The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
On The "Adult Games Censorship"
polycounter
I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on this. I'd heard something recently about Steam removing some games due to pressure from payment processors, and today, I saw this article that says itch.io has been forced to comply, as well. Supposedly, it was due to Collective Shout, "a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls". Basically, they're killing off adult content.
I'm...Not thrilled about this. Moral guardians always make me nervous. They're dangerous and controlling. And speaking of, it's kind of fucked that people should basically be at the mercy of the payment processors. It's their money. If I want to buy some nukige, why should some third party get to waggle their finger at me and say no?
It also puts me on edge because certain kinds of media, such as those intended for an LGBT audience, are often judged to be NSFW whether they have actual adult content or not due to bigotry, which makes them disproportionately likely to be caught up in such a purge.
It also puts me on edge because certain kinds of media, such as those intended for an LGBT audience, are often judged to be NSFW whether they have actual adult content or not due to bigotry, which makes them disproportionately likely to be caught up in such a purge.
I'm not really in a coherent enough headspace to make any points with clarity, but basically, it's fucked, and I'm interested to see what others think. There should be some implications for those who visit this forum, I'd think; if platforms are going to start effectively banning certain types of content, the jobs making them will dry up, too.
Thoughts?
Replies
I do however have a pretty visceral objection to payment providers imposing their will on their customers businesses - this is gross and shit and makes all the right-wing conspiracy theorists sound a bit less like the ranting loons you take them for at first glance.
Something similar to this happened with onlyfans (maybe it was a different site) a while back iirc. I have to assume that resolved itself based on my twitter feed so we may be able to look there to see how this will pan out.
as far as the porn game producers go ...
Porn is not an industry that struggles despite being widely banned from mainstream platforms because people will happily go to extreme lengths to indulge their me-time needs and will spend an absolute fortune doing it.
A porn version of steam (i can think of several names for this already) would do absolutely fine
I feel like, even though most people do have a sex drive and some of them attend it through sex-focused media, a game platform focusing on catering to that specifically would struggle. I mean, look how much any game store has had to struggle while selling regular games just because they're not Steam. How much more difficult would it be if they're in a niche on top of that? Then again...
but yea it's not great. Itch.io seems to have also been hit, dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of games deleted
https://itch.io/t/5119460/adult-and-erotic-tags-games-gone
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1m7qex3/itchio_seems_to_have_straight_up_wiped_all_adult/
Interesting times we live in. Payment processors shouldn't be doing this, lol
Couldn't it be simply a case of minors being able to purchase adult content through a mean of payment bypassing age verification on the Steam/Itch side ? If that's the case it would make complete sense for the payment processors and the storefronts to close the loophole ASAP if they don't want to face fines similar to that of a supermarket chain selling booze without checking IDs - even if that means temporarily making the content unavailable to all.
If anything this could mean that publishers of NSFW games could then sue Steam and Itch for their losses of revenue in the meantime (assuming that said games were clearly labelled as adult in the first place).
(if this happens it was my idea and i want 0.5% equity)
If that were the case, why wouldn't it have happened before now? They've had nsfw games on their platforms for years. Seems more likely that it's a result of listening to the pressure groups....And seeing which way the wind is blowing politically. Plus, they were hardly unique in that respect; for 99% of porn sites and purveyors of adult content online till now, clicking a little box to say you're 18 was enough.
Here's another not-so-great look : Valve sells Steam prepaid cards at Wallmart/Target, probably without age verification either. So that's another potential problem here, if all it takes to then buy an adult game with a prepaid scratchcard is to claim that one is over 18 on the Steam side. Of course this doesn't impact a card paiement provider directly ; but similarly to how an announcer may refuse to be featured on a monetized YT channel about firearms, it wouldn't be wild to think that a paiement provider in big business with Steam would require them to straighten out their verification system, *especially* if they haven't done so for 10+ years.
And then one could also throw in the lack of ESRB rating on adult games sold online. If GTA and gore movies abide by such ratings, why would porn games not do so as well ?
Gamers might want to be prepared to have to provide governement IDs to purchase hentai VNs soon ...