Stop Censoring Games, Stop Killing Games – Everybody, Just Stop!

OPINION – Unless you’ve been stuck in an ARPG farming loop or had your senses muted by a stroke-inducing FPS, there’s a lot going on in the world of gaming right now. And it needs to be addressed post haste or we’ll all end up playing watered down games for a limited amount of time – that is if VISA and Mastercard will allow us. Sounds like a lot to take in?

You probably won’t believe this, but there was a time when nobody cared about the games people played. I didn’t care about which games my friends played and they didn’t care about the games I played. There were enough games for everyone to have fun. There are more games today than ever before and tomorrow there will be even more.

However, the gaming industry in 2025 stands at a precarious crossroads. On one end lies technological innovation, creative freedom, and an explosion of independent developers. On the other looms growing pressure from governments, advocacy groups, and private financial entities aiming to reshape what can and cannot be made, sold, or experienced.

The Hissy Fit From Downunder

Australia has given us L.A. Noire, the War Games Series, and Hollow Knight. Alas, it also spawned pro-life feminist Melinda Tankard Reist with her holier-than-though activist group Collective Shout. Reisst is the co-founder and Movement Director of this organization which will stop at nothing to make sure that women and girls aren’t objectified and sexualized in media, advertising, and pop-culture.

On the surface, that sounds like a noble cause, but in the end it’s a very wide umbrella statement that is used to shut down everything that gets Reist’s attention. Including, of course, video games. In 2014, Collective Shout and Reist spearheaded a campaign that ultimately led to GTA V being pulled off the shelves in Target and Kmart in Australia because of its depiction of violence against women. I wonder if she would pull me off too if she knew how many male pedestrians I’ve mowed down in that game.

Collective Shout employs an all-too-common tactic: send public letters to CEOs with emotional appeal and based logic. The letter they addressed to the CEOs of PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Paysafe Limited, Discover, and the Japanese Credit Bureau, which goes on in length about games the activists deemed exploitative against women is no exception.

“We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements.”

This is a classic advocacy-pressure sentence: respectful on the surface but built to shame, challenge, and corner the recipient. It doesn’t overtly accuse, but every word is chosen to imply moral failing, hypocrisy, and corporate irresponsibility.

Mastercard and Visa waved the white flag immediately and pressured Steam and Itch.io to remove hundreds of NSFW-labeled games.

What they should have done is to tell Collective Shout that as payment methods they facilitate lawful transactions and don’t endorse any specific content, and that they abide by local laws and platform guidelines. And that would have been the end of it. Applying selective moral frameworks to financial services risks creating precedents for censorship and undermining individual rights.

In response to these recent events, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has released a public statement, citing their concerns with how Steam and Itch.io were strong-armed into removing games with little or no transparency towards the gaming community.

“The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is seriously alarmed by the recent wave of game delistings, deindexing, and payment disruptions targeting adult-themed titles on platforms such as Steam and Itch.io.

Reports suggest these actions have been taken with little to no communication and have disproportionately harmed developers producing legal, consensual, and ethically-developed content, including creators from marginalized communities.”

Meanwhile, thousands of gamers flooded Mastercard’s support line with calls to the point where response times increased exponentially and caused delays. Visa standardized emails to answer any and all questions related to their involvement with games being removed from the aforementioned platforms.

“Visa does not moderate content sold by merchants, nor do we have visibility into the specific goods or services sold when we process a transaction. When a legally operating merchant faces an elevated risk of illegal activity, we require enhanced safeguards for the banks supporting those merchants,” it reads.

Mastercard has responded publicly with a message that can only be met with a “yeah, right…” The company said that it has had no involvement with any games being censored: “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.”

Valve, the company behind the Steam platform, has gone out of their way to set the record straight and said that Mastercard never communicated directly with them and went through third-party payment processors to deliver the message.

“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,” Valve said in a statement on Aug. 1, and continued: “Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”

Here’s a tip to whoever is in charge of PR for Mastercard: Next time you want to deny that you are involved with censorship and plan to communicate this via third-party companies, make sure they don’t cite your company’s rules.

The battle between gamers and payment processors is just getting started all thanks to Collective Shout and Melinda Tankard Reist. The campaign on social media is now turning towards content creators who are speaking up against the Australian grassroot movement.

Members of Collective Shout are now labeling any contrarians to their world view as a defender of sexually abusing children, rape, and incest. This is a vile and intellectually (a word used lightly here) dishonest accusation far removed from reality. No one is defending any of these crimes. People are opposing Collective Shout’s eager to censor anything and everything Melinda Tankard Reist and her acolytes disagree with.

The UK Time Travels to 1984 on Steroids

The Online Safety Act (OSA) is a comprehensive piece of legislation which was voted into law in 2023. Its scope is so wide that it’s taken until now for it to become enforced. If you thought that policing the internet would be impossible, think again. The UK government is having a go at it.

Designed to protect children from harmful content online, which is obviously not a bad thing, the implementation of the OSA has led to much of social media, search engines, and video games to fall behind age-verification there. This includes every game rated 18+ (in the UK), which usually includes graphical violence and/or nudity.

Ironically, the UK government is right now working on lowering the voting age in national elections to 16, suggesting that minors can be trusted with contributing to the political discourse, but not get married, get a driving license, or play GTA V.

The most staunch defender of the legislation is Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation & Technology, and, just like the Collective Shout people, he resorts to the same emotional arguments and ad hominem attacks to subdue any voices of dissent.

But in the UK, the loudest voice of dissent belongs to Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK party, and the politician who spearheaded Brexit. Kyle compared Farage to the late Jimmy Savile, a famous TV personality and child abuser who raised millions for charity. Particularly for various children’s initiatives.

It’s still early days in the UK so the full scope of the implementation of the OSA is still uncertain. We do know that violating the new internet law will result in fines up to a whopping $24 million. But that’s from the perspective of a business. What happens when a 14-year-old is caught playing GTA V over a VPN is not clear.

Asking players to share their personal information every time they want to play a game will certainly go down a treat. It’s not like the industry hasn’t had its fair share of breaches, like when 77 million PlayStation users had IDs and passwords stolen in 2011, or when the same thing happened to 218 million Zynga customers in 2019, or when Fortnite accounts were affected by a breach that was so massive that Epic Games didn’t bother counting.

Protecting children seems to be the biggest issue of the internet. And, at the moment, we’re all supposed to trust this endeavor to governments and payment providers. A radical idea could be to leave that responsibility to parents. Parental locks are available for a reason.

While the UK government, payment methods, and an angry Karen want to censor video games, the biggest makers of games in the industry want to be allowed to destroy their own creations as and when they see fit.

Your License to Pretend It’s Yours

Almost all big franchises make most of their money on monetizing the wazoo out of them and not from copies sold. I say copies loosely here because we’re heading towards digital only so fast that soon enough players won’t have a physical copy of any new game to put on their shelves.

In the eyes of AAA studios, their own customers have been reduced to data entries in spreadsheets. Customers don’t pay to own games anymore; They pay for the privilege of playing their games. It’s not a right if it can be taken away from you without notification and for whatever reason according to End User License Agreements.

While plenty of voices have spoken up against this, none spoke louder than Ross Scott, a YouTuber and advocate for the Stop Killing Games (SKG) initiative. He launched SKG in April 2024 as a response to Ubisoft shutting down The Crew, rendering it unplayable despite ownership and purchase.

SKG is pushing for players to have access to games after publishers decide they’re no longer financially viable, and that companies provide for end-of-life provisions such as offline modes or private server tools. In the US, the initiative didn’t get much traction but across the Atlantic European gamers took notice.

Scott rolled up his sleeves and helped with organizing a European counterpart to SKG – Stop Destroying Games (SDG) and on July 31, 2024 a petition under the European Citizens Initiatives was launched. Its deadline expired on the date one year later.

It was a slow burn for a long time, but with only a couple of months to go, the initiative gained a lot of attention due to a few people speaking up against it, most notably YouTuber Jason “Thor” Hall aka Pirate Software.

The internet did what the internet does and virtually destroyed Pirate Software. Even his own fan base turned on him. In a short time period he lost more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Despite Pirate Software’s stance against SKG and SDG, the petition in the EU became visible in a new light and all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of people signed it, eventually reaching 1.4 million signees. Enough for the EU powerbrokers to listen.

The matter will now be a drawn out process where gaming industry advocacy groups like Video Games Europe (VGE) will have ample time to figure out how many votes in the European Parliament they have to sway to crush the initiative. Their response to SKG on July 4 on their website left no wiggle room for negotiations:

“We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable.”

So, after selling a game and making millions of dollars, making more millions of dollars from in-game purchases, the game might “no longer be commercially viable,” and the studio behind the game “must” have the option to discontinue it – rendering all the players’ logged time and money spent to nothing but memories of the experience.

Unsurprisingly, a common reason for publishers wanting to discontinue their support of games is because there’s a sequel or some new game in the pipeline. And so the cycle starts over. Your license to pretend it’s yours is revoked – unconditionally.

This is what Scott has been fighting for more than a year. He recently released a recent video on YouTube titled Stop Killing Games: Wrap up where he looks tired, very tired.

“Stop Killing Games is largely underway, even though there are things left to do. I’m a bit of a burned out husk because of it, but I can keep burning some more if necessary,” he said in the video.

Delete, Deny, Deplatform

Whether it’s the UK’s legislative overreach, activist pressure from Australia, or the silent veto power of financial institutions, the gaming industry is being reshaped by non-gaming forces. Once a haven for weird, wild, and wonderful ideas, games are being pushed toward sterilization. Regulation intended to protect is instead disincentivizing risk.

Collective Shout’s campaign against adult games is not just about content – it‘s a test case for moral gatekeeping through corporate leverage. That such a small group can influence global payment networks shows how precarious the industry’s autonomy truly is. When morality becomes monetized, no developer is safe.

Visa and Mastercard’s growing role as de facto censors bypasses any public accountability. They don’t have to justify why certain titles are blocked or removed. They just need to minimize PR risk. In this climate, content moderation becomes a financial decision rather than an ethical or creative one.

The Stop Destroying Games initiative offers a sliver of hope. It reframes the conversation around preservation and consumer rights, advocating for a future where games are treated with the same respect as books or movies. If successful, it may provide a blueprint for digital ownership reform worldwide.

In the end, this is not just a fight over what games are allowed. It’s a battle over who decides what we’re allowed to experience, own, and remember. If we do not act, the games we lose will not just vanish – they will be erased from our shared cultural memory.

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