Ted Litchfield, a journalist at PC Gamer, noted that the “nearly 500 other rape and incest games” figure Collective Shout cites in its own timeline of the campaign doesn’t make sense, and the only way to arrive at it would be to count duplicates, DLCs, and unrelated games removed in that time. “Counting up all ‘Removed’ and ‘Retired’ games on SteamDB since the 15th, I got 456 hits, but that includes double counts for most of the offending games (many of which were both ‘Removed’ and ‘Retired’), DLC and demos for those games (also given the double-r treatment), and a number of unrelated games that were taken off Steam during this time,” Litchfield wrote.
“No one platform nor marketplace should be responsible for so much media. We’ve concentrated too much of our culture to a handful of platforms like Patreon, Steam, and even Itch, though the latter, in my opinion, is less concerned with monopolization,” Boarlord said. “That makes them strategic targets for bad faith pressure campaigns. And in the case of Itch, they’re so small and lacking in resources there’s no leverage against the likes of Stripe, Visa, MasterCard. Sex workers have run our throats hoarse screaming about this: With the power to demonetize platforms that so many queer and trans people rely on to survive, payment processors effectively dictate our culture now. Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, Paypal, they decide who lives and dies.”
Visa, Mastercard and PayPal did not respond to my request for comment on the open letter or about whether they reviewed the contents of the games. Mastercard published a statement on August 1: “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations. 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.” {read}