When developer and Itch Queer Games Bundle co-founder Taylor McCue awoke one morning in late July it was to panic online. Overnight and without warning, indie-focused storefront itch.io had indiscriminately de-indexed all titles tagged as NSFW from its browse and search pages, regardless of content or nature. Suddenly, thousands of games were far harder to discover on the platform, and less easily accessible to paying customers.
“The first 24 hours were chaos, and no one knew what to expect,” says McCue, whose semi-autobiographical narrative visual novel about trauma and sex work, He Fucked the Girl Out of Me, was impacted. “I dropped everything I was doing and focused on saving the game. I put it up on archive.org and started paying for professional hosting instead of free hosting so my games would remain available… I stopped game development and changed my goal to saving my existing games.”
The itch.io incident was the second blow for adult game developers in weeks. Earlier that month, Steam made headlines after Valve quietly updated its developer guidelines to prohibit “certain types of adult content” and confirmed it would be “retiring” select games following conversations with payment processors.
For some developers, there were signs of increased caution at Valve even prior to that. As Bobbi Augustine Sand, of developer Transcenders Media, explains, the studio faced a review process more thorough than it had ever experienced before when it submitted its game, Truer Than You, to Valve earlier this year. Despite Truer Than You being a queer visual novel containing, as per its Steam page, “non-explicit sexual content” and “veiled nudity”, Valve immediately rejected an initial build, asking the team to “submit a means to reach each ending of the game, as well as all of the content in the game that could affect our replies in the content survey”.