A strange situation has emerged in light of the current situation surrounding payment processors, activist groups, and itchio.
Previously, On Itchio
According to Leaf Corcoran, the owner of itchio, an activist group named Collective Shout went after them for publishing a now removed adult visual novel called No Mercy. The developers described it as a “3D choice-driven adult Visual Novel with a huge focus on Incest and Male Domination.”.
Collective Shout pressured payment processors like VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe. In turn, those payment processors pressured itchio and Steam to change their policies regarding games with adult and controversial content. As we reported it, the changes were tantamount to censoring video games. These changes were made with no regard for things like the creator’s intent, or speech rules of certain countries and regions.
What’s Happened Now?
PC Gamer reported a game developer named Martin Halldin claimed his game, called Mouthwashing, was deindexed because of itchio’s changes. However, Halldin’s story doesn’t completely add up.
Corcoran commented on Mouthwashing’s itchio page to explain why it was deindexed:
This game hasn’t been indexed since October 2024 since it doesn’t meet our indexing criteria: https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-indexed#why-isnt-my-project-showing-up
The developers are using a “Download” button as a link to Steam. The developer took down any playable files from this page in 2024.
We can confirm that when we clicked on Mouthwashing’s Download button on itchio, it opened a link to the game’s Steam page. Based on everything we’ve presented here, Halldin seems to have misrepresented what happened so that gamers would get mad at itchio and support him and his game.
Hold Up! It Gets Even Stranger
But then, Corcoran revealed another strange detail about itchio’s rules. He also said this on Mouthwashing’s itchio page:
They aren’t against the rules, we just don’t index placeholder pages or pages that are just links to somewhere else. We want people browsing the itch.io main site to be viewing games they can access on itch.io.
That doesn’t mean you can’t, for example, use itch.io pages as a portfolio with your work that is hosted elsewhere. It just won’t be promoted by our discovery tools.
Just because a game is “deindexed” doesn’t mean it’s breaking the rules. It just means that we aren’t promoting it from the main site.
So Is Everything Cleared Up Now?
After PC Gamer’s report and Corcoran’s statements, Halldin posted this statement on his bluesky:
I’ve been made aware that Mouthwashing hasn’t been findable through itch’s search since October 2024 as we did not meet their listing criteria.
After seeing comments left just a few weeks ago I incorrectly made the assumption that the game has been delisted as part of the recent de-listings of NSFW games from the platform.
I apologize to itch.io and to people who feel like they’ve been lied to. I made an incorrect assumption.
Assuming everyone here has been talking in good faith, Halldin didn’t know what really happened when Mouthwashing was deindexed and assumed the worst without proper clarification from itchio. He seems remorseful now, but he did unwittingly create a situation that makes him look like the bad guy.
What Even Is Mouthwashing?
With all the strange twists and turns of this story, we almost forgot to talk about the game itself. Publisher Critical Reflex and studio Wrong Organ provides this description on their Steam page:
Mouthwashing is a first-person horror game following the dying crew of a shipwrecked space freighter.
Extreme violence, gore, mutilation and worse on PSX-style characters.
They play up the NSFW content of the game in their marketing. While this clearly makes them vulnerable to censorship by being blocked from sale, it’s important to know that you can still buy it on Steam, and itchio is allowing people to get to Steam from their website.
Mouthwashing earned some critical buzz when it first launched. So it might be the perfect game to make the case to roll back these excessive new rules. These rules can effectively censor game developers and creators from making games in their own terms.
But for now, we also have to be mindful that misunderstandings like this can undermine any efforts to get payment processors to stand down on this issue. If you’d like to help in pressuring these payment processors back, you can learn more here.
