A small group in Australia wrote an open letter. Not to the government, not to the regulatory body, not to anyone who has the legal authority to act on it. They write it for Visa and Mastercard. And within weeks, hundreds of games were disappearing from stores, developers were scoffing, and players were finding themselves unable to access content they had already paid for. There is no court decision. There is no law. There is no democratic process of any kind.
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I don’t care about the specific content that was targeted, or the group that pushed it, or even the compliant platforms. What always stands out is how easy it was. One book, a few weeks of pressure, and an important part of the creative ecosystem was restructured. No one was legally compelled to do anything. It happens anyway.
No One Is Responsible, Yet Here We Are
The most interesting thing about the Itch.io and Steam situation is how everyone managed to avoid taking responsibility for it. Mastercard said it doesn’t ask anyone to remove anything specific, and allows all legitimate purchases. Visa gave the same non-responsive response. Itch.io said it secures its payment infrastructure. Valve said payment processors forward their complaints through participating banks, citing MasterCard’s policy on harmful transactions. Collective Shout said it only targeted games that showed sexual violence, and that Itch.io made its own decision to pull everything.
Everyone is telling the truth technically, and yet the result is still disappearing in the games. The games did not meet the real appeal, including titles about horror, and LGBTQ+ themes, a murder mystery about an old movie star, and mouthwash, which did not violate a single policy. Collateral damage was not a side effect. It is a natural consequence of a system where one link in the chain suffers and everyone downstream bears the cost.
The Infrastructure Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
What makes this especially uncomfortable is the nature of what payment processors actually are. Access to financial infrastructure is not the same as access to a specific storefront or platform, something you can work with if a company decides they don’t want your business. It is close to commercial access itself. When the FTC sent letters to Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Stripe following the entire situation, the outline said: “full participation in commerce and public life requires that law-abiding people have access to our financial system.” It is no small thing to admit that.
Ironically, none of this happens with more malicious intentions on the part of payment processors. They don’t sit in the room deciding which games are worth attending. They face risk, respond to pressure, and try to protect their brand, all of which makes perfect sense from a business perspective. But the result is that anyone who can convincingly frame the appeal as a popular or legal risk now has a lot of influence over what creators can distribute and what audiences can access. That’s an incredible amount of informal energy to fall into this particular program.
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Good Intentions Do Not Prevent Bad Effects
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to paint Collective Shout as a separate evil, and that’s not really what I’m getting at. The team has been pretty consistent with what they’ve countered, and the games they’ve targeted early on aren’t exactly hard to counter. The point is not whether their concerns are true. The point is that a pressure campaign from a private group should not be able to restructure the global creative ecosystem without due process of law, no matter how reasonable the initial complaint seems.
Because logic is not always contained. Once you find that a sufficiently motivated campaign group can influence payment processors to lean on platforms, the question of which campaigns are successful becomes entirely about noise and resources rather than legal merit. Collective Shout has previously followed Grand Theft Auto, Detroit: Become Human, and campaigned for mandatory internet filters in Australia. The frames shift, but the mechanism remains the same. Today, games that show sexual violence. Tomorrow it could be anything that someone finds interesting enough and knows how to put together a sound book.
Google Didn’t Need To Know
If a payment processing situation requires a chain of characters before things go wrong, Google’s removal of Doki Doki Literature Club from the Google Play Store doesn’t require anything. The game that was downloaded more than thirty million times in its free version, appropriately rated Mature 17+, that opens with a content warning, and that spent years being cited as one of the most thoughtful portrayals of mental health in the world is gone. The developer and publisher were told it violated the Terms of Service in sensitive themes.
What is unclear about this particular case is not the removal itself, which may still be dismissed. That’s what it shows about the asymmetry of the situation. The forum can decide, collectively, that a game hosted for years now crosses a line that it hasn’t bothered to clearly define, and there’s really no way to do it that doesn’t involve asking. The developer does everything right: they are transparent, they warn the players, they provide resources, but nothing is important when the platform decides that it does not want the organization.
The point is that a pressure campaign from a private group should not be able to restructure the global creative ecosystem without due process of law, no matter how reasonable the initial complaint seems.
This Is What Soft Censorship Looks Like
It should be clear that what is happening here is not the type of research that is written into law or introduced by court order. There is no Acceptable Content Department issuing directives. Instead, it’s quiet and difficult to challenge because it hides in the language of risk management, product security, and Terms of Service. By 2026, this has become the dominant pattern. Age verification systems that are framed around child safety are effective as a monitoring infrastructure. Platforms implement strict content policies not because they are required by law, but because the cost of not doing so, in terms of reputation, feels higher than the cost of restricting their users. The Internet is more decentralized and more decentralized than ever before, and almost none of it needed a single government mandate to happen.
The result is a creative space where self-control makes sense. Developers looked at what happened to Itch.io and made quiet decisions: soft themes, non-conflicting content, and a safe framework. Not because the law says they should, but because the infrastructure they need to distribute their work may stop working if they don’t. That’s a very effective way to reduce transactions without anyone admitting that austerity is a goal.
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What’s Really Being Lost
Something that tends to get buried in these conversations is what actually disappears when creative risk is too expensive. It is rarely the most successful commercial activity that suffers the most. Games with real cultural weight and distribution muscle are finding ways to survive. A young, unknown, high-risk worker finds himself in conflict. Games that deal with difficult topics honestly, don’t resolve to a loose conclusion and are located in the uncomfortable environment where great art often resides.
Doki Doki Literature Club is important because it doesn’t treat mental health the way the title version would. VIILE: Stories are dug up because they talk about unpleasant things rather than pretending they don’t exist. These are not games that exist to shock people. They exist because their creators had something to say, and the farmer gave them a way to say it.
Losing access to that kind of work doesn’t happen overnight. It happens incrementally, game by game, field policy by field policy, until your space is closed. In a way, we’re lucky that games like Doki Doki Literature Club are affected, as they’ve been successful enough to make us see what’s going on. But the big question is what are we going to do about it.
Vote No One Should Enter
What unites all of this is the absence of any rational idea of democracy. No one voted for payment processors to have editorial authority over creative content. No one chose Collective Shout to set the policy for the world’s retail front. No one asked Google to decide that a game about depression was too serious to exist on Android. These decisions are made within systems designed for completely different purposes, with players having every incentive to minimize their exposure and very little accountability for what is lost in the system.
The players who signed petitions, blocked phone lines, and showed up at investor meetings were nothing short of amazing. They were seeing something important: when commercial infrastructure becomes a research medium, there is no obvious place to turn back. You cannot vote for a payment processor. You cannot appeal to the democratic authority of the Terms of Service document. All you can really do is make noise and hope that the reputational risk of being seen in the end outweighs the reputational risk that started the whole thing.
That’s a fragile position for anyone who believes that creative expression should be protected. And it’s one that will continue to come up until we have an honest conversation about who exactly we’re allowing to make these decisions, and whether we’re comfortable with that answer.
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