When Russia kicked off its war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine for completely made up reasons, there were global efforts to isolate Russia as a result. Many of those efforts have waned in the years since, unfortunately. You may recall that there was a small effort among video game companies and platforms to deny sales and service to Russia as part of this cultural blockade. While the war still rages on, and anyone who wants to can call all of this effort a failure, the point is that gaming companies and platforms took something of a moral stand against Russia as a result of the war.
Valve’s Steam platform was involved in that effort, though that may have had as much to do with payment processing sanctions as any kind of moral stand. Today, Valve is back to operating in Russia, and it appears to have no issues with some of the country’s more notoriously bigoted laws and postures when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. Recently, the maker and seller of several visual novel style games found her games delisted and a message from Valve chastising her for not following Russia’s bigoted laws.
Ebi-hime, the developer behind yuri visual novels like Her Love, Like Poison and Rituals in the Dark, posted on X that Valve notified her that some of her games had been banned from the storefront in Russia after Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency in charge of censorship in the country, determined those projects to be in violation of the country’s rules for distribution. That in and of itself isn’t surprising considering Russia has woven anti-queer legislation into its laws and even designated queer activism as an “extremist” movement. What is surprising is that Valve’s copy-pasted message on the situation is condescending and victim-blamey. It reads in part:
We also want to remind you that you promised Valve under the Steam Distribution Agreement that your games comply with all applicable laws. Therefore, it is your responsibility to do your due diligence regarding where your games are allowed to be distributed, and to inform us of any territory where they cannot be.
Now, if you want to make the herculean effort it requires to take Valve’s side on this, you could argue that operating within a country like Russia necessarily requires an adherence to its local laws. And perhaps you want to argue that that’s all that Valve is doing here.
Except operating within Russia is a choice. Platforms are only neutral to a point. And if you make the use cases more extreme, it betrays just how much of a choice this all is.
Imagine if a country required all video games sold within its borders to prohibit any female characters within the game from speaking. Or one which prohibited any person of color from appearing in a game at all. Or one which required all characters to both be of a certain religion and to profess their faith in that religion. Would Valve still operate within any of those countries? If they did, you would imagine the backlash to be rather extreme.
But, for some reason, Russia essentially outlawing the appearance of any LGBTQ+ characters in games doesn’t quite get Valve’s fur up. Is the morality around my examples and this real occurrence all that different? Are they any different?
And, frankly, couldn’t Valve have done this better than sending what is likely a boilerplate message to someone who is actively being discriminated against that sure sounds like its blaming the victim?
Not that I would expect Valve to take a proper stance against something like the Russian government. I just think that if you’re going to take the stance of compliance that it is taking, you can at least be mindful of how you talk to people using your platform about it. If you don’t want to buy Ebi-hime’s games on Steam, they are also available on itch.io.
Obviously, we don’t look to the monied interests of large corporations for moral clarity. But we can certainly hold them accountable for failing to take even the easiest of moral stances with our dollars, if we want to.
Complaining about automagic enforcement of copyrights on the internet through copyright bots is so old hat at this point so as to be cliché. But there is a very good reason for that. Even in the narrower realm of PC gaming, we have seen examples of how copyright enforcement has ensnared totally innocent games, or fallen victim to clear fraud and abuse, resulting in the delisting of those games from platforms like Steam. This often happens in the all important early release windows for these games and, to be sure, it’s smaller indie studios that are hurt the most by this failed process. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch all of this in the macro and then witness the major platforms do absolutely nothing about it.
This, in fact, despite the absolutely absurd situations all of this produces. Take the demo for Wired Tokyo 2007 that was supposed to be released recently, but wasn’t, all because indie dev Daikichi dared to use intellectual property existing outside of the game. Except, of course, that said IP was the property of Daikichi itself.
As reported by VGC via GameSpark, a post to X from the developer lays out the situation, in which they explain that (via machine translation) “the motif of a board game I personally created in the past, placed within the game Wired Tokyo 2007, is getting caught by Steam’s side as third-party intellectual property.” As a result, Valve has blocked the release of the game’s promised demo which is currently listed as “Coming soon.”
The copyright-violating aspects, as claimed by Valve, include “dinosaur themed card-games shown on the environment within your app in gameplay,” which refers to a board game called Dinostone, created by one Daikichi. In Daikichi’s response, they link to the Board Game Geek page for their table-top game, which lists the same developer name.
“It’s not a third party,” says Daikichi on X. “It’s just me wanting to use my own intellectual property rights myself.” They add, “I have no idea what the meaning of this is at all.”
In an incredible response from Valve, the platform is demanding Daikichi provide some form of documented agreement to license the images used in the game, or else provide a documented letter of authorization from an attorney in order to get the demo approved for release. This is a “papers, please!” moment in video gaming, and it makes no sense.
The situation gets even more Monty-Python-esque from there. Daikichi decided their best course of action was to send a signed letter to itself, signed by itself, authorizing itself to use the assets it had created in the game it also had created.
Then over the weekend, rather wonderfully, the developer says they “created a signed document granting myself permission to use all of my created works, including board games, and resubmitted it for the demo review.”
We’ve crossed the Rubicon, folks. And now Valve is in the uncomfortable situation of having to choose between accepting this “evidence” of IP ownership when the evidence is literally a dev writing himself a letter like a crazy person, or else Valve refuses to accept it and a developer remains unable to release a game demo because they used their own property within it.
It’s a choice that only has two wrong outcomes. Sympathy is in short supply, however, as this is the result of the guilty-first process Valve has come up with for copyright takedowns on its platform.
Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess.
By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not going to pretend like I don’t still hold that very same view. AI tools are just that: tools. If the tools are good and used at the behest of the artists in the industry to make better games, that’s a good thing. If they upend artistic intent or simply suck, that’s a bad thing. And on the matter of jobs within the industry, if there is a net reduction in jobs, that’s bad! If AI lowers the barriers of entry for otherwise creative people and the result is even more jobs within the industry spread over more studios and, importantly, more cultural output in the form of games, that’s good!
Except when it’s not. And even if the AI evangelists are right, or those of us who see the possibility that AI use will ultimately result in more people in the industry and more games released to the public are right, that can still present very real problems within the industry. And I think there could be a serious one looming for storefronts like Steam.
This concern calcified in my head somewhat when I came across indie publisher Mike Rose, known for producing Yes, Your Grace, talking about just what all of this output could mean on Steam specifically.
“From a publisher perspective specifically, it’s mega annoying,” Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse. “If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it’s just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!” Publishing lead John Buckley of Palworld developer Pocketpair called out the same AI trend in the latest Steam Next Fest.
Steam, as a focal point for the more open PC gaming market, is the clearest barometer for the rising quantity of games, with over 20,000 releases fighting for space every year. Even with Valve sticking to AI content disclosures for games listed on Steam, the rise of AI tools will only contribute to the torrent of content flooding the platform as games – or at least AI-made things game-shaped enough to be sold – become easier to produce.
Claims that there are too many games being released on Steam certainly isn’t new, nor has it historically been tied to anything to do with artificial intelligence. There have been complaints about this, as well as Valve’s apparent lack of interest in playing any real curation role, going back to 2023. Wait, make that 2020. Oh, wait, it actually goes back to 2015.
But while Steam hasn’t yet collapsed under the weight of its own volume of releases on the platform to date, the through line to all of that criticism has been Valve’s stoic apathy towards keeping up with the volume when it comes to helping its customers navigate the flood.
And that could be a very real problem for the platform. Steam’s value to the consumer, besides being the most recognizable outlet for PC gaming, is in its curation capabilities. To date, other than providing some search filters and a few tools to personalize the recommendations it makes for new titles to you, Steam has mostly left curation up to the customer themselves, or third-party list-makers. Meanwhile, the process for listing a game on Steam has not changed appreciably in the past several years. It’s still the same $100 entry fee to get your title listed. You still have to jump through all the registration steps with Steamworks, generate an app ID, build the store page, upload your assets. Then you wait for Valve to do its own review before you can publish your game, but that mostly amounts to ensuring that you’re compliant with Steam policies, that the game can launch successfully, and that’s about it.
With a potential flood of PC games coming, that sure doesn’t feel like enough to keep the platform from becoming an unnavigable wasteland where you can’t tell the gems from the slop. And, barring any new rules limiting to what degree AI can be used in game creation, that tidal wave is coming.
On this point, Rose focuses on “the elephant in the room” here: “It’s probably never going away again.”
“People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy,” he reasons. “I don’t even mean that as an insult! We just are. So for a lot of people, if there’s a choice between ‘spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,’ vs ‘type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly’ – the average person is going to pick the latter.
And that’s the thing really: Our feelings on it don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a bunch of us don’t like genAI. It’s gonna get used now, and it’ll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked.”
I don’t think that video games are cooked, but his point that AI will be in use in the industry is the one I’ve been making for months now. We have to be talking about how it will be used, not if. That ship has sailed.
And if Steam is still going to be of any value at all to the consumer, Valve better be thinking right damned now how it’s going to get more involved in the curation of what shows up on its platform.
At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of a third party, to police their copyrights on these here internets. And for just as long, those bots have absolutely sucked out loud at their jobs. We have seen example after example after example of those bots making mistakes, resulting in takedowns or threats of takedowns of all kinds of perfectly legit content. Upon discovery, the content is usually reinstated while those employing the copyright decepticons shrug their shoulders and say “Thems the breaks.” And then it happens again.
It has to change, but isn’t. We have yet another recent example of this in action, with Microsoft’s copyright enforcement partner using an AI-driven enforcement bot to get a video game delisted from Steam over a single screenshot on the game’s page that looks like, but isn’t, from Minecraft. The game in question, Allumeria, clearly is partially inspired by Minecraft, but doesn’t use any of its assets and is in fact its own full-fledged creative work.
On Tuesday, the developer behind the Minecraft-looking, dungeon-raiding sandbox announced that their game had been taken down from Valve’s storefront due to a DMCA copyright notice issued by Microsoft. The notice, shared by developer Unomelon in the game’s Discord server, accused Allumeria of using “Minecraft content, including but not limited to gameplay and assets.”
The takedown was apparently issued over one specific screenshot from the game’s Steam page. It shows a vaguely Minecraft-esque world with birch trees, tall grass, a blue sky, and pumpkins: all things that are in Minecraft but also in real life and lots of other games. The game does look pretty similar to Minecraft, but it doesn’t appear to be reusing any of its actual assets or crossing some arbitrary line between homage and copycat that dozens of other Minecraft-inspired games haven’t crossed before.
It turns out the takedown request didn’t come from Microsoft directly, but via Tracer.AI. Tracer.AI claims to have a bot driven by artificial intelligence for automatic flagging and removal of copyright infringing content.
It seems the system failed to understand in this case that the image in question, while being similar to those including Minecraft assets, didn’t actually infringe upon anything. Folks at Mojang caught wind of this on BlueSky and had to take action.
While it’s unclear if the claim was issued automatically or intentionally, Mojang Chief Creative Officer Jens Bergensten (known to most Minecraft players as Jeb) responded to a comment about the takedown on Bluesky, stating that he was not aware and is now “investigating.” Roughly 12 hours later, Allumeria‘s Steam page has been reinstated.
“Microsoft has withdrawn their DMCA claim!” Unomelon posted earlier today. “The game is back up on Steam! Allumeria is back! Thank you EVERYONE for your support. It’s hard to comprehend that a single post in my discord would lead to so many people expressing support.”
And this is the point in the story where we all go back to our lives and pretend like none of this ever happened. But that sucks. For starters, there is no reason we should accept that this kind of collateral damage, temporary or not. Add to that there are surely stories out there in which a similar resolution was not reached. How many games, how much other non-infringing content out there, were taken down for longer from an erroneous claim like this? How many never came back?
And at the base level, the fact is that if companies are going to claim that copyright is of paramount importance to their business, that can’t be farmed out to automated systems that aren’t good at their job.
We here at Techdirt have longed complained about the DMCA takedown process being wide open for all kinds of fraud and abuse. At one point years ago, Google reported that nearly 100% of the takedown requests it receives are not the sort of targeted takedowns the creators of the DMCA imagined, but rather more of a carpet-bomb approach. Examples of this sort of thing abound, with much of them comprised of companies not taking the process seriously and making all kinds of errors or accusations as a result of not doing their due diligence. The more rare, but more concerning version is when the DMCA takedown process is used fraudulently to exact revenge against an enemy. That this can even be done should highlight the problem with our current process of taking content down first and then asking questions later.
In the last couple of weeks, a video game was released on Steam. Titled No Players Online, it was a horror game and something of a sequel to a freeware game of the same name that was released in 2019. Many of the same folks behind the original, including Adam Pype, produced its successor under the developer name Beeswax Games. And then, shortly after its release on Steam, the game was hit with a DMCA takedown.
According to Beeswax, the game was hit by a Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim filed by a “former friend” who “claimed to be co-author of the game despite not having done anything for it”. Valve then took the game down on 13th November, a week after release. The developers filed a counter-notice, and Valve have now reinstated the Steam release after the complainant neglected to respond to that counter-notice in time.
You can read developer Adam Pype’s full account of events here. It doesn’t name the “former friend”, and I’m not going to speculate about their identity. Pype says the upheaval has cost the project dearly, writing that “we spent 2 and a half years of our lives and a ton of money making this game. we also have a lot of people who believed in us and wanted us to succeed. it’s crazy to me that someone can just take down our game by filling out a simple form, and it’s been tough trying to reconcile with this betrayal from someone i considered a dear friend.”
The takedown effected the ability to list and sell the game a week after release. That is essentially in the prime window for sales for any new game, but it’s a particularly important window for a small indie game that is looking to generate buzz and boost purchases. Beeswax Games missed out on a huge chunk of that, having to instead spend its time navigating the DMCA process to get Steam to relist the game.
And why is all of that how this works? Because the process Steam follows is to takedown the game upon accusation. This appears to be nothing more than a fraudulent takedown by some scorned third party. It worked because Steam took the game down without requiring any proof of the rights the third party asserted. Steam didn’t even ask any questions. It’s as simple as get notice, take game down.
Which makes an entity like Beeswax Games guilty until proven innocent. The onus of evidence is not on the party making the claim initially. It’s on the target of that claim. There is very little else in American law that works anything like this and it’s incredibly frustrating to watch this in action.
Pype continues that “this situation has had a significant impact on us, especially given how crucial the first months after release are for small indies like us. we lost out on much needed momentum and revenue right after the release of our game and we’re unsure if we will be able to recover financially from this given our already thin margins.”
This is a problem worth fixing. Businesses like Beeswax should not face the threat of going under simply because the DMCA allows for this kind of abuse.
The rush to blame video games for all the world’s ills is, of course, nothing new. While some of the more novel examples of this blame-game include current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s claim that video games are the reason the Medicaid is abused (yes, seriously), this nonsense is more commonly trotted out whenever violence is committed, typically for mass shootings. It’s irresponsible and not based on anything remotely resembling scientific data and it should stop.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder, we got to see this once again in action. The shooter’s video game platform accounts and gaming habits were scrutinized, as was his communications on Discord. And then came bumblefuck RFK Jr. with the typical level of stupidity.
The suspected shooter and his apparent connections to gaming and internet culture raised questions about whether the White House or Congress might respond with greater scrutiny of those communities. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy recently suggested that the government should investigate connections between first-person shooters and mass shootings.
The Kirk shooting wasn’t a mass shooting. There is no concrete research to suggest that one of the most popular genres in gaming somehow leads people to shoot many people at once. The suspect doesn’t appear to have been deeply steeped in first-person shooters anyway. Kennedy’s comments, in other words, are essentially a non-sequitur. Par for the course.
But Republican Kentucky Rep. Brett Guthrie managed to get in on the action himself, as did Democract Ro Khanna.
“I haven’t specifically discussed that with anyone, but I think that we should look at how video [games] affect young people,” said Guthrie. “I think that’s a fair thing. We’ve spent a lot of time on kids’ online safety, and that could be a part of that.”
California Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat who recently made headlines for calling on the developers of Roblox to protect children who play their game, also suggested that he would be open to a congressional probe into video games.
“We’ve got to have much more regulation on social media, and I think we need to look at video games and the harm they cause in terms of getting young men addicted, and being intellectually draining,” he told Courthouse News.
Subsequent to all of that, a briefing from the National Counter Terrorism Center leaked with what must be one of most “no shit” type of briefings possible. In it, the NCTC attempts to raise the alarm over the fact that games, gaming platforms, and game-focused chat platforms offer ways for gamers to communicate with one another. Clutch your pearls, dear readers.
If someone can explain what in any of this is new, please go for it. I’ll wait. And while you’re doing that, please notice just how many caveats and hedges there are in this document. Some violent extremist US teens “probably” play these games and “could” communicate with people that think like them.
Well, no fucking shit, guys! Adults can do all of that, too! As can perfectly peaceful individuals. Or they could communicate via phone, or chat message platforms like Google’s or Microsoft’s! Hell, they might even meet up at the local playground and talk about all kinds of wild shit. I sure did when I was younger. And there are a ton of people that use these platforms and manage not to shoot anyone at all. It’s almost like, and I hope you’re sitting down for this, none of these platforms are some common denominator for violence.
Which isn’t really the point. The point of the briefing is to give government a document to point to in order to further infringe on the privacy and communications of every day citizens.
This kind of analysis provides a pretext for surveillance of ordinary activities. It transforms mundane behavior like playing Fortnite into an indicator of extremism. It’s the same logic that justifies infiltrating activist groups and maintaining massive databases of people who’ve done nothing wrong. And definitely did fuck all to stop the murder of Charlie Kirk. But that doesn’t matter, because when the intelligence community is tempted with a new massive data set to gorge on, there’s no stopping the feast.
Yes, that. This nothing-burger of a briefing will end up being twisted to allow the surveillance state to hone in on their political enemies. None of this has a single thing to do with Charlie Kirk’s murder, nor any other violent activity. It will be used selectively, similar to our Mad King’s recent comments about using the government shutdown to shutter “democrat agencies” or further reduce their workforce.
All under the vulgar and cynical banner of doing this all in Charlie Kirk’s name.
This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religious right to get anything it doesn’t like out of the video game industry—put on a pressure campaign with payment processors, writing in to demand that processing companies stop working with the likes of itch.io and Steam over games on those platforms the group has decided are unacceptable. Couched in the claim that the group was primarily going after games that focused on horrid things like “rape” and “incest,” the end result was those two platforms delisting or deindexing all kinds of adult games that either don’t include that type of content or—and here’s why free speech is tricky—approach those topics not to promote them, but to grapple with the horrors of them in an artistic manner.
Notably, far from any cries that these platforms be more focused in their approach, Collective Shout merely cheered on the fallout, illuminating what the actual goal is here: to make game platforms more puritanical through bully campaigns. These are, it seems, the same people going on book-banning crusades that ensare such smut as Calvin & Hobbes comics.
Well, pressure campaigns can work in both directions, as it did in this case. Credit card companies began getting flooded with calls and emails from the public complaining about these puritanical attempts to suppress video games. It’s only been a few days of this, but apparently it’s gotten bad enough that Mastercard put out some messaging pushing back on the idea that it had demanded these changes of gaming marketplaces.
Mastercard has broken its silence after being thrust into the middle of a gaming culture war between anti-porn advocates and anti-censorship activists. While Valve previously laid blame for a recent purge of adult sex games from Steam at the feet of “payment processors and their related card networks and banks,” Mastercard released a statement on Friday denying any responsibility for a new wave of censorship that’s recently led some gamers to flood payment company call centers with complaints.
“Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations,” the company wrote in a statement published on its website on August 1. “Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”
Got it? Mastercard is not involved in the evaluation of games or their content and has not instituted any new rules beyond those that have always existed, namely that payment may only be collected and processed for “lawful purchases.” Summarizing that statement in plain language would look something like: “Nothing has changed on our end. If a purchase is legal, it’s fine by us.”
Now, that’s demonstrably false, of course. Mastercard has built a prudish reputation for itself in multiple instances, be it pressuring OnlyFans a couple of years back, banning VPN providers, as well as its crusade against Wikileaks.
But this is slightly different. In this case, according to Valve at least, Mastercard is just playing word games.
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution. Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”
Rule 5.12.7 states, “A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.”
It goes on, “The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.”
So, two things to say here. The first is that, whatever your moral stances may be and no matter how they align with Mastercard’s rules above, that rule is a far cry from “if it’s lawful, it’s all good.” Instead, it’s more like “If it’s lawful, it’s all good…unless we determine it’s either offensive or isn’t artistic enough for our tastes.”
Now I could carve out examples of how Mastercard doesn’t come close to enforcing its own rule in the video game space all day. After all, I’m pretty sure I’ve “mutilated a person or body part” in roughly a zillion video games and that the NPCs in question didn’t give me consent to do so. That’s called combat and it’s in a ton of games that you can purchase with a Mastercard. But let’s take a more extreme example within the rule: bestiality. It’s one of those things that sounds like an obvious thing to say: you can’t use a Mastercard to buy a good, service, or image that includes bestiality. But I bought Baldur’s Gate 3 with my own Mastercard on Steam and, as is famously known, the game has a mildly explicit scene in which you, to borrow a headline, “Bang The Bear.” This isn’t to say that BG3‘s scene should be labeled “bestiality” (the bear is actually a druid that transforms into a bear), but it certainly could be.
But the second point is more fun to make compared with highlighting Mastercard’s lies and hypocrisy. Mastercard claimed innocence over the adult games purge by stating it didn’t directly talk to game marketplaces about any of this. But, while that is likely true in a technical sense, all it’s doing is pointing out that the company isn’t even secure enough in its own rules to enforce them directly and publicly and instead are laundering its morality stances through its network of partner processing companies.
The end result is the same: run afoul of these rules from Mastercard and enforced by Mastercard through its processor network and a game marketplace can lose its payment processing partnerships with Mastercard’s network. It’s a complete non-denial and, honestly, of no material use. The outcome is the outcome and it’s clear that Mastercard’s network is in fact doing all of this at Mastercard’s request.
And all for some Aussie puritans that want to foist their morality on everyone else? C’mon, credit card companies. What’s the point of amassing hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap if you can’t tell some zealots to fuck all the way off once in a while?
A week or so ago, Karl Bode wrote about Vice Media’s idiotic decision to disappear several articles that had been written by its Waypoint property concerning Collective Shout. Collective Shout is an Australian group that pretends to be a feminist organization, when, in reality, it operates much more like any number of largely evangelical groups bent on censoring any content that doesn’t align with their own viewpoints (which they insist become your viewpoints as well). The point of Karl’s post was to correctly point out that Collective Shout’s decision to go after the payment processors for the major video game marketplaces over their offering NSFW games shouldn’t be hidden from the public in the interest of clickbait non-journalism.
But that whole thing about Collective Shout putting on a pressure campaign on payment processors is in and of itself a big deal, as is the response to it. Both Steam and itch.io recently either removed or de-indexed a ton of games they’re labeling NSFW, chiefly along guidelines clearly provided by the credit card companies themselves. Now, Collective Shout will tell you that it is mostly interested in going after games that depict vile actions in some ways, such as rape, child abuse, and incest.
No Mercy. That’s the name of the incest-and-rape-focused game that was geo-blocked in Australia this April, following a campaign by the local pressure group Collective Shout. The group, which stands against “the increasing pornification of culture”, then set its sights on a broader target – hundreds of other games they identified as featuring rape, incest, or child sexual abuse on Steam and itch.io. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us,” said the group of its latest campaign.
The move was effective. Steam began removing sex-related games it deemed to violate the standards of its payment processors, presenting the choice as a tradeoff in a statement to Rock Paper Shotgun: “We are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam.”
Itch.io followed that up shortly afterwards with its de-indexing plan, but went further and did this with all NSFW games offered on the platform. Unlike Steam, itch.io was forthcoming as to their reasoning for its actions. And they were remarkably simple.
“Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform,” Corcoran said. “To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate steps towards compliance.”
Digital marketplaces being unable to collect payment through trusted partners would be, to put it tersely, the end of their business. Those same payment processors can get predictably itchy about partnering with platforms that host content that someone out there, or many someones as part of a coordinated campaign, may not like for fear that will sully their reputation. And because these are private companies we’re talking about, their fear along with any of their own sense of morality are at play here. The end result is a digital world filled with digital marketplaces that all exist under an umbrella of god-like payment processors that can pretty much dictate to those other private entities what can be on offer and what cannot.
And, as an executive from Appcharge chimed in, the processors will hang this all on the amount of fraud and chargebacks that come along with adult content, but that doesn’t change the question about whether payment processors should be neutral on legal but morally questionable content or not. Because, as you would expect, the aims of folks like Collective Shout almost certainly don’t end with things like rape and incest.
It’s possible that Collective Shout’s campaign highlighted a level of operational and reputational risk that payment processors weren’t aware of, and of a severity they didn’t expect. “I’m guessing it’s also the moral element,” Tov-Ly says. “It just makes sense, right? Why would you condone incest or rape promoting games?”
Tov-Ly is of the opinion that payment processors offer a utility, and should have no more role in the moral arbitration of art than your electricity company – meaning, none at all. “Whenever you open that Pandora’s box, you’re not impartial anymore,” he says. “Today it’s rape games and incest, but tomorrow it could be another lobbying group applying pressure on LGBT games in certain countries.”
We’ve already seen this sort of thing when it comes to book and curriculum bans that are currently plaguing far too much of the country. When porn can mean Magic Treehouse, the word loses all meaning.
What is actually happening is that payment processors are feeling what they believe is “public pressure”, but which is actually just a targeted and coordinated campaign from a tiny minority of people who watched V For Vendetta and thought it was an instruction manual. Well, the public has caught wind of this, as have game publishers that might be caught up in this censorship or whatever comes next, and coordinated contact campaigns to payment processors to complain about this new censorship are being conducted.
Gilbert Martinez had just poured himself a glass of water and was pacing his suburban home in San Antonio, Texas while trying to navigate Mastercard’s byzantine customer service hotline. He was calling to complain about recent reports that the company is pressuring online gaming storefronts like Steamand Itch.io to ban certain adult games. He estimates his first call lasted about 18 minutes and ended with him lodging a formal complaint in the wrong department.
Martinez is part of a growing backlash to Steam and Itch.io purging thousands of games from their databases at the behest of payment processing companies. Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed credit for the new wave of censorship after inciting a write-in campaign against Visa and Mastercard, which it accused of profiting off “rape, incest, and child sexual abuse game sales.” Some fans of gaming are now mounting reverse campaigns in the hopes of nudging Visa and Mastercard in the opposite directions.
If noise is what is going to make these companies go back to something resembling sanity, this will hopefully do the trick. We’re already seeing examples of games that are being unjustly censored, described as porn when they are very much not. Not to mention instances where nuance is lost and the “porn” content is actually the opposite.
Vile: Exhumed is a textbook example of what critics of the sex game purge always feared: that guidelines aimed at clamping down on pornographic games believed to be encouraging or glorifying sexual violence would inevitably ensnare serious works of art grappling with difficult and uncomfortable subject matter in important ways. Who gets to decide which is which? For a long time, it appeared to be Steam and Itch.io. Last week’s purges revealed it’s actually Visa and Mastercard, and whoever can frighten them the most with bad publicity.
Some industry trade groups have also weighed in. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) released a statement stating that “censorship like this is materially harmful to game developers” and urging a dialogue between “platforms, payment processors, and industry leaders with developers and advocacy groups.” “We welcome collaboration and transparency,” it wrote. “This issue is not just about adult content. It is about developer rights, artistic freedom, and the sustainability of diverse creative work in games.”
This is the result of a meddling minority attempting to foist their desires on everyone else, plain and simple. Choking the money supply is a smart choice, sure, but one that should be recognized in this case for what it is: censorship based on proclivities that are not widely shared. And if there really is material in these games that is illegal, it should obviously be done away with.
But we should not be playing this game of pretending content that is not widely seen as immoral should somehow be choked of its ability to participate in commerce.
One of the more frustrating aspects of any conversation we have around the preservation of video games, something that is simply not being done for the most part today for the vast majority of titles created, is how easy and simple the ultimate fix is. It isn’t a secret. It’s not an arduous process. It doesn’t require any hoop-jumping for publishers and developers. You just release the source code for games once they’re past their primary sales window and let the public preserve it, and even build on it, from there.
Doing so would accomplish a number of good things. First, it would both free the publishers from the burden of having to preserve this artform themselves while also unleashing an army within the public that are willing to do that work. The bargain that is copyright protection would be preserved, if not achieved with higher velocity, and then people like myself and the folks behind the Video Game History Foundation and Good Old Games (GOG) can finally stop our bitching about how our cultural output is disappearing. Secondly, if these developers and publishers were really smart, they would use the elongated interest timeline in these games that would result from all of this to sell other, tangible things surrounding these games, like figurines, merchandise, and other items. Not to mention driving interest in newer, updated titles within these same franchises.
So if this is all honey and roses, why have such source code releases been so sparse? Several reasons, likely. Some of it, believe it or not, is purely a combination of vanity and insecurity around the code itself. Lots of folks don’t actually want to throw open the factory doors and allow the entire world to inspect precisely how the sausage is made, so to speak. Criticism of code is as ubiquitous as the untidy writing of the code itself. And, of course, there are the big player developers and publishers out there that bow to the altar of intellectual property, instinctually gravitating towards protectionism out of fears they probably couldn’t even articulate if asked to.
Fortunately, we’re now finally starting to see some shifts in the thinking from some big players. First to discuss is Valve, which recently released the source code for Team Fortress 2, both for the client and server code. And while the license under which the code was released doesn’t allow for commercial projects, it does allow for anyone who wants to play with the code to publish what they create on Steam.
Valve’s updates to its classic games evoke Hemingway’s two kinds of going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Nothing is heard, little is seen, and then, one day, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Day of Defeat, and other Source-engine-based games get a bevy of modern upgrades. Now, the entirety of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) client and server game code, a boon for modders and fixers, is also being released.
That source code allows for more ambitious projects than have been possible thus far, Valve wrote in a blog post. “Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend, or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible.” The SDK license restricts any resulting projects to “a non-commercial basis,” but they can be published on Steam’s store as their own entities.
The timing here is somewhere between slightly late and just about right, honestly. TF2 was released in 2007, nearly twenty years ago, and has had an active player-base for a long, long time. The game’s community had something of an uproar a couple years back, mostly around the prevalence of cheating going on in the game, but that seems to have died down somewhat. Opening the code up to the public might actually help with cheating issues in the game, as well. After all, you’ve now got an entire world’s worth of people who can alter or re-develop portions of the game and code to stave off cheating.
But the most important part of this is both that the game is now able to be preserved by a public that has full access to its underlying code and that interest in the game can be extended by that same public being able to build off the code and create new, interesting content. Valve, meanwhile, gets to have that content listed on its platform, while also retaining interest in the Half-Life series that is at the heart of all of this.
Last November, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released Steam-Powered Hate, accusing Valve’s game launcher, Steam, of fostering extremism. The report dropped just before Senator Mark Warner, a SAFE TECH Act proponent, threatened Steam’s owner, raising concerns about the political motivations behind the ADL’s claims.
The ADL analyzed over one billion data points, flagging just 0.5% as “hateful.” Yet, they misrepresent Steam—primarily a game marketplace—as a social media hub overrun with extremism, despite offering no real expertise in online content moderation or gaming culture. Meanwhile, they give powerful figures like Elon Musk a pass while pushing for government intervention in digital spaces they don’t understand.
This isn’t new—the ADL has a history of advocating speech restrictions, from social media to video games. As an American Jew, I find their big-government approach to content moderation alarming. Regulators must reject pressure from advocacy groups that misrepresent online communities and threaten free expression in the name of fighting extremism.
The ADL Misunderstands Gaming’s Complex and Notoriously Edgy Environment
Gaming communities operate on a different wavelength than typical online spaces. Gamers are notorious for their dark humor, edgier memes, and a communication style that can seem alien to outsiders. The ADL, in its attempt to analyze a platform central to gaming culture, failed to grasp this, making sweeping generalizations about a community it clearly doesn’t understand.
Take their report’s biggest claim: the vast majority of so-called “hateful content” was Pepe the Frog—a meme that, while hijacked by extremists in recent years, remains widely used in mainstream gaming culture. Even the meme’s creator was outraged by its association with hate groups. Yet the ADL doesn’t distinguish between an actual extremist Pepe and a harmless, widely used gaming meme. Instead, they lump them together, inflating their numbers.
Their AI system, “HateVision,” identified nearly one million extremist symbols—over half of which were Pepe. The AI was trained on a limited dataset of images and keywords the ADL pre-selected as hateful, but it failed to differentiate between legitimate extremism and gaming’s irreverent meme culture. Worse, it didn’t distinguish between U.S.-based and international users, ignoring the fact that gaming communities operate under different cultural norms worldwide.
The AI’s failures didn’t stop at images. It also couldn’t tell the difference between actual hate speech and the tongue-in-cheek, often provocative style of gaming communities. While gaming culture can be abrasive, the vast majority of players understand the difference between in-game trash talk and real-world hostility. The ADL? Not so much.
The ADL also went after copypastas—blocks of text copied and pasted to provoke reactions—identifying 1.83 million “potentially harmful” ones without bothering to check context. Their keyword-based approach flagged terms like “boogaloo” and “amerikaner” without acknowledging their multiple meanings. “Boogaloo” is mostly a Gen-Z meme, not a secret alt-right code word in gaming. “Boogalo” does have alt-right connotations, but there are other connotations like the one listed above. “Amerikaner” can refer to a cookie, the German word for “American,” or even a famous YouTuber’s username. They also flagged “Goyim” as a slur, despite it being a common and sometimes affectionate term used by Jewish people themselves. In the in-group of Jewish people it is often non-offensive. Though the term can be used in an offensive manner by antisemitic people, the ADL made no distinctions.
Curious, I did a Steam keyword search for “Amerikaner.” The first result was a left-winger calling out racism. The second was someone mocking Americans in Counter-Strike. The third was a non-English post. None of the results, in my opinion, rose to the level of extremism. I also searched “Boogaloo” and found references to the classic “electric boogaloo” meme, a non-English speaker using the term, and a gaming forum name. The ADL didn’t bother with this level of nuance—they just scraped forums, pulled words out of context, and called it a day.
The ADL also attacked Garry’s Mod (G-Mod), a sandbox game known for its anything-goes creativity. They focused on one mod featuring maps of real-life mass shootings, citing comments with words like “based,” “Sigma,” and even “Subscribe to PewDiePie” as signs of extremism. But these are common ‘chronically online’ phrases with broad uses. “Based” is Gen-Z slang used by individuals on both the left and right. “Sigma” is a meme mocking “alpha male” tropes. And while the Christchurch shooter did mention PewDiePie, claiming the ADL is unfairly targeting him isn’t exactly a stretch. Yes, PewDiePie has had controversies, but painting him as a hate symbol is a major leap.
The report wraps up with the tragic white supremacist attack in Turkey, where the ADL notes that while there were red flags on the shooter’s Steam profile, there’s “no evidence” he was directly inspired by extremist content on the platform. Still, they use this tragedy to argue Steam isn’t doing enough to moderate content. But even their own research found Steam actively filters Swastikas into hearts—identifying only 11 profiles where this workaround failed. Eleven profiles. Out of millions. That’s an edge case, not a crisis.
To be fair, the study did identify a small number of fringe groups glorifying hate and violence. But the bigger question is whether the ADL’s findings actually reflect a serious problem—or if they’re simply misunderstanding an edgy, chaotic, but largely non-extremist gaming culture. And given what a small amount of extreme content that the ADL found worldwide, it looks like Steam is actually doing its job.
The ADL’s Steam Comparison is Hypocritical and Misguided
Still, the ADL reportedly takes issue with Steam’s so-called “ad hoc” approach to content moderation, claiming that despite Valve’s removal efforts, the platform still “fails to systematically address the issue of extremism and hate.” But this critique ignores the reality of gaming culture and Steam’s own policies.
Steam’s moderation reflects the nature of its community. Its content rules fall into two categories: one for games—allowing all titles except those that are illegal or blatant trolling—and another for user-generated content, which bans unlawful activity, harassment, IP violations, and commercial exploitation. The ADL criticizes Steam for not taking a stricter stance like Microsoft and Roblox, but that comparison is misleading at best.
Microsoft’s gaming history isn’t exactly a beacon of virtue. Xbox 360 live chats were infamous for racist slurs, and Call of Duty’s lobbies remain a toxic free-for-all. Meanwhile, Minecraft—the game the ADL seems to hold in high regard—was created by someone with a history of antisemitic remarks, and Microsoft itself has faced accusations of workplace discrimination. Yet, the ADL doesn’t seem nearly as concerned about these issues.
As for Roblox, while it does enforce stricter content moderation, it’s far from an extremist-free utopia. The Australian Federal Police have warned about the platform’s potential for radicalization, and NBC has reported extremist content explicitly targeting children. If anything, this suggests that heavy-handed moderation doesn’t necessarily eliminate bad actors—it just pushes them to adapt.
Steam’s approach may not align with the ADL’s ideal vision of content moderation, but pretending that Microsoft and Roblox represent the gold standard ignores their own deep-seated issues. It does not make sense for a platform like Steam to have policies identical or similar to XBox and Roblox. Both of those are fully live-service platforms, whereas Steam is primarily a consumption platform for games as opposed to a platform where users are constantly interacting with one another in-game, online through the platform.This creates market differentiation. Platform’s policies are a reflection of the services that they offer and if users feel the policies are problematic they can jump ship to another provider.
Regulators Must Beware of Overreach from Non-Trust & Safety Experts Like the ADL
In its report, the ADL calls for a national gaming safety task force, urging policymakers to create a federally backed group to “combat this pervasive issue” through a multi-stakeholder approach. On paper, this sounds like a noble goal. In practice, it’s a recipe for government overreach that could stifle the gaming industry’s creative and independent spirit.
Gaming has thrived because of its grassroots nature—built by passionate developers and players, not by bureaucrats or advocacy groups with no real understanding of gaming culture, online community norms, or trust and safety. A federal task force risks imposing rigid, top-down regulations that don’t fit the dynamic and ever-evolving gaming world. Worse, it could open the door to politically motivated interventions that prioritize appearances over real solutions.
The ADL also suggests Steam engage in multi-stakeholder moderation efforts. But who controls the conversation? When powerful corporations and activist organizations dominate these discussions, smaller developers and gaming communities get sidelined. That’s how you end up with policies shaped by corporate interests and advocacy agendas rather than solutions that actually work for gamers. And let’s be blunt—the ADL has no business dictating content moderation policies for gaming platforms.
The ADL is not an expert on content moderation, online community dynamics, or trust and safety. It has no meaningful experience navigating the complexities of digital spaces, algorithmic content regulation, or the unique cultural norms that define gaming communities. Instead, their report relies on anecdotal evidence, an oversimplified AI model, and out-of-context symbols, all of which lead to flawed conclusions and misleading claims.
Steam isn’t Microsoft or Disney. It’s a privately owned company run by Valve and Gabe Newell, without the vast political and financial clout of industry giants. Forcing broad content moderation mandates onto platforms like Steam sets a dangerous precedent, burdening smaller businesses that lack the infrastructure of the major tech companies. And let’s be clear: Steam’s primary function is to sell video games, not to serve as a social media watchdog.
The ADL’s concerns about extremism may be well-intended, but their lack of expertise, misinterpretation of gaming culture, and one-size-fits-all approach make them uniquely unqualified to weigh in on this issue. Their push for federal intervention aligns with the broader SAFE TECH Act’s concerning political and financial motivations, which could disproportionately harm platforms that aren’t backed by corporate lobbying power.
Yes, online extremism is a problem—but handing control to out-of-touch regulators and advocacy groups that don’t understand the space isn’t the answer. The gaming industry must stay free, innovative, and independent—not bogged down by heavy-handed government oversight that threatens to erase the very culture that makes online gaming communities thrive.
Elizabeth Grossman is a first-year law student at the University of Akron School of Law in the Intellectual Property program and with a goal of working in tech policy.
