No Mercy for censored games, 28/08/2025
How thousands of games with adult themes got caught in a censorship trap
How outrage over No Mercy turned into a campaign to censor video games
PlayStation consoles increase in price as Trump tariffs bite
Metal Gear Solid Delta shows the highs and lows of re…makesters
Hello VGIM-lings,
It’s George Young here, back again with a topic that has been slathered all over my social media across the Summer.
Thousands of games were banned or deindexed from gaming platforms Steam and Itch.io in July, after payment processors like Mastercard and Visa applied pressure on both stores to remove games deemed inappropriate by a conservative campaign group.
The move sparked carnage across the world, with thousands of games removed from sale or hidden from view while the platforms sought to appease the payment providers.
But how did one taboo-laden game called No Mercy, described as “vile” by UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper following its release in March," spark a wave of censorship that crashed into the industry over the summer?
And what impact has that had on creators making games with adult themes that are well within legal norms, both financially and creatively?
Let’s recap what happened with this banning business, with a little help from someone unfairly affected by a global censorship campaign.
The big read: No Mercy for censored games
Respecting the timeline: If you’re not sure where to start, it’s always a good idea to take a look at a timeline. And in this story, we need to jump back to Spring this year and the release of one distasteful video game: No Mercy.
March madness: On March 22nd, the pornographic visual novel launched on Steam. It is undoubtedly controversial. It lets you have sex with a virtual MILF, which, for fans of Oedipus out there, happens to be your Mum. The main character isn’t physically violent, but he definitely doesn’t obtain proper consent in this incest fantasy. The developer’s use of lines like “never take 'no' for an answer” underlines the point in an eye-rolling manner. It also features plenty of distasteful imagery, although it is more of a virtual picture book than an out-and-out “simulator” as reported in the media.
Shouting out loud: No Mercy was a distasteful release, which plumbed its way into the deepest darkest depths of the Steam store. But just a few weeks later, it burst into the public scene after Collective Shout, a conservative campaigning group with a track record of anti-pornography and anti-abortion positions, called for it to be banned.
Domino effect: In a blog post on the 7th April 2025, Collective Shout stated that “No Mercy puts women and girls at risk” because “it is an endorsement of rape.” The game was pulled from sale in Australia the next day following an investigation from the local classification board. By 9th April, the story had gone international after being picked up by British broadcaster LBC. Peter Kyle, the UK’s Tech Secretary, commented that the game was “deeply worrying”, adding fuel to the fire for the game to be banned. And following public pressure to remove the game, Steam pulled it from stores in the UK and Canada. The game’s developer then announced it had pulled it from stores completely in response to the controversy.
Following the rules: No Mercy was undoubtedly controversial, and its demise was speedy. But a couple of big things were missed in April. It was only available on Steam because it, and pornographic games more broadly, were following the platform’s rules at the time. The store allowed pornographic and adult games on the platform, provided they were appropriately labelled, age-gated, didn’t feature real people, and were not either “illegal” or “trolling” in line with its wider content policy. No Mercy technically followed those rules, which meant that it was only pulled after Steam decided to use its wider discretionary powers to yank games it doesn’t like from the store.
Whisper network: And while the game’s content was definitely problematic, No Mercy swelled from a distasteful game into an ever-scarier boogieman with every retelling of the story - irrespective of the facts. Newsweek, for example, reported that the game allowed players to torture and murder a woman and her baby the day after it was pulled from sale. Despite its hyperbolic reporting, none of this happened or was possible in the game - something that hasn’t been corrected since.
Creeping shadow: Even after it had been pulled from the store, No Mercy’s shadow grew. As it did, that shadow cast itself over thousands of games which featured adult themes within reasonable free expression, such as those exploring sexual relationships or the lived experiences of sex workers. And as more games fell under its shadow, campaigners were able to use No Mercy’s grisly reputation to campaign against lots more adult games - leading to thousands of titles tumbling into a censorship net.
Censorship strikes
Hitting their digital wallets: Three months after No Mercy had been taken down from Steam, Collective Shout returned with a new angle of attack. Rather than going after digital storefronts to remove content on a case-by-case basis, it instead wrote to payment providers on July 11th. The group asked them to cease support for Steam and indie store itch.io completely due to the alleged presence of “hundreds” of games which all contain “rape, incest, and child sexual abuse” content.
Gathering Steam: However, Collective Shout didn’t say which games featured that content because they were “too distressing to make public.” This hesitancy contrasted with its willingness to promote lurid details about No Mercy on its website in April 2025. This should have given payment providers reason to tread carefully in reaction to the campaign. But within days of the letter, both Steam and itch took sweeping action against adult games on their platforms to try to pacify concerned payment providers who acted on Collective Shout’s behalf.
Coming to the boil: On July 18th, Steam removed around 80 games with adult themes in response to the campaign - a number smaller than the amount claimed by Collective Shout. But in response to the crisis, Steam updated its developer onboarding guidelines to ban games that “violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors… in particular, certain kinds of adult-only content.” Developer Naomi Clark has since described the new rules as “vague”, leaving developers of games featuring adult themes “hamstrung” in the process.
Itchy feeling: Things were worse for developers on itch. Eight days after the letter, itch.io deindexed 1500 games in its store search function because it couldn’t identify which games featured adult content that fell foul of Collective Shout’s complaint and those that didn’t. By July 31st, itch started to reindex games after manually reviewing hundreds of titles to check whether they featured illegal content. However, games that were reindexed were not allowed to use a payment or donation link on their page. This meant developers of games with adult themes that did not break any laws were still banned from receiving payment for their work.
Not very due diligence: Given the sweeping nature of the measures, you’d have expected that the payment processors would have carefully identified which content they wanted removed and for what reason. That, however, wasn’t the case.
Warm calling: On 24th July, players and creators launched a mass contact campaign called #SaveSpeech to politely ask Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Stripe why the companies were threatening to pull their support from both storefronts. Campaigners in the United States also contacted their political representatives, reminding them that video game content is protected as a form of free speech under the First Amendment.
Summer of no loving: In response to the campaign, Mastercard claimed in a statement on August 1st that it had “not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms.” It had, however, allegedly allowed others to do it on its behalf. Valve, the company which operates Steam, released its own statement in response to Mastercard’s, claiming that “payment processors and their acquiring banks” working on behalf of the company had contacted Valve to ask for content to be removed due to its “risk to the Mastercard brand.”
Can't pay your pals: As a result of payment providers’ risk aversion and lack of research into the content they were removing, thousands of games with reasonable adult themes were demonetised. And even though the problem started over a month ago, the impact is still being felt today. One anonymous poster claimed on Reddit this week that PayPal has frozen an account with £80,000 worth of earnings from a “perfectly legal” adult game caught in the campaigning trap - demonstrating the damaging effects of the campaign in the process.
Culture clash
Fair enough: Of course, payment providers do have legal responsibilities that they have to take seriously to stay in business. Edwin Evans-Thirlwell wrote a piece for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which explained how payment providers play a big role in helping governments enforce law in an offhand way. That’s why Mastercard and Visa have policies barring the use of their services to pay for content around child sexual exploitation or incest content.
Ambiguity: But while some of the terms and conditions are fair and specific, many are written in a deliberately ambiguous way to let providers interpret them however they see fit. And when those rules are interpreted across different forms of culture, it turns out games are treated more harshly than other forms of creative expression.
(Im)mature policy: For example, PayPal’s terms, which were used to freeze the account mentioned above, forbid the purchase of “mature adult content” through its platform. I contacted PayPal for clarification on this point, to which they responded that “all adult content and pornographic material are not allowed through PayPal”.
Not your PayPal: But PayPal can be used on a range of publicly available sites to pay to read about the child orgy in Stephen King’s IT, the incest in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, or watch a rape scene in the 1972 erotic drama Last Tango in Paris. When left to police the obscenity threshold of “knowing it when they see it”, payment providers aren’t applying it equally; they’re lowering the bar for games.
Censoring the conversation: This catches thousands of games in a censorship net in a way that deeply affects creative freedom. I talked with Taylor McCue, the artist behind the award-winning He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me - a game about sex work and trauma - which has been affected by the campaign. She believes it amounts to little more than an attempt to push widespread censorship of sexual content via the back door, with games used as an easy target by campaigners who don’t see the medium’s artistic value.
On McCue: “You can't talk about sex trauma or abuse [in games, if the censorship continues],” she said. “That turns us into a cheaper medium where it's okay to see somebody get their head cut off, but not to see people talking about feelings.” Chillingly, she added that she thought the campaign “could set us back for an entire generation” by discouraging developers from telling similar stories for fear of getting trapped in the net.
Governmentally guided: Given the wider political context, she could well be right. The banning, removal and deindexing of games for adult content is part of a wider puritanical movement, where suppressing access to sexual content is leading to much wider infringement of freedoms online.
Acting Up: In the UK, big parts of the Online Safety Act came into force just as the itch/Steam debacle raged. It imposed intrusive age-verification on people using a large number of user-to-user chat services, where kids might reasonably access pornographic content. After rolling out the measures, the act was criticised because the tools used to manage facial recognition felt draconian and, in some cases, platforms did appear to be suppressing reasonable free speech in an attempt to stay on the right side of the law. But in response to concerns, Tech Secretary Peter Kyle suggested that critics of the act were potentially empowering a new generation of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile - increasing fears that overbearing ‘safety’ rules could quickly become authoritarian.
Project 2025: And in the US, campaigners have much more explicitly linked crackdowns on sexual content with reducing our freedoms. In an undercover sting by investigative news outlet The Intercept, Russell Vought, co-author of the Project 2025 strategy, which aims to consolidate right-wing political power in the US following Trump’s election, would push for a “national ban on pornography” by targeting payment processors with the aim of “shutting down tech and telecoms companies” that allow it. According to Vought, the porn ban would also be an “immediate fight leverage point” to enact Project 2025’s wider agenda effectively - something the ACLU warns could “erode civil rights and civil liberties” across the country.
The cost of censorship
Gamers react: As a result of one offensive game, the industry has once again been forced to defend its right to create cultural content for creative and commercial reasons.
Statement of intent: Trade associations across the world have issued statements of varying strength, which have sought to defend the rights of creators to create. Felix Falk, managing director of Game, the German Games Industry Association of which Valve is a member, released a statement saying that “the artistic freedom of game developers is fundamental to games as a cultural medium.” The IGDA, meanwhile, released its own scathing statement that said it was “alarmed by the vague enforcement of policies delisting and deplatforming legal, consensual, and ethically developed games”.
Falling on the smallest shoulders: But in the short term, the cost of censorship campaigning isn’t being borne by the industry at large; it’s being shouldered by small creators and businesses whose content is legal but is trapped in the net. And while the disheartened developer on Reddit is one such example, others like McCue are feeling the pinch too.
Hosting the cost: “I paid for hosting,” Taylor tells me, when she realised her games were about to head offline. “I started putting my games up on archive.org and learning how to use the Game Boy emulator. I had to manually go through every key and then transfer them to a new game.” Protecting these works takes time, effort and ultimately money that not everyone can spare.
Degenerate Art: And while the Streisand Effect has helped creators like Taylor by exposing their work to a wider audience, any money that does end up coming towards creators gets stuck with the payment providers, who are causing the problems. “I deactivated all donations on my page and added text,” Taylor says. “I feel bad about people donating because I think, ‘Is this money actually going to make it to me? Or is it going to get thrown into the void?”
Staying silent: We already know how unseriously video games are taken compared to every other form of media. The censorship of all games featuring adult topics as if they were as tasteless as No Mercy cheapens the image of the industry and pushes thoughtful creators out of the space. “I saw a person who was making a game on [their sexual abuse],” McCue recalls. “And then they said, ‘I give up’. I've seen people who were going to make a game that's about sex trauma, and now they're going, ‘No, I can't make a game. Maybe I'll do some other thing or just stay silent forever.”
Lit match: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And as Taylor put it to me, we’re at risk of hearing a familiar story about art being sacrificed on the altar of puritanism. “This is a renaissance of queer art. [After] the Harlem Renaissance, some of those 10 million artists survived, but a lot disappeared. [Now] there are so many things being produced. Even if it ranges from really good to utter crap, I'm terrified of that vanishing. If it all died, it would be like tossing a lit match into a library that's covered in gasoline.”
News in brief
PlayStation Price Plus: PlayStation has increased the prices of its PS5 consoles by $50 in the US due to a “challenging economic environment”. This is undoubtedly in response to Trump’s tariffs, which were embedded in every estimate of the company’s latest financial report, and comes just weeks after Nintendo increased Switch 1 prices in the region.
Boot camp: Metal Gear Solid Delta is the biggest game of the week, but with just how closely it sticks to the original, it has critics wondering what’s the point? Well, it turns out that MGS Delta might be more for Konami than it is for players. Talking to Christopher Cruz at Rolling Stone, Delta producers Noriaki Okamura and Yuji Korekado said that they are hoping to use the remake to train new blood in the art of Metal Gear. Nobody liked Konami’s only attempt to develop a game in the series without everyone’s favourite auteur, so maybe this is a smart move.
BioShocking: Things go from bad to worse for the 4th entry in the Bioshock series. The game was originally pegged for release around late 2026, but has now been delayed indefinitely after parent company Take-Two laid off 30% of the staff at developer Cloud Chamber and put Rod Ferguson in charge of getting the project over the line. Bloomberg reports that the move was made to “focus” the team, because nothing creates a desire to work hard like the fear of unemployment.
2023 DLC: Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot joined the New Global Sport Conference in Saudi Arabia last week to announce a free DLC for Assassin’s Creed Mirage based on the country’s World Heritage site of Al-Ula. This happened less than a year after French news outlet Les Echos reported that the Public Investment Fund-backed Savvy Games Group was allegedly considering stumping up cash for some Mirage DLC to help Ubisoft out of a financial hole, a report which the company denied at the time.
Silkpost: Silksong is not only real, but it is in its lane, moisturised, thriving, and out in one week’s time. And in an interview with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Team Cherry revealed that the game’s delayed release wasn’t the result of tumultuous internal struggle. Instead, the small team had simply made enough money from Hollow Knight to develop it at their own pace - spending seven years happily weaving together Silksong.
Moving on
Justin Truman steps in as Studio Head at Bungie… Dwayne Jenkins joins Sandbox Strategies as PR Manager… Drussila Hollanda becomes Head of New Games at Supercell… And Gail Hamrick has been appointed as Vice President of Human Resources at IGN Entertainment…
Jobs ahoy
Blizzard is hiring for a number of positions, including Narrative Designer for an unannounced project… Twitch is looking for its next International Comms Lead… PlayStation Studios Malaysia is hunting down a Senior User Researcher… Larian Studios needs a Senior Technical Features Producer… Playground Games is looking for a Lighting Artist to work on Fable…
Events and conferences
PAX West, Seattle - 29th August-1st September
Games Industry Law Summit, Vilnius - 2nd-4th September
XDS, Vancouver - 2nd-5th September
NZGDC, Wellington - 25th-27th September
Tokyo Games Show, Tokyo - 25th-28th September
Game of the week - Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is one of the best games of all time. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a 2025 release of one of the best games of all time with nicer graphics.
If you’re a mega fan of the third entry in Kojima’s rib-nudging-big-wink-to-camera series (and you should be if you’ve played it), then here it is… again.
Remakes, remasters, reboots (or whatever re-based noun you add) struggle to tread that delicate line between pleasing old fans by giving them what they remember, while updating the rougher parts for a more modern audience.
Metal Gear Solid Delta allows you to choose between the original cinematic fixed camera style and a modern third-person camera. But everything else is just how you remember it: bugs and all.
When a game is as good as MGS3, you probably don’t want to make too many changes. But then you need to ask why remake it in the first place?
You can buy the MGS Master Collection with five games from the series and some graphic novels for a fifth of the price of Delta.
And honestly, unless you are a graphics Gary, you probably won’t notice the difference. The game isn’t even out, and the Ȕberfans that the one-to-one remake is aimed at are already bemoaning the lack of hazy lighting and piss filter.
So, the discussion has changed from whether MGS Delta is good to whether it should exist. And only you, dear reader, may decide that.
Before you go…
Atari recently announced Bubsy 4D, the game absolutely no one asked for, but people who played it at gamescom are saying it's actually fun?!?
The company might just be the shining light in the darkness. Atari recently bought some classic Ubisoft IPs. This includes Child of Eden, the excellent spiritual successor to Rez aa nd delightful romp.
Don't call it a comeback? We’ll do what we like, thank you very much.
 | A guest post by
|