Something terrible happened on the night of July 23rd; itch.io began clamping down on NSFW materials on their site. This is, unfortunately, something that was a long time coming.

For the unfamiliar, itch.io, for years, has been a haven for NSFW games, books, comics, and TTRPGs. The site’s only rules in relation to adult content have essentially been to not post anything illegal.

This quickly turned itch.io into a haven for queer creatives, who often have their work removed from sites such as Amazon or Patreon, despite the work often not breaking the TOS of those respective platforms. Not only did itch.io have permissive policies, it also was accessible. Game developers didn’t need to jump through the hurdles they would to get their games onto sites like Steam; with itch, it was a simple process that didn’t require any initial moderation.

There have always been problems with itch.io. I’ve written in the past about how itch.io frustratingly doesn’t allow creatives to split profits between each other. itch also takes forever to approve payouts, which can leave people in a lurch. itch’s “customer support” is so slow that it’s basically useless, and itch has repeatedly dropped the ball when it comes to facilitating the compilation of large bundles.

Just recently, the Queer Games Bundle finally sent out their approval forms for this year, almost two full months after it was supposed to go live. And the problem is, it might be too late.

I said itch.io starting to restrict NSFW content was a long time coming. This is because payment processors, notoriously, dislike legal adult content. The ACLU has been trying to combat the way Mastercard likes to throw its weight around. Paypal regularly bans artists who produce illustrated or written erotic art, art that doesn’t even feature any real people. Patreon has a history of banning artists who also create erotic illustrations and prose, material that often doesn’t even violate their TOS.

The executives who control these companies, like most powerful executives, are neo-nazi freaks who hate any kind of sexual expression. Fascists enjoy sexual suppression; Wilhelm Reich detailed in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism the ways in which sexually repressed people can have their desires sublimated into fascist urges.

But these executives are also genuinely evil people, who have always wanted to ban adult content from the internet. In the past, they couldn’t. They didn’t control the United States Supreme Court, which meant that any kind of lawsuit against them could’ve set an undesirable precedent. So they had to pick on small targets, individual artists who couldn’t do anything to protect themselves.

But now, the political climate is completely different. And they just needed to be emboldened by an Australian “pro-life feminist” organization called collective shout¹. collective shout complained to the handful of payment processors much of the world is dependent on and successfully got a number of adult games removed from Steam.

Here’s where things get personal. I’ve organized four bundles in the past. The last bundle I organized, a bundle of NSFW queer art, went live in January and made almost $14,000. I decided to organize another adult art bundle that would go live later in the year called The Mature Queer Art Bundle.

My last bundle had 25 contributors. The Mature Queer Art Bundle was going to have 50. I created a Discord server to facilitate the organization of the bundle and got to work. The bundle was planned to go live in November, to avoid overlap with a bunch of other bundles:

-The Queer Games Bundle
-The Give Trans People Money Please Bundle
-The Queer Halloween Stories Bundle

If you haven’t noticed, these bundles are a major lifeline for queer, and especially transgender artists.

After the news broke about Steam, collective shout said they were coming after itch.io next. I’d found 21 people for the bundle at that point. I quickly found another four people, to bring things to an even 25.

And then the events of the 23rd happened. Despite almost everything about the bundle being good to go, it seemed reckless to move forward, to create a giant target for itch’s future “audit” of adult content.

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. – Announcement from itch.io founder Leafo

Any games tagged as being NSFW have been removed from itch.io’s internal search engine. And itch has already removed a bunch of games that used certain keywords on their project pages, with “incest” seeming to be the most common one. People who’ve had games removed are reporting they can’t initiate payouts anymore, essentially meaning their money is being held hostage.

They risk having their accounts banned by Paypal, something that already happened to a handful of artists I personally know because of material on their itch pages, months and years before these current events.

Not only are creators losing the ability to sell their work the regular way. They are also losing the massive paychecks that come with bundles. I personally estimate that I’m going to lose $1,150 in lost bundle sales due to the current crackdown on NSFW content, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Just about everyone I know is being affected in some way by this. Some people are losing a nice source of supplementary income. Some people might lose everything.

Trans people gravitate towards making adult artwork, and independent artwork in general, because we’re often locked out of traditional forms of employment. Basically any job that involves interacting with people is a job where trans people struggle to find work.

collective shout and the payment processors know exactly what they’re doing. There are some cishet men who are going to feel the impact of this. But the people who are going to be hurt the most are queer people.

A lot of people don’t care, and some people even think the removal of NSFW content from these storefronts is a good thing.

Give it another couple of months, or years.

They’ll come after inoffensive depictions of same-sex relationships; it’s not like there’s no precedent in these times. And they’ll come after interracial relationships. They’ll eventually come after anything involving people of color.

This is the beginning. And it’s never going to be easier to reverse course than it is right now.

The ACLU has a petition going right now in relation to these issues; not about itch.io specifically, but about payment processors banning content that’s legal. I’m not sure if now is the best time to potentially seek a new legal precedent in relation to these things, but maybe I’m wrong; the federal government was just forced to restore $6.2 million in cut funding to LGBTQ/HIV organizations after a Lambda Legal win. Maybe there is hope.

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SabrinaTVBand can be found on Bluesky at @sabrinatvband.bsky.social‬.

1. I refuse to dignify the name of this organization by capitalizing it. ↩︎