Explain the Drama: The Itch.io Games That Vanished from Search

Imagine searching an indie game store for a game by name—and it doesn’t appear. You have the link. The page is still there. But the store has made it nearly impossible to discover. That happened on itch.io in July 2025, and even *Consume Me*, an award-winning game about eating disorders, was caught up in the disappearing act. What on earth did it have to do with an adult-games crackdown?

First, the players. Itch.io is a storefront where independent creators upload games and other projects. Buyers can find them through search, browse pages and recommendations; creators can sell them using payment services such as Stripe and PayPal. On the other side was Collective Shout, an Australian campaign group objecting to games it described as depicting sexual abuse. Between the campaigners and the developers sat the companies that handle payments. That’s the pressure point in this story.

Here’s the sequence. After campaigning against a game called *No Mercy*, Collective Shout published a July 14 letter asking payment companies to stop processing transactions for Steam and itch.io while they hosted games the group said featured rape, incest and abuse of children. That description is the campaign group’s claim about the content it found—not a description of every game affected. On the night of July 23, itch.io creators noticed adult-oriented projects disappearing from search. By the next morning, itch.io said it had deindexed *all* adult NSFW content from its browse and search pages while it audited the catalog.

Deindexed does not necessarily mean deleted. A direct link could still lead to a game’s page. But if people can’t find a project by browsing, its creator loses one of the main ways to reach new players. Ars Technica observed the Adult tag shrink from nearly 17,000 browsable games to just 48 on July 24. Some projects were removed outright, and the broad sweep drew complaints from creators whose work did not match the campaign’s stated target. That included the developer who pointed out that *Consume Me* no longer appeared in itch.io search. For an indie creator, the difference between ‘still online’ and ‘actually findable’ is enormous.

But there is another side. Collective Shout said payment companies should not profit from games it believed depicted violent sexual abuse. Itch.io said it had to act urgently to protect access to payment processing, and apologized for giving creators no advance notice. Mastercard told WIRED it had neither evaluated individual games nor required platforms to restrict them. It said it allows lawful purchases, while expecting merchants to have controls against unlawful content. Those positions do not neatly cancel each other out: the argument is partly about which content should be sold, and partly about why so much else became hard to find.

Then came a partial return. WIRED reported on August 1, 2025, that itch.io had begun reindexing some *free* adult content; its founder said paid content would return slowly as payment discussions continued. What about now? On November 3, 2026, itch.io’s live Adult-tag browse page displayed 11,607 results. So the blanket blackout visible that July is no longer in place. That number does **not** tell us that every affected project came back. Itch.io’s current creator FAQ says legal fictional adult content is generally allowed, but selling it must comply with payment-provider policies; its guidelines also say visitors must opt in to see adult content.

The page is back. The search results are back. But the larger tension hasn’t gone away: if a creator’s work is legal yet falls outside a payment provider’s rules, can they find a lasting way for people to discover it—and pay for it?