Hey everyone,

We’re heartbroken right now. Many of us weren’t just making adult games for fun. It was our full-time job, our livelihood, how we paid rent, put food on the table, and supported our partners, kids, and families.

What’s happening now with NSFW content being erased silently, without warning, is more than just unfair. It’s left thousands of honest creators jobless overnight, with no clear path forward.

We weren’t criminals. We weren’t hurting anyone.

We told stories. We built communities. We made people feel seen, safe, and connected.

Official announcement:
https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

https://opennsfw.carrd.co/

https://x.com/OpenNSFWSP

OpenNSFW Sound Pack is a collaborative project between many sound designers/voice performers allowing you to use audio in any projects as long as you agree to terms/credit properly. 1000s of NSFW Sound effects / 20+ performers. Plaps, moans, wet sounds, etc. Audio has been used in 1000s of projects [animations/games/audio dramas].

We advertise/credit contributors in order to help our contributors and see project grow. We are always looking for talented foley artists, synth creators, voice actors, or people with express permission to use audio for project. Please follow up with me on twitter if interested [not on reddit often]

https://x.com/MadamSavvy/status/1945554735127208027

CollectiveShout is leveraging Visa, Mastercard, and similar payment processors' policies to advance their agenda. They claim responsibility for Steams new "vague" censorship policies and sweeping bans.

They aim to eliminate pornography from most platforms, including X/Twitter.

https://x.com/OpenNSFWSP/status/1945925854694900123

They are accusing all who disagree with the sweeping bans of being a "pedo"

https://x.com/OpenNSFWSP/status/1946011761984856118

Hello folks,

My name is Jean Ketterling. I am a professor and researcher at the University of Saskatchewan and the Principal Investigator of The Pornography, Platforms and Play Project (PPPProject)—a study of the social, cultural, legal and economic factors that shape the production, distribution, and consumption of pornographic video games. You can learn more about my work and approach to research on my personal website, my University of Saskatchewan profile, and the PPPProject website.

I’m posting here because, as part of this project, we are currently recruiting game makers who had an NSFW, erotic, lewd, sexual or pornographic game hosted on Steam or itch.io in July 2025 to participate in a survey that will help us understand the impacts of those platforms’ July 2025 policy changes regarding NSFW content.

To participate in the survey, you must be:

• 18 years or older,

• Be able to write in English for the purpose of a survey, and

• Have had a pornographic/sexual/lewd/erotic/NSFW game hosted on itch.io or Steam in July 2025

If you are interested in participating, please visit our study website, https://www.pppproject.com/, to learn more about the project and the research team. If you are interested in participating, please send me an email, either through the website form or using the address you can find on my University of Saskatchewan profile and I will send you a link to the survey. I’m also very happy to answer any questions about the research via email.

Please feel free to share this information with any game makers who might be interested in participating.

This research project has been approved on ethical grounds by the University of Saskatchewan Behavioural Research Ethics Board. Any questions regarding your rights as a participant may be addressed to that committee through the Research Ethics Office: [email protected]; 306-966-2975; out of town participants may call toll free 1-888-966-2975.

Hey everyone, I'm Ora, founder of Poiora. We just launched a marketplace specifically for adult games and assets with crypto payments.

Why we built this:
Payment processors constantly drop adult creators. Game platforms change rules to ban adult content or delist adult games and art without warning. We wanted a platform where no one can pull the rug because the payment rails are decentralized.

What makes it different:

• 3 revenue streams in one place: Sell games, assets (models, audio, art), and memberships (like Patreon)

• 97% to creators: 6% total fees (3% buyer, 3% seller). Example: $10 game → you get $9.70, buyer pays $10.30

• Instant payouts: USDC/USDT/EURC hits your wallet immediately on every sale

• Censorship-resistant: Built on Solana, no payment processor can deplatform you

• Compare: You keep $970 from $1K sales vs $700 on Steam, ~$850-880 on Patreon

• Security: Non-custodial - you control your funds directly. We've built strong security into our purchase flow so your games are protected and no one can circumvent payments.

We just launched and are actively building based on creator feedback. First 12 creators get homepage featuring, and we're looking for creators to spotlight in detailed profiles as we launch our go-to-market.

I know crypto can feel like a barrier, but we use stablecoins (pegged 1:1 to dollars). Your buyers don't need to understand blockchain, just connect a wallet and pay.

Think of this as additive, not replacement - another platform alongside Steam, Itch, Patreon, etc. Just with better economics, higher potential earnings, and zero deplatforming risk.

Check it out: https://www.poiora.com

Happy to answer any questions or concerns! What would make this more useful for you?

We just launched our biggest voice pack yet with VoxAfterHours.

🎙️ 30-Minute Free Voice Pack
Free to use in commercial and non-commercial projects. All we ask is that you credit VoxAfterHours in your project credits, or tag u/VoxAfterHours on X when you post your work so we can help share it.

🔗 Free Demo / Full Pack:
https://wethotsfx.itch.io/vox-after-hours-voice-pack

🔥 5+ Hour Full Voice Pack — $65
The complete pack is available now on itch.io for developers who want a much larger library to work with.

🎧 Full Pack Preview:
https://x.com/WetHotSFX/status/2090831543673450629

Hope this is useful for some of the NSFW game developers here. If you end up using anything from the pack, we'd love to see what you make with it.
This is brought to you from the person behind OpenNSFW Sound Pack.

This was added today or yesterday link here: https://itch.io/docs/creators/faq#is-adult-content-allowed

The following is a non-exhaustive list of prohibited themes present in card processing networks. We are unable to support the sale of any works containing these topics:

• Non-consensual content (real or implied)

• Underage or “barely legal” themes

• Incest or pseudo-incest content

• Bestiality or animal-related

• Rape, coercion, or force-related

• Sex trafficking implications

• Revenge porn / voyeur / hidden cam

• Fetish involving bodily waste or extreme harm (e.g., “scat,” “vomit”)

This is my advice to prospective NSFW devs, from someone who has gone from a side project to 1500 subscribers over the course of a few years. You can absolutely take it or leave it but this is the attitude toward NSFW development I have found to be the most healthy for myself.

Focus on building a community of supporters first and foremost, people who would want to support you because they know you follow through etc. Don’t expect to make a profit, just be happy when the hobby starts paying for itself. Your #1 priority is making the best game possible, not gaming the system or finding some optimal way to gain revenue. Your supporters will only be as invested in your game’s development as you are.

Make sure you have a solid playable demo before ever talking about money. In NSFW gaming you don’t want to ask for money first, you have to prove to the audience that you’re capable of making a unique gaming experience, then they will naturally want to support you. You need "friends in low places", and it often means going to adult forums (like F95zone / TFGames) and Discords. If you find interacting with people in those kinds of places distasteful... it's gonna be tough. There will be a lot of mean people and a lot of weird people that you will need to wade through but there are a lot of amazing people too.

I developed my game without a patreon / subscribestar for almost a year with a very small group of people. Only once I was happy with it did I start a Patreon - got kicked off, then started a SubscribeStar … so it goes. The platform doesn’t even MATTER - you want people who care about your project who will follow you, as any platform could crack down on your game at any time, but the players stay the same and will work with you.

Personally what I've found that works best is to offer your game for free, with early builds for subscribers. That way you get a dedicated core of play testers too, it’s a very symbiotic relationship.

The funny thing is you will gain subscribers when you release early builds, but you gain credibility when you do public releases. You should see credibility and community reputation as just as important to your project’s overall health. When I release builds to the public, my # of subscribers actually goes down temporarily, but I still see this as an important step for building trust.

Anyhow that is just my advice from my experience as a dev here. Focus on your game and the community around it, and the money will follow naturally. And you'll probably make a lot of good friends along the way too!

Hi r/nsfwdev. My team and I have been working on https://libre.games/ ever since the Steam news and now with Itch.io dropping the hammer we threw together a waitlist page and I wanted to share it with y'all. We've been working in games for nearly half a decade and have previously build systems that have processed millions of transactions.

We're building a new platform for web and desktop games. You can publish anonymously and get paid in crypto if you want. We've also been working on a new payment method where users can pay with a credit card by purchasing a token on a separate website. This scheme works for sites like Nutaku and have allowed them to even accept credit cards and even Apple Pay through a third party!

Once we launch, we plan to collect as little as a 0% fee and let you pay what you want (similar to Itch).

If this sounds interesting, please sign up for the waitlist or shoot us an email! And we'd really appreciate it if you could share us in your nsfw developer communities! Feel free to leave any questions here and I'll answer them.

And most importantly, if you are a developer with a web-based game, we'd love to work with you. Please DM or email us!

This might be old news to some, but you should probably make a backup or consider moving to another platform.

Github has cracked down on repositories that don't even contains explicit material. It's unclear whether they are banning private repositories as well, but there's absolutely nothing you can do if your git backup is deleted without prior warning.

https://www.404media.co/github-ban-suspension-adult-modding-games-illusion/

Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why.

Developers I spoke to said the community estimated around 80 to 90 repositories containing the work of 40 to 50 people went down recently, with many becoming inaccessible around late November and early December. Many of the affected accounts are part of the modding community for games made by the now-defunct Japanese video game studio Illusion, which made popular games with varying degrees of erotic content. One of the accounts Github banned contained the work of more than 30 contributors in more than 40 repositories, according to members of the modding community that I spoke to.

Github didn’t tell most suspended users what terms they broke to earn a suspension or ban, and developers told me they have no idea why their accounts went down without notice. They said they thought they were within Github’s acceptable use guidelines; even though they make mods for hentai games and things like interactive vibrator plugins, they took care to not host anything explicit directly in their repositories.

We've been developing adult games for about a year, and during that time we've faced various visibility issues. After trying different approaches, we found a solution that worked for us, and I wanted to share it in case it helps other developers facing the same problem.

Problem

When you enable payments or donations on an adult game page on itch.io, your game stops being indexed.

Solution

Instead of using a single itch.io page, we split the game into two separate pages.

Version 1.0 – Free / Public Version
Completely free
Payments disabled
Donations disabled
Used as the demo or public version

Since there are no payment options on this page, itch.io continues to index and recommend the game.

Version 1.1 – Paid / Latest Version
Separate itch.io page
Latest version of the game
Paid access
Donations enabled

We always upload the latest version of the game to the paid page, while the demo version remains on the public page.

When players visit the public page, we direct them to the latest version page through links on the page itself. This allows our game to continue receiving traffic while also giving us a way to receive payments and donations.

I hope this helps others who are experiencing the same issue.

Source: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content#addendum-faq

Addendum FAQ July 28th

It’s an understatement to say the original announcement received a lot of response. I’m adding a FAQ here to address some of the most common concerns I’ve seen.

Why was itch.io’s response greater than Steam’s?

The difference in our responses stems from the difference in our platforms. Steam is a “closed” platform where every product page is approved before it appears on the store. Because they were generally aware of the content they host, they could identify and act on specific pages.

itch.io is an open, “UGC” (User-Generated Content) platform. With over 2 million product pages, anyone can publish content at any time with minimal barriers. We could not rely on user-provided tagging to be accurate enough for a targeted approach, so a broader review was necessary to be thorough.

Additionally, itch.io is a small company, both in team size and in transaction volume, compared to a company like Steam. We have limited ability to “push back.”

If we lose our ability to accept payments from a partner like PayPal or Stripe, we impact the ability of all creators to do business. Losing PayPal, for instance, would prevent us from sending payouts to many people. Our actions were taken to protect our payment processing abilities for as much of the platform as possible.

What is the timeline for these changes?

The situation is evolving as we await final determinations from our current payment processors, Stripe and PayPal. There are still unknowns that prevent us from providing a fixed timeline.

In the meantime, we are actively reaching out to other payment processors that are more willing to work with this kind of content. We have suspended the ability to pay with Stripe for 18+ content for the foreseeable future. Our immediate focus has been on content classification reviews and implementing stricter age-gating on the site.

Can you elaborate on library access?

Pages that are “deindexed” are still accessible if you own them. They have not been removed from your library or collections.

Some pages have received a “content notice,” which applies to individual pages where our team has concluded we can no longer support their business. If you previously purchased or received a download key for one of these pages, the downloadable files are still available in your library, assuming the creator has not taken down the page or removed the files themselves.

We are aware of some people making claims that content has been removed from their library on social media. If you are one of those people we strongly urge you to reach out to support so we can understand what exactly you’re expecting to see as none of the changes we’ve made as part of this review should impact your access to paid products.

Regardless of what happens, I personally recommend you maintain control over the content you own. itch.io is a DRM-free platform from day 1 for this reason. Download and backup your games and don’t let any corporation dictate what you can own.

Can you elaborate on payouts?

Some have noted a rule in our adult content policy about not processing payouts for infringing accounts. This rule has been in place for a long time to address bad-actor situations where a user joins the site and blatantly violates our terms to make sales before being banned (There are content types we have ways had zero tolerance for, e.g., content with sexualized minors or sexualized real-life imagery). In those cases, we ban the user, refund payments, and do not honor payouts.

The current situation is a special circumstance. We have no interest in withholding anyone’s earnings. The measures we are taking now are to ensure we do not lose our relationships with our financial partners, which is necessary to continue paying creators without issue.

Can you elaborate on the new items in the adult content policy?

Our adult content policy is located here: https://itch.io/docs/creators/faq#is-adult-content-allowed

Our TOS and adult content policy have always included the rule: “If you plan to collect money for your content, then you must adhere to the acceptable use policy of all respective payment processors that your account utilizes.” This is vague. The other day, we added a specific list of prohibited themes present in card processing networks to help people understand the kinds of things we might be looking for in our review.

We understand the problems that come with a list like this, as it’s easy to argue the semantics. We decided it was better to give you more information to work with instead of less, even if many of the items on the list can be argued either way. We intend to refine this part of the site with more care, but since there are still unknowns, this is the information we can provide for now.

Discord is now resuming their push to get everyone's IDs as part of a new codename project 'Tiny Bronco' as initially reported by DiscordPreviews and further clarified by Wumpus Central.

All Discord users globally will be blocked from NSFW discords (including those for adult games) until they hand over personally identifiable information. Even if you as a player or creator are not in an AV state and thus have no legal obligations to do AV, you will still be required by Discord to submit either: a selfie, a credit card, a government ID, or your google wallet. (All methods are personally identifiable.)

Discord 18+ group activity will likely plummet

The compliance rate historically has been very low on other platforms for these identity verification gates -- 90% or more users choosing to not verify. As such, 18+ developers should expect their discord community activity to be significantly reduced after this rolls out. Users are not generally willing to submit PII, especially after Discord's previous breach of IDs.

More broadly, another ID verification company was breached just this week -- and while there's no indication Discord uses this particular company, people are quickly learning to be wary of these systems.

Alternatives -- self hosted & open source recommendation list

If you're thinking about migrating to other platforms, here are are my personal favorites. I have migrated most of my own communities to these already. (I previously lost my main Discord account due to their faulty AI moderation a couple years ago and was never able to recover it, so I have some experience trying out alternate solutions)

• Matrix for chat:

  • Server: Self host your own, or check out the public server list. Based on the previous times there were big migrations, expect the main matrix.org home server to get slammed with requests when AV goes through -- using an alternate less popular homeserver is likely a better choice and still lets you talk with everyone on the matrix network.

  • Client: I use the Nheko client for custom emoji & custom reacts, but the Element client is easier to use for new users. I hear Cinny is good if you like Discord-style UI.

  • Adult games are listing their matrix chats on this page at Horni.io -- you can add your own there, too!

  • There are also two general purpose matrix groups for 18+ devs - Horni.io for all 18+ devs, and AGDC for established commercial devs (both linked in the above matrix link).

• Discourse for real-time forum threads

• NextCloud for screen share and google docs style features

• Mumble for VOIP (I maintain the Mumble<->Discourse plugin!)

All of the above are fully free and open source!

TLDR: To get your NSFW adult game reindexed sooner on Itch.io, you need to temporarily set your project's Pricing to "No Payments." Be aware that this makes all files on the page free.

Source: https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-content

Today, we are re-indexing free adult NSFW content. We are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be re-introducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term.

Note: I’ve limited the display of replies to prevent off topic discussion. If you have issues or concerns you can contact support or if you want to have a more public discourse then I recommend creating a topic in General Discussion.

If you’d like to be eligible for today’s re-indexing, your page must have the following option checked: (The “No Payments” option under the “Pricing” section of your project’s Edit Page in your Dashboard)

Important: If your page uses “individually priced files,” changing this option will convert those files to be freely available. We currently do not support a page configuration that combines “owners only” content with a page configured to be fully free with payments disabled. Given the circumstances, we are exploring new ownership options in the dashboard that may address this. At the moment, though, Only enable this option if you intend for all files on your project to be available for free.

We are also implementing a new “content warnings” system for pages tagged as NSFW. To be eligible for indexing, all page owners will be required to complete this. This feature is not yet ready, but we will post an update when it is. If your page was previously indexed, you will have a time window to complete this requirement to avoid going in and out of indexing.

Stripe Update

For those who aren’t aware, Stripe is one of the payment processors we’ve used since our early days. They have provided the “Pay with card” option on our checkout page for over 10 years.

We spoke with Stripe yesterday about their content policies. They confirmed that they will not be able to support adult content that fits the following definition: “content designed for sexual gratification.”

Stripe asked us to pass along the following message to our users:

Stripe is currently unable to support sexually explicit content due to restrictions placed on them by their banking partners, despite card networks generally supporting adult content (with the appropriate registrations). Stripe has indicated that they hope to be able to support adult content in the future.

We are in the process of talking with other payment partners to accept card payments that Stripe is unable to process. We disabled Stripe payments last week on pages identified as having “adult NSFW content.” Now that we have a more specific definition from Stripe, we may review that initial list for potential re-introduction. However, our long-term plan is to implement one or more new processors to avoid putting the platform at risk.

Glossary

• adult NSFW content — This is the term we are using for the criteria applied in last week’s audit of adult content. It refers to pages that have both the “Contains sensitive material” option checked and a tag suggesting adult content (e.g., “porn,” “mature,” “lewd,” “erotic,” “hentai,” “fetish”).

I've been speaking with various payment processors, trying to get a merchant account set up for my game in order to accept payments directly. It's been challenging though finding the combination of a provider willing to offer good rates, fair terms, and okay with 18+ content (especially 18+ furry content).

One paypro has suggested I gather a group of developers, as that will make the pitch to the bank easier when they can see a large volume of it being worth their time to actually look at our industry and take the time to understand it.

To that end, I am gathering interested developers via this page where you can learn more and sign up if interested. Most fields are optional, but the more information we can provide to the bank, the stronger our case is (especially regarding chargeback rates, etc). My intent is to take this and use our group size to negotiate for a fair deal for merchant accounts that anyone signed up on that list can then choose to proceed with. We have a lot more negotiating power as a large group than as individual developers.