Collective shout seems to have expanded its scope: games like cult classic Fear And Hunger have been removed from Itch.io, while horror game VILE: Exhumed has been delisted from Steam just a week after launch.
To be fair… Funger is pretty brutal, a little past regular “horror”. Definitely against the censorship tho.
Involving the MasterCard Mafia in your puritanical crusade is next to criminal. The only solution is to [CONTENT REMOVED FOR VIOLATING RESTRICTIONS AGAINST ADVOCATING VIOLENCE].
Maybe we should retaliate.
What I see is a new niche opening up for a website offering game sales through alternative payment processors.
Man, I knew it was only a matter of time but I didn’t think it would be this bad, this soon.
Fear & Hunger is a goddamn masterpiece. Yes, it has depictions of nonconsensual sexual acts. It’s in keeping with the lore of a world that is truly fucked even beyond our reality. It’s an integral part of the worldbuilding, and it is by no means glorified.
Agreed. Fear and Hunger has it’s issues and I would not broadly recommend it to anyone. I would also say that the FREQUENCY of sexual assault in the game, and the presence of some weirdly sexual status effects like anal bleeding are a bit overboard. That being said, when one of the earliest enemies can sexually assault you, or maim your character in a way that leaves you able to keep playing, but effectively crippled, it really nails home not just that the world is dark, but that your assumptions about what is in the game don’t apply here. Anything could happen. REALLY anything. And exploring a harsh, hostile world with that expectation set is one of the best parts of the game, because it’s a unique experience that you just can’t get at that quality anywhere else.
Why cant the payment processors just fucking ignore them oh my god
I think all the higher ups are afraid to admit they consume adult content so they will act as if it’s wrong.
The people who would typically be expected to push back against collective shout also typically wouldn’t be expected to do anything effective whereas the people involved with collective shout are the type of people who give politicians money.
Or you know, try bitcoin instead? 🤷🏻♂️
The Collective Shout logo looks like a butthole.
It’s an asterisk…
TIL the thing under a cat’s tail is an “assterisk.”
as
terisk
Thank you! First thing I thought when I saw that logo.
Six seasons and soon a Movie!
Yay were back to the 2000s again, Jack Thompson rises again !
don’t you mean Joe Lieberman?
Wait, that’s actually their logo? A butthole?
A stretched out pink butthole full of cum, yes
New punk band name found
And kids, that’s how I met your mother
gross, who would fuck them?
E Pluribus Anus.
So close to the Greendale flag from Community.
That slope got real slippery real quick.
Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.
Soon: games causes mass shootings! Prohibit all games! And the payment processors will just comply because again they’re semi dictatorial greedy fucks
I don’t get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.
If visa doesn’t want people to purchase game X with Visa, then remove Visa as payment option for buying game X.
This is what Steam will probably do in the future, and Itch.io is already looking into it. There’s a reason all this garbage hasn’t splashed GOG. GOG is based in Europe, where protection laws would slap silly any financial entity trying to pull this stunt on an European company (pressure groups have weaseled censorship and moral panics with other strategies though, just not this one), and they have so many more payment processors that PayPal, Visa and MC would just be dropped entirely and immediately for any of the other dozen or so alternatives. The issue is that in the US and Australia, the three headed shit dragon already lobbied governments to pull the ladder behind them, so no other payment processor could take their place or compete with them, establishing a legal oligopoly of the old money finance club. They won and have this power due to systemic and political failures decades in the making.
And then use what?
A few options include American Express, Discover, JCB, and the Steam Wallet, which can be funded through Steam gift cards.
-
Itch has come out and said it’s not Visa, it’s PayPal and Stripe.
-
Removing those payment options would cause a massive loss of revenue.
If this is true, all gamers who care about this issue of censorship should collectively boycott those payment processors. PayPal should be especially easy to disconnect from since they already suck.
But removing them from the specific games they object to would not lose any more revenue than removing the games entirely, and reduce the backlash significantly, as long as they could find 1 obscure payment provider to handle the obscure games and keep some form of access.
According to the statement someone else linked now, they will ask devs about whether they comply with the payment processors’ terms, and it sounds like those processors will otherwise be unavailable. They just had to blanket remove like this for now because they don’t actually have sufficient knowledge about all the games’ content.
We’ll see what will happen, and if it turns out devs are getting screwed in the long run, someone will fill the new market niche anyway.
-
Yeah, that’s not what the payment processors are requesting. They aren’t saying they don’t want to be used to buy this content. They’re saying, if your platform hosts this content at all then they won’t process any payments. It doesn’t matter if the option is removed if the content is still there. They’re using their power of monopoly to police content.
Do you have a source of where they are saying that?
I have seen an article about the Australian political action group that was claiming credit for getting the games banned. The story behind the start of the controversy.
And I have seen an article about the communication from Steam that they were banning games which were in conflict with the rules of their payment providers. The result basically.
But I’ve only seen conjecture and speculation about what went on to get from the start to the result. I haven’t seen any article that spelled out exactly what the different payment providers demanded from the gaming platforms, nor anything about what they discussed in between them.
I only use Steam myself, so I hadn’t checked Itch Io’s communication yet. I don’t know the platform myself so it’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting this, but to me it appears that Itch Io will allow creators to delist payment options that they are not compliant with: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”.
You overestimate the adaptability of the average software stack. I worked at companies where even adding another button to the cart screen was a monumental undertaking
I don’t get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.
I think the issue isn’t that the payment providers don’t want to support the purchase of those games with their card. They want to stop offering their services to a platform that sells those games.
It appears that in the future, Itch will allow creators to opt out of payment providers, meaning that it’s probably on a per game basis, not per platform. That Itch and Steam are not making a per game solution now, is most likely because their current software doesn’t allow it and they need time to rework it. Itch has promised various changes already, Steam has been mum afaik.
Source for Itch: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”. https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
Interesting! Maybe it’s a similar situation on Steam, but the payment providers demanded the platforms act immediately (or at least too soon for them to make such changes).
Or maybe Steam gets too many chargebacks on NSFW games and is ok with this? Lol
Can we go after CollectiveShout Now ??
We should, but also they aren’t the root cause. If they’re gone, there’s nothing stopping a different group from doing the same thing (except for fear of retaliation). The ideal solution is to force payment processors to process any payment for legal content.
Wow… This count have happened in the 2010’s with the anti-gaming feminist and conservative movement at the time.
If only they knew to go after payment processors instead of identity groups.
