LOS ANGELES—The founder of Itch.io, Leaf Corcoran, announced Thursday that his company began reindexing free adult entertainment games on the indie video game marketplace after it recently announced deindexing due to pressure from major credit card companies and payment processors.
Corcoran's action runs counter to the lobbying efforts of the Australian anti-pornography group Collective Shout and its co-founder, Melinda Tankard Reist.
The group claimed responsibility for a so-called "grassroots" campaign to pressure the payment and financial partners for PC gaming marketplaces Steam and Itch.io to block age-restricted content.
Steam responded by clamping down on "certain kinds of adult content," via documentation for developers who use the outlet to publish. Itch, being a much smaller company, had to take an aggressive approach to cut entire categories of games out of concern for losing payment partners.
"Today, we are re-indexing free adult NSFW content," Corcoran wrote in a post via the platform's developers' discussion board. "We are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be re-introducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term."
Corcoran explained that the reindexing of free material, which doesn't require payment processing, is the first step to addressing the problem of payment censorship.
"We are also implementing a new 'content warnings' system for pages tagged as NSFW," he explained. "To be eligible for indexing, all page owners will be required to complete this. This feature is not yet ready, but we will post an update when it is."
He added, "If your page was previously indexed, you will have a time window to complete this requirement to avoid going in and out of indexing."
Corcoran also wrote about his company's interactions with one of its payment processing partner vendors, Stripe.
"They have provided the 'Pay with card' option on our checkout page for over 10 years," he explained. "We spoke with Stripe yesterday about their content policies. They confirmed that they will not be able to support adult content that fits the following definition: 'content designed for sexual gratification.'
"We are in the process of talking with other payment partners to accept card payments that Stripe is unable to process," he continued. "We disabled Stripe payments last week on pages identified as having 'adult NSFW content.' Now that we have a more specific definition from Stripe, we may review that initial list for potential reintroduction."
He added that his long-term goal with the company is to find payment processing partners that accommodate sexual content transactions.
