#327: The idiots are winning

Hit Points tries not to dwell too often on the misery of the world beyond videogames. For one thing, we already have plenty to be cross and sad and worried about when conducting our weekly survey of the latest goings-on around the game industry. For another, we all know how bad things are out there, right? You don’t need me to remind you of it all the time. I like to think of Hit Points as, if not a safe space per se, then at least somewhere you don’t have to worry about clumsy shoehorning-in of jokes about, like, JD Vance’s face. I used to do stuff like that quite often, until a reader got in touch to say, erm, could you not? We get quite enough of that literally everywhere else. Hit Points is a willing recipient of feedback — most of the time, anyway — and so I resolved to do my best.

Sometimes, alas, life finds a way of kicking you in the dick. So with apologies to Charles Littlewood, who sent me that feedback email all those years ago, I’m afraid today is One Of Those Days. This week the digital indie-game store itch.io abruptly hid “all adult NSFW content” from browse and search results after suddenly coming under scrutiny from companies that process payments on the platform. A few days earlier Steam took a couple of dozen games off sale, and updated its developer terms to forbid “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors” after coming under similar pressure.

The credit, if we can call it that, for all this is Collective Shout, a pressure group I presume is entirely comprised of the sorts of people who spend their days railing against woke snowflakes on Facebook, then calling for Sesame Street to be banned because it's going to make their kid trans, and seeing no contradictions in those two positions whatsoever. The focus of its ire was an absolutely horrific r*pe-themed game called No Mercy that was briefly available on Steam and Itch a few months ago. In an open letter, published in April and addressed to Visa, Mastercard, Stripe et al, Collective Action claimed to have identified “hundreds of other games featuring r*pe, incest and child sexual abuse on both Steam and Itch”, and called on payment processors to “immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games.”

Now, look. I think it goes without saying that games with violent or incestuous sexual content should not be commercially available on mainstream storefronts. If this stuff belongs anywhere, which is debatable, it is in the deepest recesses of the dark web, not on the two best PC game stores on the mainstream internet. And one potential, if rather unsympathetic, interpretation of this week’s events is that both these platforms had this coming, given their longstanding refusal to properly moderate or control what goes on their stores. Like, a big eShop sale started in the UK this week; I checked it out on Nintendo’s website, and on the first page of results, nestled in there with all your Marios and Zeldas and whatnot, was a discounted collection of hentai games. These Collective Shout folks are clearly all really annoying IRL, and have set out to make our hobby/profession far less inclusive and even less interesting. But you have to admit that, beneath it all, they sort of have a bit of a point.

This is bigger than that, of course, its consequences far further-reaching than mere content moderation. Personally I find myself more preoccupied with the fact that banks and credit-card companies are suddenly the moral arbiters of the web, which is very, very troubling — not to say deeply ironic, given that western financial institutions have surely ruined far more lives than No Mercy, or any other number of thematically similar games, ever could. The payment companies moved against Itch with such speed, urgency, and lack of specificity that the store owners felt they had no choice but to immediately delist any and every game that might possibly be deemed as being vaguely out of bounds. Robert Yang’s frequently brilliant, and entirely harmless, experimental gay games got the chop. Consume Me, a brilliantly designed autobiographical RPG about a teen with an eating disorder that absolutely cleaned up at the IGF awards a few months back, was taken out too. 

Those are just two examples of the presumably thousands of entirely innocent games that have found themselves caught in the crossfire — and of course this is precisely the point. The intent of campaigns like this is not to target harmful things that exist, but to target things that explore themes that campaigners find distasteful, and to give pause to anyone that might make explore such themes in the future. Itch says it is conducting an audit of all the delisted games, presumably with the intention of putting those that don’t fall foul of the payment companies' newfound puritanism back on the store. But along the way it will encounter dozens, perhaps hundreds, of marginal cases: games they don’t believe will upset their new overlords at Visa and PayPal, but which conceivably might. Given the disastrous consequences, both for Itch and the army of creators that use it, of losing the ability to sell things for money, maybe they’ll choose to leave those games in the shadows for safety’s sake.

It rumbles on. Maybe the queer kid with a cool game idea doesn’t bother building it out because they figure there’ll be nowhere to sell it. Maybe game publishers stop signing LGBTQ+ stuff because they see which way the wind is blowing. Maybe media stops covering games with even vaguely sexual themes because they can’t afford to be caught up in the crossfire (this has already happened: this week two staff quit the shuffling reanimated corpse of Vice’s Waypoint after management ordered the deletion of two articles about Collective Shout, supposedly because they were worried about the site being disfavoured by Google). As UK indie titan Marie Foulster has pointed out, none of the industry’s trade bodies have spoken out in defence of developers this week, presumably because they, too, are fearful of the consequences. No doubt the pressure groups, emboldened by Collective Shout’s success, will decide to cast a wider net the next time they sit down to write an open letter. And the time after that, and the time after that, until we’re left with — well, who knows. Not much. 

Do I need to write this final paragraph? You know where it’s going. Pride flags in kids’ books, corporate DEI rollbacks, Colbert getting cancelled, presidents suing newspapers. Website explainers about what to do if ICE raids Comic-Con. This is all part of a pattern, and its ultimate purpose is to intimidate. Hell, I’m even a bit twitchy about writing this edition, because Hit Points uses Stripe for payments and while I’m sure they have no problem with me today, I can’t say with much certainty that will remain the case forevermore. This is properly dark stuff, and it is only going to get darker.

MORE!

Christ, that was a tough write. Let’s try and have some fun below the line.

• Microsoft has reversed course on plans to raise the price of firstparty games later this year. The news was revealed in an unspeakably cringeworthy post on the not-Twitter account of The Outer Worlds 2, which was due to be the first $80 Xbox game. “As an organisation devoted to making sure that corporations do not go unfettered,” it reads, “we at the Earth Directorate have worked with [REDACTED] to revise the price of The Outer Worlds 2.” Fucking hell. Anyway it’ll now be $70 at launch and Microsoft has, against all odds, found yet another way to look like a complete and utter clown-car. Carry on. 
• Sticking in Redmond for a moment, this week Microsoft halted the sale and rental of movies and TV shows on Xbox and Windows, offering neither warning nor justification for the move. The TV-TV-TV era ushered in by Xbox One lasted a little under 12 years and ended, as was always fated, in abject failure. At least we’ll always have Quantum Break. 
• In better news for the game industry’s worst running joke, Forza Horizon 5 is the best-selling new game of the year on PS5, with more than three million copies sold according to the number-crunchers at Alinea. World’s gone mad, eh. 
• Perhaps that’s why Satya Nadella is in such fine fettle. In a letter to staff the Microsoft CEO said that “by every objective measure, Satya Nadella is thriving; our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right.” Acknowledging the 9,000-odd people his company laid off a few weeks ago, Nadella called it “the enigma of success” (?) and claimed that the cuts gave Microsoft the chance to “shape, lead through, and have a greater impact than ever before.” Give me strength. Honestly starting to think the guillotine’s too good for this wretched prick.
• Speaking of running jokes, 1047 Games — of ‘make FPS great again’ hat-fame — is sending Splitgate 2 back to beta less than two months after launch. “We had ambitious goals,” the studio admitted, “and in our excitement to share it with you, we bit off more than we could chew.” There’s been a round of layoffs to mark the occasion, while the studio is also ending support for Splitgate 1, telling our new chums at This Week In Videogames that upkeep was costing in the region of $50k a month. You might think that sounds like chump change for a company founded by the son of a frighteningly rich venture capitalist! I couldn’t possibly say!
• Switch 2 is now the fastest-selling console in US history, it says here. The console’s 1.6m first-month sales comfortably beat the previous record holder, PS4, which racked up a comparatively paltry 1.1m sales in 2013. Good!
• In a mixed week for UK game studios, Until Dawn maker Supermassive has laid off 36 staff and delayed its next project, Directive 8020, to next year. Still Wakes The Deep developer The Chinese Room, meanwhile, is an indie studio again after splitting up with parent company Sumo, but required a round of layoffs to get itself into sustainable shape. 
• Sony has acquired a 2.5% stake in Namco Bandai in a strategic partnership that seemingly has more to do with manga and anime than anything game-related, but here it is anyway. 
• Before I forget! I am somehow on Simon Parkin’s most excellent podcast, My Perfect Console, next week. The episode arrives on Tuesday but if you’re a Patreon sub like me, which you should be, you’ll get an ad-free version a day early. I’ll talk about this a bit more in a shameless promo post on Tuesday. Enjoy! I hope it’s good!

There we go. Rattled this one out a bit because the kids are on hols and I’ve been roundly ignoring them all morning, trying to bash out a newsletter amidst the din of the world's best babysitter, Ring Fit Adventure. Time to get out in the garden and throw a ball around, methinks. 

Tomorrow they’re off to the grandparents for a week. This is the first time we’ve shipped them both away for such a long time and I am both nervous and excited about it. How will I contrive to entirely waste this rare spell of child-free time? Looking forward to finding out. Have a lovely weekend!