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If you haven't been following video game news, Both Valve and Itchio have made sudden changes to their policy about banning adult games. The rules around what gets your game removed have become very draconian and intentionally vague. This sudden change happened because the companies that process payments over the internet, all demanded that the platforms censor themselves or lose the ability to process payments at all, effectively shutting down the online store. Even Valve had to cave with absolutely no push back. The stated goal of this censorship is to stop "adult" games, or porn games from being sold. But the consequences of this sudden ultimatum by an outside party with way too much control are already being felt...
This is one of my favorite games of all time, Echo. It just got shadow banned. At time of writing, Itch will not let you find out that this game exists. Echo is a horror game about growing up gay in a small town. It has multiple different endings, and this game has made me cry multiple times. I genuinely think this game is a contender for having the best writing in video games. Yes, I think it's up there with Fallout New Vegas and Disco Elysium. Its not a "porn game"... And yet it got de-listed:
If you know anything about the history of LGBTQ+ struggle this will be all too familiar for you. This is how censorship of LGBTQ+ art and resources were always justified, by claiming gay people existing is "adult" or "explicit", "porn" that needs to be banned and hidden away from polite society. This is how it was with the Comics Code Authority and Hays Code. This old tactic has returned. Given how the processors have seen absolutely no consequences to their censorship, we should expect them to push further and attempt to shape culture how they see fit.
I will admit, this is a difficult tactic to counter. You can't just move to selling your games or crowd sourcing funds to a different platform, all platforms rely on the payment processors. I only see 3 possible ways forward to reduce their influence:
Crypto! Yeah no this isn't really an option. I don't expect most people to want to engage with buying crypto just to buy video games. Maybe the people who already buy drugs with crypto will be OK with using it to buy video games, but the rest of us won't.
Reduce Reliance on Platforms! Part of why this worked so well is everyone gets their games through Valve and Itchio. They are the obvious choice for places to go after. If instead we can figure out how to distribute games from a website, it would be harder for payment processors to just shut it all down. They would essentially have to play wack-a-mole. Not sure how easy it would be to convince gamers to buy their games from random indie game dev's websites...
Make it Free! (and open source) If you can change the business model so that the game is free and open source, and maybe fans can fund development by crowd sourcing or selling merch, its harder for a payment processor to really go after you. Oh no they blocked this one individual gamedev from patreon? Looks like they just opened up a merch store! If you can host the game on a website that's even better!
Honestly this has made me rethink my plan of making a larger RPG over the course of years only for weird future censorship rules to get it removed and disapeared. I never made any fan games or rom-hacks because I did not want to risk having this happen, but now making those are looking a lot more appealing!
For now, I consider my RPG set in hell to be shelved for the time being... Its just too big of a game and by the nature of the setting and themes it would be at risk to be removed in the future. I think I want to focus on making smaller experiences that can be played inside of a web browser. This will allow for the most amount of creative freedom possible given the circumstances.
In the history of the web, we move away from Web 1.0 decentralized websites, where anyone can write up some html (like this blog). Instead we got the social media walled garden platforms of Web 2.0. Places that were more convenient but now are becoming more and more hostile to people actually on those platforms.
I see this payment processor situation as a continuation of the trend of enshitification. This will push online culture towards the direction of the old Web 1.0 days, where more and more people after getting burned by platforms, figure out how to make small communities for themselves outside of them. There used to be lots of cool free content out there in the world, with their own communities hanging out on internet forums. This is how DOOM has been operating for decades now. This community has recently made a big contribution to internet culture!
We moved away from this decentralized Web 1.0 world because platforms were easy to set up and would actually pay creators. This resulted in a shift away from the pure creative energy of the old web and toward content creators and influencer culture. But if the money dries up, I think some creators will return to the old way of being creative online and culture will continue unaffected by the payment processors. While the new "card code" that the payment processors are pushing will reduce budget for independent media, I don't think they can fully control media like previous codes have. The internet was designed from the ground up to be decentralized, anyone can get a web domain, point it to a server and host some html pages.
See: wildrose.space
~WR