What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
Regulate Visa and MasterCard and the rest. As utility services, they should not have the ability to ban or deny service to any payment that is not clearly illegal. Or we should create a public alternative with private transactions.
Weirdly, Amazon sells TONS of porn and NSFW content, and yet doesn't lose their Visa/Mastercard processing.
Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.
This is absolutely a wedge to censor LGBTQ+ content. If you can separately argue that adult content should be blocked and LGBTQ+ themes are for adults, then you can block queer content online en masse.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
This actually took longer than I thought.
It is really weird that for all my adult content I have to go to a dedicated adult store, yet for games I can find them on Steam and gog where kids shop for games.
You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?
Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
While being removed from general stores, porn has become very visible on big gaming platforms which majority of customers don’t associate with porn. Backlash is inevitable.
I think we can expect a bigger push against porn in general as pendulum swings back on the other side.
Its too bad that the old school anti-trust provisions against restraint of trade are no longer of interest to enforcers. This isn't a case where visa/mc are against a specific game/publisher transactions is where they are saying we will stop processing payments for your entire platform because of a few games we object to. And its worse because the pmt processors aren't really specific about their objections in public at least.
I read from a fairly reputable source that money laundering is a huge problem in online sex industry.
Which makes sense - you have buyers and sellers who insist on anonymity, services that leave no trace once rendered, buyers and sellers lying to family and friends about what they're doing, etc.
There's often no "normal" amount of consumption, for example, some sellers receive million dollar tips.
Money laundering is a massive problem, and it enables some really terrible things.
I suspect the fact that American banks are so anti-porn comes from the fact that the American financial sector has such strong anti-money laundering regs (as opposed to, say, the American real estate sector, or the UK financial sector).
One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws. Not many porn platforms could function that way.
I don’t understand people who defend porn access. Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs. We regulate gambling, paid access to porn is worse. Furthermore it is fraught with misogyny and exploitation and objectification of women. Would you defend ISIS games on Steam promoting Taliban-style patriarchy? Porn is worse.
This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentially criminal content needs to be reviewed.
Don't we have something like net neutrality but for money transfers?
And besides, why do payment processors even know/care what their customers use their money for as long as it's legal?
If you want to ban porn, fine, but do it through the law, and don't let every company make their own laws. Especially if they are a quasi monopoly (have power).
What I would like to know is why is it any business of VESA or any other payment processor, what I am buying with my own money. vESA has no business knowing what game I’m specifically buying. They just have to give money to Steam in my behalf and that’s it.
The decision to provide or not some services or products should be free from considering downstream use.
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
The slippery slope is the one the payment processors have been sliding down for a while. Steam and itch dont want to pull these games. They dont have a choice.
This is somewhat tangential: people are debating a lot whether porn has negative effects, but has anyone thought about or studied positive effects? I personally think it's more likely for porn to have positive effects and that it's preferable to sexual deprivation. Horny and sexually deprived people tend to sometimes do awful things like sexual harassment or even rape, but if they have access to porn, they're much less likely to do those things.
How do porn sites accept money then? Steam should just make a separate company for adult games and use the same payment methods as porn sites.
Also this reminds me of Apple that for example demanded Telegram to block adult channels (including non-porn channels where authors blog about their sex life) from AppStore's Telegram version.
Also if cryptocurrency were more popular and widespread, then banks would have less leverage to do this.
The problem with slippery slopes is that the world is made of them. You can't leave the slippery slope, at BEST you can choose which slope you're sliding down.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
For your kids, you can set up a child account where you can block content they can see, adult content included.
Actually, it works for basic accounts as well, you can filter out adult content and don't have this kind of problem :)
In many countries, the sale of alcohol is restricted because the majority agrees that it is harmful to society. The same should be done with pornographic content. However, we are only beginning to learn how to efficiently limit it. Things like this will happen, but it will improve over time. Overall, I see positive progress here.
It is alarming for credit card companies to take on a politically censorious role that supersedes legal activity. This really kicked off in 2021 when MasterCard started imposing restrictive rules on sex sites like OnlyFans. The ACLU has a campaign against it:
https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercards-new-p...
It's not a slippery slope, they're targeting non-porn games literally right now. Detroit Become Human, a very well reviewed cinematic/adventure game especially among non-gamers was one of their targets.
There are a lot of people mentioning crypto as a possible solution to this, and a lot of people responding that crypto is a ponzi scheme, and they're not interested. But congress recently passed stablecoin legislation that could possibly fix this problem. Recipients would have a straightforward way of receiving money, and they wouldn't need to gamble on the price of bitcoin. Most people would probably still use a third part payment processor to handle the rough edges of managing money on the blockchain. But if any of them try to pull something like this it would be incredibly easy spin up a new processor and migrate accounts.
I know people here love to hate it, and it's a very very controversial topic, but this here, is a good use case for Bitcoin [1]
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
> Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
I find the overall discussion on this topic interesting, but it feels like we could emphasise a bit more how this is related with the transition of discourse from freedom to righteousness. In this context, arguing the fairness of being free is just an admission that freedom is now a secondary line of argumentation. As an outsider to the US, it also seems a bit ironic to my uninformed eyes that a heavily liberal part of the society effectively and efficiently co opted the fairness, equality, morality vector to drive an agenda of less liberalism in the interest of winning against non liberal movements.
imo nothing wrong with a platform deciding what content it wants to host.
But there’s also nothing wrong with allowing this type of content. Who wants to help me build an uncensored game distribution platform? We could call it Steamy.
I'm assuming this is driven by stakeholders in the legacy porn business prompted to anticompetitive action by generative AI tools seriously threatening their monopoly on sexual content for the first time. There has always been a huge barrier to entry into porn for non-seedy, non-abusive, and mentally stable people. Art-based content like games are both much easier to create without a human trafficking network and are usually far more wholesome than the prevalent legacy porn tropes, which often center around incest, coercion, chauvinistic infidelity or miscegenation, and other disgusting themes. I am hoping there are people archiving this content for future sociological study.
On July 29 2022, Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California held that Brown Rudnick had adequately alleged facts in the Fleites v. MindGeek case that Visa engaged in a criminal conspiracy with MindGeek to monetize child pornography. Judge Carney also granted the plaintiff discovery that will reveal the relationships between the hundreds of allegedly sham organizations and the secret owners behind this alleged criminal trafficking internet platform.
The bitter truth is that the tech world's libertarian allergy to collective action is exactly why stuff like this keeps happening.
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
All the real hentai trash is on DLsite anyway. These people probably have no idea, and even if they did, they're powerless to change Japan. They'd definitely give up after encountering Kanji.
I have always found it odd that whenever pornography comes up the degree to which people defend it in all forms. It is uncomfortably telling but also completely misses why this is happening.
Itch.io is heavily saturated with anime porn games along with steam to the point I find both difficult to navigate even with nsfw filters turned on. Turning those filters off and it is pretty egregious the volume of it all let alone subject matter. I dont care about porn but the platforms have done a piss poor job for the majority of people who are not looking for porn games but find games like cyberpunk totally acceptable. How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?
This is happening because it was too easy for someone to pull up the home page on said platforms and point to several incest porn games. Using payment processors is not a solution i favor but people cannot find that experience acceptable.
On a personal note, i dont want to live in a society that deems it acceptable to have a “no incest” filter for games. That is line for me and not for religion but because I find incest disgusting.
More caving to the ultra-religious pearl grippers who just have nothing better to do than tell others how to live.
All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
The fact that we can let a duopoly of payment processors dictate the morals of our societies based on the morals of a few militant cluster B "concerned moms" is very very scary.
The solution to those who would like to play porn games is not relying on developers to make them or Steam to host them but using an LLM to build them for you, and your SSD to host them.
The very idea of a store front for software needs to die. It’s a single strangle point that serves only to concentrate power and create a legal or regulatory target.
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
Porn games on Steam and itch are tacky af but they don’t push them on me and I sort of just ignore them. That being said they should probably sell them on different website.
For those who think this is about just banning adult content, think again.
What's actually happening is any content disliked by certain billionaires is being flagged by payment providers under their influence.
Some examples, like this one are for porn but the same approach could be used for anything even remotely controversial.
Anyway, maybe Witcher 3 could be next. Great game, but it happens to have some sex scenes, so....
In discussions about this topic, in almost every place I see them, lots of people (against this censorship) are going "I don't play this kind of games" or "I don't personally care about tentacle fetish" (or whatever).
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
It's unfortunate because there really isn't anything anyone can do except wait for regulation or try raising awareness/usage of crypto payments or cash by mail
They are targeting incest/rape games. I wouldn't call that 'LGBTQ' like some people seem to imply. If Itch and Steam don't want to police their store fronts _before_ the law gets involved, then I am not surprised that other businesses such as payment providers will choose not to work with them.
Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.
Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope
(wired.com)523 points by 6d6b73 21 hours ago | 681 comments
Comments
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?
Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
While being removed from general stores, porn has become very visible on big gaming platforms which majority of customers don’t associate with porn. Backlash is inevitable.
I think we can expect a bigger push against porn in general as pendulum swings back on the other side.
Which makes sense - you have buyers and sellers who insist on anonymity, services that leave no trace once rendered, buyers and sellers lying to family and friends about what they're doing, etc.
There's often no "normal" amount of consumption, for example, some sellers receive million dollar tips.
Money laundering is a massive problem, and it enables some really terrible things.
I suspect the fact that American banks are so anti-porn comes from the fact that the American financial sector has such strong anti-money laundering regs (as opposed to, say, the American real estate sector, or the UK financial sector).
One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws. Not many porn platforms could function that way.
Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes! As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (189 comments)
Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (51 comments)
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (306 comments)
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)
And besides, why do payment processors even know/care what their customers use their money for as long as it's legal?
If you want to ban porn, fine, but do it through the law, and don't let every company make their own laws. Especially if they are a quasi monopoly (have power).
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
In the current atmosphere, it might just pass.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...
There's a whole buisness model of russians paying to a company in Kazahstan so that they buy a steam game and gift it to a russian user
Also this reminds me of Apple that for example demanded Telegram to block adult channels (including non-porn channels where authors blog about their sex life) from AppStore's Telegram version.
Also if cryptocurrency were more popular and widespread, then banks would have less leverage to do this.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
See also decrim.
https://bannedgames.netlify.app/
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
We shouldn't be privatising money.
But there’s also nothing wrong with allowing this type of content. Who wants to help me build an uncensored game distribution platform? We could call it Steamy.
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
Itch.io is heavily saturated with anime porn games along with steam to the point I find both difficult to navigate even with nsfw filters turned on. Turning those filters off and it is pretty egregious the volume of it all let alone subject matter. I dont care about porn but the platforms have done a piss poor job for the majority of people who are not looking for porn games but find games like cyberpunk totally acceptable. How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?
This is happening because it was too easy for someone to pull up the home page on said platforms and point to several incest porn games. Using payment processors is not a solution i favor but people cannot find that experience acceptable.
On a personal note, i dont want to live in a society that deems it acceptable to have a “no incest” filter for games. That is line for me and not for religion but because I find incest disgusting.
All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
Some examples, like this one are for porn but the same approach could be used for anything even remotely controversial.
Anyway, maybe Witcher 3 could be next. Great game, but it happens to have some sex scenes, so....
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
When did pornography become protected speech?
Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.