Lesbian Game Makers Caught In “Adult Content” Purge
A crackdown meant for explicit games is sweeping up safe-for-work sapphic titles on Itch, leaving queer developers cut off from audiences and income.
Featured image: Still from Like Seafoam via krispycat
It started with a promise that the rules would only affect “adult” material. Now, lesbian game developers say their safe-for-work titles are being swept away in Itch.io’s crackdown on sexual content.
According to a report from the Trans News Network, multiple creators have discovered that their yuri games — stories and romances between women — have been deindexed or outright removed, even when they contained no explicit scenes. The platform has also reportedly frozen payments for some of these creators.
“I am concerned that my audience will be severely cut,” said developer ButterflyLatte, who says both her SFW and NSFW yuri projects were caught in the purge. “I’m already having to search for other places to release this particular game, and am worrying where I will be able to release future projects as well.”
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The removals follow pressure from the Australian protest group Collective Shout, which has a history of campaigning against pornography and ties to anti-LGBTQ organizations. The group targeted Itch and Steam, pushing payment processors like PayPal and Stripe to cut off access to titles they deemed unacceptable. The rhetoric was framed around combatting sexual violence, but queer developers and free speech advocates say the reality is a familiar pattern: the suppression of LGBTQ+ art under the guise of protecting morality.
Anyone who lived through Tumblr’s 2018 “adult content” ban has seen the trajectory before. Platforms overreact to public pressure, implement broad restrictions, and in the process, wipe out huge swaths of safe queer work. It happened on LiveJournal. It happened on FanFiction.net. Now, it’s happening to indie games.
“If only someone had said ‘they won’t stop with porn’!” streamer Veronica Ripley commented sarcastically on Bluesky.
The impact is not abstract. Maddie May, also known as Milkboy, says the crackdown has destabilized an already precarious living situation. “I have no other means to support myself currently. Itch made me a little bit of money, but it already wasn’t a lot,” she told TNN. “Me and my girlfriend have been on the verge of homelessness for a while, and we survive completely on her income. I’m fortunate enough to have a place to live and a partner who makes enough to support what I do, but we just barely scrape by. Itch helped ease that struggle, if only a bit.”
Some creators discovered the restrictions in the most disorienting way possible — by finding their games simply gone from search results. Developer krispycat says they checked for three of their SFW titles, Wendy, Warm, and Like Seafoam. “However, they don’t appear in the suggestions either — I suspect it’s because they’re yuri games,” they said.
The damage isn’t limited to individuals. The Toxic Yuri Game Jam, a community event celebrating sapphic game-making, saw more than half of its 200 submissions either deindexed or deleted from Itch entirely.
For queer creators like Taylor McCue, the shift feels like the end of an era. “I am an older millennial queer and I remember the feelings of loneliness and the void of just not having anything like me in what I played,” McCue said. “I got to see Itch become a renaissance of queer works and community. I viewed it as an art movement and a potential future that I was a part of. Since my game has been de-indexed, I don’t know what to think. The pessimistic part of me knew this day would come, but I didn’t think it would come so soon. When it did come I thought Itch would at least email me or something.”
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Itch has attributed the restrictions to demands from payment processors, citing PayPal and Stripe. That explanation lines up with Collective Shout’s own boasting about getting Mastercard and Visa to cut off other adult game sales in the past. Valve made similar claims when it removed titles from Steam, saying they were acting under the credit card companies’ “rules and standards.”
Mastercard denies reviewing or banning individual games, insisting it allows all lawful purchases but requires merchants to ensure its cards are not used for illegal adult content. In the United States, that generally doesn’t apply to fictional depictions, and certainly not to safe-for-work LGBTQ+ material.
Whether this is overreach by payment processors, an overreaction by storefronts, or the intended result of an anti-queer pressure campaign, the effect is the same. Games telling women’s love stories are disappearing, and the people who make them are left scrambling to find new homes for their work.
