Censorship War vs Gaming

Hi. 

So unfortunately instead of posting all the cool promotional materials I made and talking about my personal game development, I have to talk about game development and art in general as the Steam censorship controversy sweeps through the internet.

I’m sure many of you have heard of the new mass censorship of the internet led by the Visa / Paypal / Mastercard cartel, essentially taking what’s happened on Patreon the past few years and applying the same subjective and quite impossible standards to the whole world, starting with gaming. This has essentially ruined all of gaming overnight and is a level of weird corporate overreach that is shocking even to me, someone who has been abused by these guys for years.

This has always been completely crazy letting a middleman determine what art is made and now it has expanded to everyone and all things instead of just easily bullied niche creators of adult titles. It is time to stand up for free speech and basic rights. The censorship black-hole is already absorbing everything and it has thrown not just my game but all games and all art into jeopardy. This is in existential crisis for artistic and free expression in the West!

We need to stand for free speech, artistic expression, and for the right of adults to choose what legal goods they can buy with their hard-earned money. A payment processor should process all legal transactions, not be a hypocritical moral arbiter for the whole world. 

It doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum you sit, letting a corrupt elite have so much control over basic rights and superseding all national and democratic input is just beyond outrageous for basically everyone in the Western world. A thin slice cheers the censorship because it happens to things they don’t like but over the past week it has already expanded to everything so those people look very myopic and dumb.

This is not a left or right wing issue. It is everyone vs the ivory tower elite. These people don’t care about the excuse needed to censor or grab power so focusing on that specific excuse or catalyst is not productive.

I want to sell an uncensored version of my game on Steam but this is now impossible until this cartel gets regulated and basic autonomy returns to businesses and individuals.

The way forward is clear: we stop this insane corporate overreach now before it is too late and we arrive in what is essentially the shittiest version of a cyberpunk dystopia.

Watching Steam get purged and DLsite, and Itch, and DMM, and manga and bookstores, dating sites etc and now we have the UK’s porn verification system. It's all so rapid and surreal. The purge is still ongoing. This is 10s of thousands of games and books including visual novels - novels - books - this is the largest book burning of the modern internet era and anyone that has ever played a video game, read a book, or watched a movie must stand up to stop mass censorship before it infects and spreads to ruin everything.

Please sign this petition:

https://www.change.org/p/tell-mastercard-visa-activist-groups-stop-controlling-what-we-can-watch-read-or-play

Please email your local political reps. If in the US, contact your reps to vote for S401 Fair Access to Banking and HR 987. 

Please send a complaint to the FTC pointing out the obvious antitrust issues between Visa et al and Valve, Patreon, DLsite etc. Their monopolistic blackmail must end for economic and social reasons. It's bad for freedom, art, and business.

Raise a stink on social media. Talk to your friends and family. Complain to Valve/Steam. Cancel your cartel credit cards. Pay off your debts. Choose alternative payments like X, valvepay, Amex, and crypto.

Email complaints to Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Paypal, pointing out that censoring all media and standing against freedom of speech and artistic expression in the name of “brand protection” has ruined their reputation. The fact that a third party processor now gets to tell people what legal stuff they get to buy with their money is so ridiculous that you should be able to convince anyone that it’s a bad idea and precedent. This is finally a unifying issue that has spread to a level where liberals and conservatives can stand together against a very real and powerful enemy.

https://archive.ph/2025.07.24-192446/https://www.reddit.com/r/itchio/comments/1m83s71/things_you_can_do_to_counteract_payment/

Thank you for all your support and interest over the years. I hope the cartel will let me make spicy games in the future. If not, I am still going to do it anyway so I will need your help.

Thanks for your time. More posts with real content are coming soon if I don't "damage the goodwill of the corporation."