Popular gaming storefront signals an end to adult games due to external pressure

While Steam and Epic Games Store are household names when it comes to PC gaming storefronts, there are other platforms like Itch.io which focus on selling indie games, usually DRM-free. Roughly a week ago, Valve banned adult / pornographic games on its platform citing pressure from payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, and now, Itch.io has done the same.

In a blog post, Itch.io executive Leaf Corcoran has announced that the platform is "deindexing" NSFW games. What this means is that such content will not be surfaced through its browse and search pages. Itch.io's rationale behind this is exactly the same as Valve's; that is, payment processors are not a fan of being involved in transactions related to NSFW games.

This controversy began with a game called No Mercy, which was banned from Itch.io in April 2025. Many critics described this title as a disturbing "rape and incest simulator", due to which the game, its developer, and storefronts hosting it received major backlash. No Mercy encouraged a male protagonist to become "every woman's worst nightmare" through acts of sexual and domestic violence, but the developer Zerat Games defended their creation, calling it a work of fiction that is also prevalent in pornographic content found online.

Corcoran has emphasized that since the situation evolved quite quickly and the storefront's payment processes were at stake, it was difficult for the company to inform impacted developers within a reasonable amount of time.

Right now, Itch.io is conducting an audit of all the games on offer, to validate that they comply with the requirements of its payment processors. Once this audit reaches completion, new compliance measures will be established, requiring game developers to meet the requirements of payment processors before submitting their titles for publication.

This is not the first time that a gaming storefront has come under fire for hosting controversial content. Back in 2016, a game called Hatred which tasked the player to go on a sociopathic murder rampage was temporarily banned from Steam Greenlight.