🎯 Follow the Money: How Payment Processors Quietly Censor Games
When the Bank Decides Your Story
In July 2025, indie game storefront itch.io quietly removed hundreds of adult and NSFW titles from its public browse and search functions. Developers woke up to find their games hidden, traffic gone, sales tanking overnight. No DMCA. No legal ruling. No massive PR scandal. Just… gone.
It wasn’t itch.io’s idea alone. Behind the scenes, payment processors — Visa and Mastercard, specifically — had pushed new restrictions on platforms handling “adult content” transactions. The decision was swift, opaque, and absolute. And it wasn’t the first time.
📜 This Has Happened Before
- 2021: OnlyFans announced it would ban sexual content after pressure from payment providers — reversed within a week after public outrage.
- 2022: Patreon tightened its sexual content guidelines after processor audits, causing creator bans without appeals.
- 2023–2024: Steam implemented quiet changes to its adult content tagging and country-level visibility, limiting certain games in multiple regions.
- 2025: itch.io follows suit, citing “payment processing limitations” as the reason for mass deindexing of NSFW titles.
💳 Follow the Money
When you buy a game, your money doesn’t just go from your wallet to the developer. It passes through payment gateways, credit card networks, and risk assessment systems. Any of these layers can flag — or block — a transaction.
Visa and Mastercard’s policies on “brand risk” mean they can refuse to process payments for content they deem controversial. And if they refuse, platforms like Steam or itch.io have no choice but to comply, unless they can sustain operations without them — which is commercially impossible at scale.
Payment Gateways Brand Risk Platform Dependency🎮 Developer Fallout
For small studios and solo devs, the consequences are brutal. One week you have a steady trickle of sales. The next, you’re invisible.
- Loss of storefront visibility → loss of sales momentum.
- Breakdown of community growth as discovery vanishes.
- Inability to access traditional marketing channels (many ad platforms follow similar content rules).
Some devs have turned to alternative platforms like Gumroad or crypto-based payment solutions — but these have their own discoverability and stability issues.
🗓️ Timeline of the 2025 Crackdown
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 30 | Internal payment processor audit reports flagged “high-risk” adult content transactions on itch.io. |
| July 2 | Processor compliance notice sent to itch.io; deadline for changes set at 14 days. |
| July 10 | Itch.io removes NSFW titles from browse/search without prior developer notice. |
| July 12 | Public outcry begins; indie dev Twitter threads gain traction. |
| July 15 | itch.io posts a brief statement citing “payment limitations” but offers no appeal process. |
- Understand that some games vanish due to payment policy, not law.
- Support devs directly when possible through Patreon, Ko-fi, or direct sales links.
- Diversify revenue streams — never depend solely on one storefront.
- Stay informed about payment processor policies; plan content accordingly.
❓ Who Really Decides What We Play?
In the public’s mind, censorship is a government action. But in the digital economy, private financial institutions have just as much — if not more — control. They decide what’s “brand safe” for their network, and those decisions ripple down to storefronts and players.
Until platforms can operate without relying on these gatekeepers, the games you see — and the ones you never will — are shaped by forces you’ll never interact with directly.
The Bottom Line
Every purchase you make is part of a financial ecosystem that decides which stories get told. Sometimes, the biggest threat to creative freedom isn’t politics or public opinion — it’s the quiet swipe of a card that never goes through.