Over the past few weeks, thousands of video games have been banned, removed and delisted from Steam and Itch.io. The justifications for doing so have been almost comically vague, and at least one highly anticipated title is now unable to be sold despite containing nothing objectionable.
It started in early July, when payment processors including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal established new regulations concerning the types of games they would allow to be sold on the PC gaming platforms they support. The exact details of these regulations have not been made public. What we do know is that, in response on July 16, Steam added a sweepingly vague clause to its ruleset banning “certain kinds of adult only content.” Hundreds of games were removed from the platform. On July 24, Itch.io rolled out its own rule change and summarily deindexed every adult and NSFW game it hosted, which amounted to more than 20,000 titles being hidden from search and browse pages. Itch.io is currently auditing this bunch and preparing to introduce new compliance measures for NSFW games.
Among the games swept up in this tidal wave of censorship is VILE: Exhumed, the latest project from solo developer Cara Cadaver of Final Girl Games and publisher DreadXP.
VILE: Exhumed takes place in the files and preserved BBS chatrooms of an old PC, as players hunt for clues in the disappearance of adult film actress Candy Corpse. It’s an unsettling psychological experience that’s mainly text-based, and it offers pixelated commentary on misogyny, sexual entitlement and parasocial relationships. VILE: Exhumed has been praised in multiple previews, even earning a place in Six One Indie’s Best of PAX East lineup this May. It was slated to hit Steam on July 22.
As DreadXP director Hunter Bond and his team continued preparing the game for launch, they noticed it was taking an abnormally long time for Steam to approve its page. They submitted tickets to Steam asking for a status update, but heard nothing concrete back. The day before VILE: Exhumed was supposed to come out, Cara and DreadXP were forced to announce a delay. And On July 28, Cara announced VILE: Exhumed had been removed from Steam and banned from the platform.
Steam told Cara that the action was triggered by scenes of “sexual content with depictions of real people,” a description that she said doesn’t apply to her game, since it deals in text and implication. The ban is not eligible for appeal and VILE: Exhumed can not be resubmitted to Steam. This effectively removes it from the mainstream PC gaming conversation entirely, since Steam essentially enjoys a monopoly in the market and there isn’t a competing storefront with the same audience reach in town. Losing Steam access is a huge blow for small developers especially.
VILE: Exhumed is a deeply personal project for Cara, one that she worked on for years. “I poured myself into this game — it was an incredibly personal story, made up of bits and pieces of my real-life experiences, my real feelings, and was reflective of that for many other people as well,” Cara told Engadget. “Silencing a story about violence, entitlement and sexual expression (though the sexual content was all implied) shows the age we are living in, and I deeply worry for storytelling and art.”
To put it clearly: Steam removed a solo female developer’s game about misogynistic violence and banned her from attempting to list it ever again, and the platform’s reason for doing so doesn’t make sense to anyone who knows what’s actually in the game. You can decide that for yourself, too: At least one full playthrough of VILE: Exhumed lives happily on YouTube, a site not known for tolerant views on nudity or adult themes. More confusingly, the original version of Cara’s game, VILE, remains available and searchable on Itch.io’s storefront, even though it includes much of the same content as Exhumed.
This highlights a core issue with Steam and Itchi.io’s sudden and haphazard censorship plans. Vague rules against “adult-only content” leave too much room for interpretation and invite overreach — especially in a society that’s increasingly hostile to marginalized communities — while simultaneously doing very little to protect the audience from whatever demons the payment processors think they have identified. The rollout of the new regulations has been chaotic and already multiple games, including the horror hit Mouthwashing, have been inaccurately identified as casualties of the situation.
Engadget has reached out to Visa, Mastercard and PayPal for information on what their new policies are and why they’re being enacted. Only PayPal has responded with a generic statement that it does not comment on individual accounts. Valve has also not returned requests for comment. Itch.io did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
This isn’t the first time Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and other major payment processors have targeted online communities for censorship. The current PC gaming bans mirror previous efforts to restrict content on PornHub, OnlyFans and Patreon, to name a few targets. This sort of financial censorship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says, “can heavily influence what kind of speech can exist online.”
The International Game Developers Association has lodged its fierce opposition to the censorship campaign, and provides avenues for players to contact Visa and Mastercard directly with their concerns.
“We are alarmed by the vague enforcement of policies delisting and deplatforming legal, consensual, and ethically-developed games, especially from LGBTQ+ and marginalized creators,” the IGDA said. “Developers deserve clear rules, fair warnings, and the right to appeal.”
In the case of VILE: Exhumed, Steam is silencing a game that can help combat gender-based sexual violence, in the name of protecting players from being harmed by these same themes. VILE: Exhumed is uncomfortable, confronting, personal and raw — and that’s the beauty of small, independent games. By all accounts, it doesn’t belong in the Steam ban, and it’s also likely not the only game unfairly swept up in the broad censorship campaigns hitting PC platforms, pushed by payment processors.
“Indie development for me has been such a beautiful opportunity to create things and tell stories that mean something to me — and I hate that that freedom of expression is being taken from myself and others,” Cara said. She and DreadXP are cooking up a new distribution plan that doesn’t include Steam.
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