If you’re an indie creator of any sort, you’ve likely been paying attention to a trend that’s been growing over the last year or so. I’d argue the trend has been growing for the better part of a decade now, as our political climate has shifted from progressive to regressive.
What am I yammering about? Well, it’s the fact that payment processors are now putting platforms into chokeholds over what they can sell. In the past year or two, we’ve seen credit card processors—Mastercard and Visa, in particular—strong-arm various platforms, like Steam and Itch.io, into curtailing what products they offer on their platforms.
Whether you’re an indie developer, a creator, a publisher, a casual gamer or reader, or just an adult with an iota of sense, that’s a bad thing. Here’s why—and what we can do about it.
Payment Processors Hold a Lot of Power
Payment processors are the entities that make it possible for retailers to collect payment. Visa and Mastercard are the two biggest ones here, but other processors exist. The big credit card companies, though, have the most clout, because everyone wants to accept credit card payments.
You can’t just set up a shop and say, “Hey, I accept credit cards!” though. If you want to accept payments, you need to set up a merchant account, which grants you access to the payment network. You can only accept payments once you have access to the network.
Payment processors like Visa and Mastercard charge for access to the network and for every transaction. As a merchant, you’ll pay a base fee to have the account. Then you’ll pay a fee and a percentage of each transaction to the payment processor. The credit card companies levy different fee.
Why Indie Devs Turn to Platforms Like Itch.io
Now, if you’re an indie game dev, you’re probably making games on a shoestring budget anyway. Forking out additional money to Mastercard and Visa just to join their network in hopes you can sell some games isn’t really in the cards. That’s where a platform like Steam or Itch.io comes in. You don’t need to worry about which cards you do or don’t accept. And your customers can pay how they like. Better yet, Steam and Itch.io pool the power of the crowd. As a single indie, you’re not going to sell much, but when you put together all of the transactions on Steam or Itch.io, you get a much larger volume. The credit card companies will cut you some slack if you’re doing huge numbers with them.
Yet this situation gives the payment processors a lot of power. Since most consumers want to pay with credit card—especially for goods and services on the internet—merchants almost have to accept cards. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve decided not to shop somewhere because they don’t accept my preferred card.
Accepting the payment options your customers want to use to pay you is huge. That means a credit card company has a fair bit of sway when it comes to merchants. Essentially, they can say, “Hey, do X” or “don’t do Y or we’ll cut you off.” Most merchants feel like they have no choice but to comply.
Which Is What Payment Processors Did to Steam and Itch.io
Visa and Mastercard put this to the test last summer. They threatened gaming juggernaut Steam. Allegedly, they objected to some indie games on the platform. They threatened to cut off credit card payments unless Steam cleaned up the “objectionable” content.
Steam tried to circumvent the threat by removing only the content that was objected to. They had to expand their categories somewhat. And, for the most part, what Steam removed was content most individuals would have found objectionable or, at the very least, controversial. For example, one of the games removed was an incest simulator.
A short while later, Itch.io found themselves in a similar situation. Visa and Mastercard threatened to pull the plug on payments unless Itch removed objectionable content. Unlike Steam, Itch.io decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The platform wholesale shadow-banned all NSWF (or “adult”) content. This included content similar to what Steam had removed, but it also took out LGBTQIA+ games, novels, and other content, as well as indie games with an adult audience.
Itch was widely decried for how they handled the situation. They did a lot of damage to their relationship with indie creators. When Visa and Mastercard tried to exercise their clout, Itch showed that they were willing to throw indie creators under the bus.
Steam initially handled the situation with more aplomb. Some tried to suggest that was because Steam had a larger team and Itch.io needed to move quickly with a small team, so a blanket solution was needed. Since that time, though, Steam has increasingly found itself in the crossfire as Visa and Mastercard continue to apply pressure to remove and ban more content.
Payment Processors Are Risk-Adverse
As I noted in the previous section, almost anything in the financial sector is conservative. That is, the financial sector, on the whole, doesn’t like to take risks. It likes tradition. It likes the tried and true. And it does not want to get caught up in anything that might a fly-by-night operation or stinks of scandal.
You can understand this. There are teams and companies dedicated to rooting out financial fraud and money laundering. The internet is a notorious hotbed of criminal activity, ranging from credit card and identity theft to money laundering to the sale of contraband.
You can see why the financial industry might feel that internet business, on the whole, is a bit sketchy. And we can certainly agree that there are sketchy things happening on the internet, just as there are criminal things going on in the real world at large.
Certain Industries and Subject Matter Are Considered Riskier
That brings us to the field of risk assessment. Generally speaking, the financial industry loves risk assessment. They want to know where it’s safe to put their money. And so, they look at where crimes are most likely to occur and they pointedly don’t put their money there. One, it’s risky—if the business operation goes down, there goes their money. And two, if the business operation goes down, they could be dragged into criminal proceedings themselves.
So, what’s considered high risk? As I mentioned, pretty much the entire internet. Car dealerships and travel bookings are also considered risky. People might try to launder money through dealerships. Travel bookings are very attractive to those who have committed identity theft and credit card fraud.
Another big area considered super risky? Anything sex-adjacent. If you follow the line, you can see how we get from “porn site” to something like “objectionable” or “questionable” content on platforms like Steam and Itch.io. And from there, it’s not a far hop to something like romance novels. Let’s not forget that there’s already been one lawsuit in the US that was trying to prevent private booksellers from stocking SJM’s work, and there are plenty of school libraries that have banned that book and others.
We can also look at Tumblr or OnlyFans. OnlyFans had similar trouble with payment processors threatening to pull the plug, because the platform is effectually sex workers running custom, subscription porn services. Tumblr was once the go-to site for indie sex workers, until it banned NSFW content, largely at the behest of the folks who wanted to monetize it.
It’s little wonder Itch.io’s blanket shadowban went down poorly with indie creators. A lot of us remember Tumblr pulling this exact move.
So, Why Is Sex Such a Big No-No?
Depending on where you live, the laws might be different, but the long and short of it is, generally, sex work is illegal.
There is a very large gray area with that statement. Adult film stars generally aren’t considered to be doing anything illegal, but a prostitute, generally, is. Is someone creating custom sex content on a platform like OnlyFans more like an adult film star, or are they more similar to a prostitute? And we might imagine how people think that being an adult film star means you are a prostitute, the same way strippers are lumped in together with prostitutes. And we know that people treat romance authors—especially those who write spicy works—like they must also be prostitutes, down to do anything, because they write about fictional people being horny.
How Does Queerness Fit into This Puzzle?
LGBTQIA+ people, particularly trans women, are also more likely than the general public to be involved in sex work. Knowing that, we can see how this weaves a net around sex work–queers–porn. Since sex work is, to some degree, illegal in a lot of jurisdictions, and it often involves queer people, we can see how policing sex work also means policing queer people.
People are also quite concerned about the display of sexual content in public. Porn magazines can’t be displayed to the general public, for example, because it might offended your grandma or scar some innocent child. In turn, this means porn becomes censored, while sex work is policed, and queer people end up caught in the middle.
We might as well call this the illegalization of sex. Sex and any type of sex work is relegated to a semi-legal space, at best, and most of the time it is illegal. That means it ends up operating in criminal spaces, alongside weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, and—you guessed it—money laundering and credit card fraud.
So, yeah, the financial industry isn’t too keen on anything that even has a whiff of sexual content.
Guardrails Are Needed—But It’s a Slippery Slope
There are, perhaps, some types of sexual content that do need to be censored or illegalized. Texts that glorify rape, pedophilia, or incest come to mind. Yet there’s a question there. What glorifies such a narrative?
We can look at Nabokov’s Lolita. The work is heralded as a literary triumph, yet it focuses on pedophilia. It’s told from the point of view of a pedophile. The trick here is that we’re not supposed to sympathize with Humbert Humbert, as much as he desperately wants us to side with him and blame Lolita for “tempting” him. He’s an unreliable narrator, though, and we’re going on a deep-dive into the twisted psychology of a man who does very twisted things and then tries to justify his behavior.
Is that glorifying pedophilia? If you sided with Humbert, then yes, you could read it that way. Humbert feels abused by society. He never acknowledges what he does is wrong. Even if he comes close to admitting that the act, the desire, is sick, he firmly blames Lolita, not himself.
Yet that’s not how we’re supposed to read this story. The narrative is not meant for us to sympathize with Humbert or glorify what he’s done or suggest we need to be more accepting. We’re meant to be horrified by his actions, by how twisted and monstrous his thinking is.
V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic was a big hit with the YA crowd in the 1970s and 1980s, even though it contains an explicit incest plot between brother and sister. Yet I don’t think the work glorifies incest. Rather, it posits incest as a natural consequence of the unnatural and horrific situation the siblings find themselves in.
A Blanket Solution Cannot Work
These kinds of narratives are important, not just for their literary or artistic merit, but for how they can help survivors of these situations. That’s where we have to carefully consider what kind of media we’re banning and censoring, what kind of narratives are actually being presented. Simply outlawing rape narratives is not the answer.
And simply blanket shadowbanning all adult content on a platform isn’t the answer either. Yet that is largely what the credit card processors want. They don’t want anything that might be construed as “sexy,” because the political climate is increasingly puritanical.
Oddly enough—or perhaps predictably, they don’t seem to have the same qualms about violence.
What Can We Do?
You can find out if there’s a petition to push back against the unfettered power payment processors have to “nanny” purchasers, who are, for all intents and purposes, adults. While we can certainly argue that we don’t want people to be able to purchase, say, “cheese pizza,” adults should be allowed to purchase whatever legal content exists.
Beyond that, there’s no real need to nanny adult users. Yet that seems to be what increasingly conservative governments are doing, by introducing laws that ban pornography. This is why simply saying “consenting adults should be able to buy legal content” is not enough. The laws can change at any time. Previously legal content might suddenly be classed as illegal tomorrow. There was a time when LGBTQIA+ content was deemed “obscene” on principle, whether it was “spicy” or not. It’s not difficult to see that we’re sliding in that direction now.
Petitions are one small step. Supporting NSFW artists, writers, devs, and sex workers alike all helps too. And you can always call the credit card companies and ask them why the hell they want to play morality police. Are they giving credit cards to little kids? No? Then leave the adults alone.
That, in fact, should be our default stance. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, one of Canada’s most influential prime ministers, said it best, I think. When Canada ditched sodomy laws, he famously said, “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Neither do the folks behind our credit cards, or just about anyone else for that matter. It’s time to tell them to stop sticking their schnozzes in what law-abiding citizens are doing with their own hard-earned money and hope the door hits them on the way out.
