Following Steam’s purge of NSFW games at the behest of payment processors (Visa and Mastercard), itch.io has also been targeted and forced to cull any and all NSFW-labeled games from its platform. Though the games targeted could be argued against on moral grounds, it is no right of payment processors to police speech and force their own “ethics.”
A few days ago, Steam was forced to pull the plug on a large number of NSFW games, primarily those containing certain darker and, arguably, immoral themes and scenes which I won’t directly name (thanks Wccftech). This came after payment processors, primarily Visa and Mastercard, did not wish to participate in providing the means to purchase such titles, all supposedly because a group called Collective Shout campaigned for precisely that.
Now, following Steam, itch.io, a popular platform for hosting indie and smaller games, is next on the chopping block (as written up by IGN). Once again, the usual suspects are the ones pushing for these changes, with itch.io having no option but to comply.
After all, if payments were frozen and suspended for the site, it could go under in no time. Money is the name of the game and if you run out of it (or out of means to acquire it) you’re pretty much done for, which is exactly why Visa and Mastercard (and perhaps other payment processors) have an unfair position of power to force their own ethical standards upon others.
While I do not necessarily like any of the games that were targeted and I do not believe they should be up in everyone’s faces like they are on Steam’s main store page, no company, big or small, should have such coercive powers to police what people buy, play, and do, so long as it’s lawful.
What these payment processors are doing is nothing short of a monopolized abuse of power, whereby they use their positions as financial service providers to enforce what they believe should and should not be sold online. Lawful or not, this content must be removed, lest the platforms in question risk losing their sources of income.
And games like the ones above could be just the start. It’s a dangerous precedent to have any company possess the ability to force the removal of any type of content it deems fit. It is outright censorship and could, at some point, evolve into any manner of content or game that the payment processors simply do not like.
The group I had mentioned above, Collective Shout, was already campaigning against Detroit: Become Human due to its dark and serious themes, which some might find offensive or even outrageous. Its now-locked X account was parading and celebrating Visa and Mastercard’s crackdown on NSFW content on Steam, and crowned the group as the chief actor who petitioned these payment processors into doing so.
Tomorrow, any odd collective could be very much in line with the political climate and petition or campaign for the same, only with different teams in mind. The point is that these companies have now proven that they have the means to force even the biggest multi-billion-dollar platforms like Steam into compliance, and with great power comes great abuse more often than not, with the precedent now set for perhaps the biggest wave of censorship in video game history.
The post Gaming’s recent run-ins with payment processors set a dangerous precedent appeared first on Destructoid.