Collective Shout later confirmed that it had influenced actions taken by Valve and itch.io after writing an open letter to Visa and Mastercard, but that it did not necessarily ask itch.io to de-index all NSFW games.

As industry groups decry censorship, players are flooding Visa and Mastercard with complaints and sharing the titles of delisted NSFW games to support developers.

Itch’s disproportionate response was a necessity – as a small platform with very few staff, it didn’t have the resources to screen every game on the website, and therefore chose to pull all potentially rule-breaking content from search engines and browsing in order to retain payment processing services.