Agreed. Fear and Hunger has it's issues and I would not broadly recommend it to anyone. I would also say that the FREQUENCY of sexual assault in the game, and the presence of some weirdly sexual status effects like anal bleeding are a bit overboard. That being said, when one of the earliest enemies can sexually assault you, or maim your character in a way that leaves you able to keep playing, but effectively crippled, it really nails home not just that the world is dark, but that your assumptions about what is in the game don't apply here. Anything could happen. REALLY anything. And exploring a harsh, hostile world with that expectation set is one of the best parts of the game, because it's a unique experience that you just can't get at that quality anywhere else.

The worm that keeps getting put into payment processor's brains is that they might somehow be held criminally liable for games people purchase. It's like telling a bus driver that they might be liable because they gave a ride to someone who robbed a store.

The people who would typically be expected to push back against collective shout also typically wouldn't be expected to do anything effective whereas the people involved with collective shout are the type of people who give politicians money.

I think all the higher ups are afraid to admit they consume adult content so they will act as if it's wrong.

Or you know, try bitcoin instead? 🤷🏻‍♂️

E Pluribus Anus.

So close to the Greendale flag from Community.

Hope so.

It'll be some "evolution is the devil" creationism bullshit, because this is a Christian fascist movement.

They hate Elmo, too.

Nah, most likely Veggie Tales. Elmo is too woke and might cause dissonance with supremacists and Christian Nationalists. Oh, wait. I just repeated myself - sorry.

I feel like even those games will be banned if we don't stop them now. My thoughts are that games like 'I am Jesus' is the end goal here.

Nah, we'll still have our shooters and sports games, just not anything sexual (yucky), taboo or too outside of the ordinary.

We should, but also they aren't the root cause. If they're gone, there's nothing stopping a different group from doing the same thing (except for fear of retaliation). The ideal solution is to force payment processors to process any payment for legal content.

You overestimate the adaptability of the average software stack. I worked at companies where even adding another button to the cart screen was a monumental undertaking

Yeah, that's not what the payment processors are requesting. They aren't saying they don't want to be used to buy this content. They're saying, if your platform hosts this content at all then they won't process any payments. It doesn't matter if the option is removed if the content is still there. They're using their power of monopoly to police content.

This is what Steam will probably do in the future, and Itch.io is already looking into it. There's a reason all this garbage hasn't splashed GOG. GOG is based in Europe, where protection laws would slap silly any financial entity trying to pull this stunt on an European company (pressure groups have weaseled censorship and moral panics with other strategies though, just not this one), and they have so many more payment processors that PayPal, Visa and MC would just be dropped entirely and immediately for any of the other dozen or so alternatives. The issue is that in the US and Australia, the three headed shit dragon already lobbied governments to pull the ladder behind them, so no other payment processor could take their place or compete with them, establishing a legal oligopoly of the old money finance club. They won and have this power due to systemic and political failures decades in the making.

I don't get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.

I think the issue isn't that the payment providers don't want to support the purchase of those games with their card. They want to stop offering their services to a platform that sells those games.

And then use what?

I only use Steam myself, so I hadn't checked Itch Io's communication yet. I don't know the platform myself so it's quite possible that I'm misinterpreting this, but to me it appears that Itch Io will allow creators to delist payment options that they are not compliant with: "For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.".

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

don't you mean Joe Lieberman?

The founder is a well-known Christian "pro-life feminist" from Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist