing of thousands of games and other pieces of media has had a broader, if potentially temporary, impact, censoring any games flagged as having sensitive content. Some of those games are indie award-winners.

The crackdown on sex-related games began earlier this month, with mass-delistings of games on Valve’s Steam marketplace.

A purge of another sort began early Thursday, as game distribution platform itch.io, which is largely focused on indie creators, suddenly pulled all adult and not-safe-for-work (or NSFW) content from its search and browse pages. The games are there, mostly, just not findable via search.

In its efforts to assess its content, Itch.io has seemingly pulled any content marked as sensitive, including Independent Games Festival Awards’ Seamus McNally Grand Prize and Nuovo Award winner Consume Me from developers Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson.

Consume Me is a personal game about disordered eating and diet culture, and Hsia said she’s not even sure if she tagged the game as sensitive. (The demo has been up on Itch.io since 2018.) There’s nothing that would earn it a mature content rating, though, Hsia told Game File in an email, so she expects that it’ll eventually return to Itch.io’s search functionality. What’s unclear is how long it’ll take: “If it isn't re-indexed by our launch date of September 25, then we probably won't launch on Itch,” Hsia said.

Game makers on itch.io began to realize on Wednesday that their content was being “shadowbanned,” or de-indexed from the digital marketplace. And on Thursday, Itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran said in the statement that the platform took the “sudden and disruptive” action of de-indexing all adult games and removing others to “protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure.”

The culling of NSFW content on Itch.io has been deep:

• On July 16, there were 28,144 games in the NSFW category page on Itch.io; now only 5,979 appear. (It’s not clear why these games remain, despite being listed on the NSFW category page. It may be related to tags.)

• Earlier this month, 7,167 games on Itch were tagged NSFW. Now, only two such games can be found.

The majority of games impacted by Itch.io’s new policy are still available to access and purchase on the marketplace, but don’t show up during searches.

On Thursday, Corcoran explained to Itch users that the changes were made in order to comply with payment processors, such as credit card and financial technology companies like Mastercard and PayPal: