Who controls what games you can play?

Does anyone have a memory from childhood of wanting a particular video game? Maybe one that was rated T for Teen instead of E for Everyone? Maybe your parents/guardians vetoed the idea, and as the arbiters of your existence, there wasn’t much you could do to argue that.

Now imagine you’re in the same position years later. You’re an adult. You have a job, make money, and pay for your own video games now. This new game looks great, so you head to Steam to buy it. But instead of your parents/guardians stepping in the way, this time it’s a handful of trillion-dollar corporations, banks, and organizations. A few overpaid executives have decided they don’t like this game, so they won’t process the payments for it.

This isn’t the best metaphor, but I couldn’t help but evoke that image of being a video-game-obsessed child, powerless to make the reckless gaming decisions that have since been more open to you as an adult. When every individual game meant so much more.

Your parents/guardians are individuals. They were raising you, knew you on a personal level, and (presumably) had values and ideals as a human being, even if they may not have been the most informed on the world of video games. They can be relatively well-trusted to make good decisions and draw a reasonable line in the sand on a case-by-case basis.

What’s happening to Steam and itch.io right now is far from that.

To catch you up to speed, an Australian organization, Collective Shout, self-described as “a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls,” wrote an open letter to payment processors like Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal, urging them to stop processing payments for storefronts like Steam and itch.io unless they removed certain content.

A sort of catalyst for this current controversy was the now-removed game No Mercy, which featured subjects like rape, abuse, and incest. Generally, everyone agrees that this game should have been removed. But the vaguely outlined demands of organizations like Collective Shout have forced video game storefronts to make snap decisions, or risk losing everything.

Sites like Steam rely on payment processors. If a few of them decide to stop supporting the site tomorrow, the largest PC video game storefront would completely collapse. Players would be unable to buy new games, and developers would be unable to make money from their games.

Rather than risk the finances of the entire company, not to mention the livelihoods of so many video game developers, sites like Steam and itch.io were essentially forced to quickly remove or delist hundreds of games overnight. In a statement posted to the site, itch.io explained: “Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform. To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners…” While an understandable move to make, it resulted in days of chaos, confusion, and many games being delisted without even realizing it.

This is where we are now, and while there has been a huge movement in the gaming community, it doesn’t look like it’s going to immediately get better. There is a Change.org petition to sign, an ACLU petition to sign, and I wrote a guide on how to contact Visa and Mastercard to protest this censorship.

Thanks to great sites like Game File and writer Nicole Carpenter for their excellent journalism on this topic. Their coverage is an absolute must-read.

Plus, I recommend watching this heartfelt video from one of my favorite indie game curators on YouTube:

They’re trying to take away our video games. Just like they banned our books in some parts of the country.

Video games are art. Sure, they are the newest medium, and just like in any medium, there are bad examples of it. But if you don’t watch movies because you don’t like popular action franchises like The Fast and the Furious or the Marvel movies, you’ll be missing out on amazing experiences like Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, The Godfather, Princess Mononoke, Parasite, Titanic, and so much more.

For every rehashing of the Call of Duty formula, we have games like despelote: a story told from the perspective of a soccer-loving kid in Quito, Ecuador, who explores the city, kicking around a soccer ball in 2001, the year Ecuador was the closest it had ever been to qualifying for the World Cup. It’s also tied with Death Stranding 2 as the 5th highest scoring game on Metacritic this year.

2025 also brought us to a T, the heartwarming story about a kid stuck in a T-pose. The gameplay is not violent or action-packed. It just tells the story of a kid growing up and learning how you don’t need to fit in to be happy.

I also think about games like Terra Nil, a favorite of mine from 2023, where the player helps restore barren landscapes back into healthy habitats, and, in the end, leaves without a trace for nature to take its course.

We should have access to these games and so many others. Sure, right now it’s just the NSFW titles that are the focus, but is that where it will end?

What’s to stop an oil company from deciding they don’t like the nature-friendly message of Terra Nil and pressuring Steam from selling games like that?

When we let a small group of powerful and influential people decide what kinds of games are acceptable and what aren’t, we all lose out on unique ideas, fresh concepts, and novel storytelling.

Video games aren’t just brain-rotting, addicting flashing lights for people to distract themselves from boredom. Sure, some of them are, but many others have grown far past that to offer enriching, enlightening experiences that you can’t get anywhere else. That is worth protecting.