No One Wants to Die on Gooner Hill

This one isn't very funny.

Recently, Visa and Mastercard convinced Steam to remove several morally dubious NSFW games off their storefront. I say convinced, because they didn’t have to take them down. They could stay up, sure, but Visa and Mastercard wouldn’t process their payments for any other transaction.

These games weren’t removed by Steam. They were on the platform for a while, most for over a year, and they complied with Steam’s admittedly lax content policies. After pressure from Visa and Mastercard, they were removed for breaking a newly-introduced rule which prohibits “Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks”. So now if Visa/Mastercard decides they don’t like the game, they can have it removed.

The games that were removed were pornographic games with specific niches. Some of the titles include Incest Twins, Futanari Incest, Daddy Twins Incest and Redemption of Li Wei. That last one seems out of place, but like all the others on the list, it featured rape and other forms of sexual violence. Yeah, this isn’t going to be a very fun article.

Removing this smut was a good thing, right? After all, we wouldn’t want such deplorable content out there. Steam should be free of such depravity. If you oppose this decision, it must be because you support this content, right?

I don’t support this content, but I don’t think Visa and Mastercard should decide what gets sold on other stores. They have a history of denying service to whomever they don’t like, and if you speak out against it, you get branded as part of whatever group it is they’re trying to get rid of. At the moment, it’s the gooners, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a gooner.

Matters of censorship are seen as a battle between two sides: The righteous censors who want to eliminate filth, and the degenerates who want to indulge their base desires. If you’re against the thing we want to ban, it must be because you enjoy it. You want freedom of speech because you want to say slurs, and you want Steam to be in control of what is sold on Steam because you want to play Rapefest 3000. Is that really the hill you want to die on?

There’s always a hill to die on, and it will always be an unsavory one. No one wants to die on gooner hill.

Games about what now?

Glancing at the list of removed games, it’s hard to make a case for them. You have things like Sex Village, a whole mess of incest games, games about rape and torture. The perfect target to get rid of and claim that anyone who objects is doing it because they like that sort of thing.

There isn’t much information on these games for a number of reasons, but from what I can gather these were all low budget porn games made by small developers, sold for pennies. They weren’t exactly popular, either, with most of them having player counts under 100, and some with less than 20 players. This combination of them being incredibly unpopular and now wiped off the face of the Earth, means there’s no way of knowing much about them, other than what you can infer from the titles.

They seem like the kind of terrible, low-budget shovelware that shouldn’t have made it onto Steam in the first place. These Unity asset flips made in a few hours, whose sole purpose is to show poorly rendered 3D nudity. With a modicum of quality control, these wouldn’t have seen the light of day.

You can get a sample of what a lot of these games were like. A lot of the games removed were from the “Interactive Sex” series, and most of them are still on Steam. More than you think.

The developers of these games, EroticGamesClub, are what you picture when you think of low budget sex games. According to vginsights.com, Their first game was published in 2022, and between then and now they’ve published 244 games (Steam lists them having 200). Steam doesn’t have a problem with these garbage games staying up on their store, and even the ones that were removed were sitting there for over a year. Most with player counts under 30 people.

Visa and Mastercard suddenly decided they weren’t going to do business with Steam unless they removed those games. The kind of dubious product pumped out by one guy in some corrugated steel shack out in Bosnia. Why was this such a pressing issue?

Collective Shout

Collective Shout is an Australian group that campaigns against pornography and other such things. They released a statement on their official Facebook page stating:

In response to false claims and misinformation about our campaign, we’re setting the record straight. Some have asked why we involved payment processors, and others have claimed we are responsible for Itch-io removing all NSFW content.

We raised our objection to r*pe and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months. We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.

We called on Itch-io to remove r*pe and incest games that we argued normalised violence and abuse of women. Itch-io made the decision to remove all NSFW content.

Our objections were to content that involved s*xualised violence and torture of women.

These people are so censor-happy that they can’t even post an official statement without bleeping stuff out.

They claim they weren’t responsible for the take downs, but they did complain to Steam about those games. Itch.io also removed all its NSFW games after this event. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.

Collective shout also successfully campaigned to ban rapper Tyler The Creator from Australia back in 2015. They cited his lyrics as a point of contention, saying they’re harmful to women. As someone who listens to Tyler, I know there’s a lot of questionable material to pick from, especially in his earlier albums. I don’t think his millions of female fans have objection to them, but I’m just making an argumentum ad populum fallacy, so my entire argument is invalid.

What’s the big deal? I don’t want to play incest games.

Me neither, but this is where it starts. This same group went after Detroit: Become Human, one of the blandest, safest David Cage games. No one even gets possessed by a demon to commit murder in this one, but hey apparently there’s child abuse in that game, so it has to be banned.

Disgusting gooner games are the first step. No one wants to play these horrid games, so you shouldn’t complain when they get taken down. There, doesn’t the Steam storefront look good without all that smut there? Wait a minute. What’s that game over there? Grand Theft Auto? A game named after a felony? Oh boy, we gotta get rid of that one, too.

Yes, Collective Shout went after Grand Theft Auto, too, saying it shouldn’t be sold at Target. GTA is the poster child for this sort of nonsense. Every few years someone tries to ban it, unsuccessfully, but boy do they sure try. It’s like people don’t remember Jack Thompson and how he tried to shut down any game that wasn’t squeaky clean, and he was rightfully mocked for it.

Back in 2008 there was a mini controversy surrounding Mass Effect’s sex scenes. It was too raunchy. You can’t sell that to kids. Never mind that it’s an M rated game and kids shouldn’t be playing it, it’s a videogame, videogames are for kids, ergo Mass Effect is a children’s game.

Today, they campaign against an obvious target. Tomorrow, they go after the usual suspects; GTA, DOOM, shooters. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that something you like has been the target of a moral panic. Violent games? Always. Heavy metal music? Of the devil. Dungeons and Dragons? Leads to satanism.

There will always be someone trying to ban media on moral grounds. Today it’s Collective Shout, in the past it was busybody conservatives, and in the future it might be neo-vegans who try to cancel Grand Theft Auto 8 because it offends their evangelical veganist sensibilities.

Conclusion

I don’t think it should be up to Mastercard or Visa to dictate what is sold on Steam, or any other platform. They are supposed to provide the service of moving money around. What that money goes to is not their prerogative. They’re not the moral arbiters of what people can and can’t do with their own money. Imagine if a phone company cut your service because you used a bad word during a call.

This monetary-level based denial of service has profound effects on everything. It’s not one platform deciding you can’t host something on it, it’s the money itself saying “I’m not going to be used here”. Payment processors hold a monopoly over the transfer of money, the most important thing in an economy. They shouldn’t be able to control where it goes.

What if that money is being used in illegal activities? That’s where the police and law enforcement come in. You know, the people in charge of enforcing the law. If someone wants to use their money to buy drugs, should they be prevented from using the money, or arrested for breaking a law?

Steam’s issue with this could be solved with stricter quality control. With some more moderation, they’d be able to weed out a lot of these shovelware asset flips. This would improve the user experience in general for everyone.

Now, should polish be the thing that determines if a game is put on Steam? Is my only objection to these sexually violent games the fact that they’re of low quality? No. With better moderation in place, Steam could verify that there’s nothing objectionable being put on the store. If there’s a game with sickening sexual content, even if it’s technically not illegal, Steam should be free to reject it from sale. It should be their choice, not the payment processors’.

Both the payment processor and Steam are private companies, so why should one be able to control things and not the other? I always hear the argument that, if a private company does something, it’s their right and you can’t complain. This is true. Steam can decide what to put on the store, because they’re not the only games sellers in town. There are plenty of other storefronts out there, and if all else fails, you can sell your game on your own site independently. It’s nowhere near as easy to start up your own payment processor. You can’t bank outside of the system. They’re a monopoly.

If they can decide who uses their money and who doesn’t, that would put them in a position to completely cripple anyone they don’t like. If you don’t think it will affect you, just remember that substack, the website hosting this blog you’re reading, is considered to be right-wing and infested by nazis because of its supposedly lax content moderation. In a few years, someone might get a bee in their bonnet over Substack, decide it’s not worth the risk to their brand to keep funding, and disable their ability to monetize.

This is pure hypocrisy on the payment processor’s part, too. They ban the games off Steam for their sexual content, but they are the main payment handlers for porn sites. Sites like Taboo Films, whose entire shtick is incest porn. Oh wait, this one’s allowed because they don’t have sex with their siblings, it’s their STEP siblings. I don’t see why they need to add the fact that they’re related in any way, but here we are. You can see two actual humans pretending they’re related going to town on each other in 4K Ultra HD, but you can’t do the same on Steam. They also handle payment on Meatholes, a site that prides itself on its extreme, grotesque, violent hardcore porn that borders on literal rape. There have been adult stars who have worked for them and they’ve told horror stories on how they cross the line. These are real, human people, and you can watch them get brutally fucked for a few dollars a month, thanks to Visa and Mastercard. Just not on Steam.

I don’t like these kinds of games, and the legality of them is a whole quagmire that I refuse to touch, because I’m not informed enough. All I can say is, I don’t like them, I don’t like this kind of material or what it depicts, but their distribution should be up to the store’s discretion. If there’s something that goes against the law, that’s what law enforcement is for.

Hopefully next week we can talk about some dumb PS2 game or something.

Side quest: Neutered language.

That Collective Shout post above made me extremely angry. They want to highlight the horrors of sexual violence, but they can’t even say rape? They asterisk sexual? Oh but rape is such a horrible word!

Exactly. That’s the point of the word. It’s descriptive. If you’re talking about rape, you shouldn’t feel comfortable. It should shock and disgust you. If you use safe, softened language, you’re diminishing it. If you hear someone got “SA’d” or “graped” it sounds silly. Now, if you hear they were raped, it catches you off guard. It impacts you, as such the mention of such a horrible act should.

Same goes for suicide. Someone didn’t “unalive” himself. They didn’t commit “sewer slide” or “self-deletion”. They committed suicide. They killed themselves. It’s a horrible thing that deserves an equally jarring term.

These are subjects that should be handled with the gravity they deserve. They shouldn’t be bleeped or censored for the sake of advertisers, you shouldn’t have to skirt around them. When discussing adult topics, speak like an adult. You can say shit, piss fuck, motherfucker and everything else, but oh no not the r-word!