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How Payment Giants Are Changing What Gamers Can Buy Forever?
A fight is happening right now between gamers and big companies. This fight might change what games you can buy online. Let me tell you what’s going on and why it matters to you.
What Happened to the Games?
In July 2025, a group called Collective Shout from Australia got mad about some adult games. They wrote letters to big payment companies like MasterCard and Visa. These companies help you buy things online with your credit card.
Collective Shout said some games showed bad things like rape and incest. They asked the payment companies to stop helping people buy these games. The payment companies listened. They told gaming websites: “Remove these games or we won’t let people use our credit cards on your sites.”
This scared the gaming websites. Steam, where millions of people buy games, quietly removed hundreds of adult games. Another website called Itch.io removed over 20,000 games from their search. Players couldn’t find these games anymore, even if they wanted to buy them.
The Problem Got Bigger
The companies didn’t just remove the really bad games. They also removed games that weren’t that bad:
- Games about gay and lesbian relationships
- Romance stories that were pretty normal
- Some games that barely had any adult content at all
This made many game creators angry. Some of these creators make games about their own lives as LGBTQ+ people. Now their games got banned too, even though they weren’t trying to make anything harmful.
How Gamers Fought Back
Gamers got really mad about this. They did several things:
- Over 200,000 people signed a petition telling the payment companies to stop
- People flooded MasterCard and Visa phone lines with complaints
- Even Elon Musk said “bravo” to people fighting this[content]
- A website called GOG gave away 13 free adult games that got banned elsewhere[content]
Over a million people downloaded those free games on the first day[content]. The message was clear: gamers wanted to choose what they could buy.
The Companies Said Different Things
MasterCard said they didn’t make anyone remove games. They claimed they just follow the law and don’t ban legal games. But Steam’s company, Valve, told a different story. Valve said payment companies did pressure them and mentioned a specific MasterCard rule about protecting their brand name.
This created confusion. Who was telling the truth? The payment companies or the gaming websites?
Why This Matters to You
This isn’t just about adult games. It’s about who gets to decide what you can buy online. If payment companies can stop one type of game, they might stop other things too. Some people worry this could affect:
- Books about certain topics
- Movies with adult themes
- Art that some groups don’t like
- Music with strong language
What Could Fix This Problem
Senator Kevin Cramer wrote a bill called the Fair Access to Banking Act. This law would stop banks and payment companies from refusing to work with legal businesses just because they don’t like what those businesses sell. The bill has 42 supporters in Congress.
If this law passes, it could protect gaming websites and other legal businesses from this kind of pressure.
Where Things Stand Now
The fight isn’t over. Collective Shout still says payment companies should be able to choose what they support[content]. Gamers say adults should decide for themselves what to buy.
Some good news: Itch.io started putting some free adult games back online. Steam is giving money credits to game creators who lost their games, so they can make new ones that follow the new rules[content].
What This Means for the Future
This situation shows how much power payment companies have over what we can buy online. They control the money flow, so they can control what gets sold. This might lead to more fights about:
- Who decides what’s acceptable to sell
- Whether private companies should make these choices
- How to protect legal businesses from pressure groups
The gaming community proved they can organize and fight back when they think their rights are being taken away. Whether this will change anything long-term remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: this debate about online censorship and corporate power isn’t going away anytime soon.
Right now, both sides are standing firm. The outcome of this fight could affect not just games, but how we buy many things online in the future. For gamers and anyone who cares about choice in what they can purchase, this story is worth watching closely.