A quick rundown for those out of the loop – an Australian “feminist” group Collective Shout have started a big information campaign directed at payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, which resulted in these companies putting pressure on storefronts like Steam and Itch.io to remove video games that “promote sexual abuse of women and children”. This evidently didn’t stop at degenerate hentai games, as even some horror video games were targeted.

Collective Shout isn’t strictly speaking “feminist” - their leader is, for example, an anti-abortion Christian and was making claims that women dressing in a “slutty” way are being exploited without their knowledge. One of the big contributors at Collective Shout is Daniel Principe - another Christian activist who is against pornography in all its forms [publicchristianity.org]. Their initial statement was supported not just by other radical feminist groups, but groups like Exodus Cry (an American NGO against all commercialized sex trade) or National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media - another Christian NGO with similar goals.

NCOSE is a group I want to talk about a bit more. Initially, the organization was called Operation Yorkville, that later changed into Morality in Media - it was an explicitly conservative Christian organization that was stating the direct link between pornography and obscenity, homosexuality, atheism(!) and murder(!). It was founded in 1962, but 2015 it underwent a massive rebranding – they renamed themselves National Center on Sexual Exploitation and shifted focus from fighting for upholding Abrahamic morality into fighting the sexual exploitation of women, a much more palatable and defensible position - it’s not about bible thumping, it’s about preventing real tangible harm to women and little girls. This proved to be a massively successful decision, as now they’ve not only managed to convince Visa and Mastercard to drop their support of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, among other sites, but also push FOSTA-SESTA law in Congress.
The organization received funding from people like Joseph Coors and Philip Anschutz[littlesis.org] who in turn also funded Heritage Foundation[littlesis.org] - a conservative group behind Project 2025.

Now, you can call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t buy for one second that two companies that collectively control over 80% of credit card transactions in the world can be bullied into submission by a bunch of Australian radfem LARPers. The question is, who can bully them, whom do credit card companies respond to in the USA?

Several government agencies monitor their activity, one of the biggest ones is Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The acting director of this bureau is a man named Russel Vought. Vought isn’t just a Christian Nationalist, but a co-author of the Project 2025 by Heritage Foundation, that aims to reshape the entire structure of American federal government. One of the stated goals of this project is criminalization of pornography in the US - however, the authors know that such proposal would not be popular among the electorate, so it needs to be sugarcoated with “protecting minors” framing. You don’t have to take my word for it, here is Vought himself admitting it on camera:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0noIS9lmR0Y

When I talk about 50 year issue that we lost because of the framing, that’s one of them… What’s the immediate leverage point that we can win and win a debate that allows us to win more in the next fight? Right now we came up with the idea on pornography to make it so that the porn company bear the liability for the underage use… and what ends up happening is that the porn company says “we aren’t going to do business in this state”, which is of course entirely what we are after. We start with the back door… we would’ve done the national ban on pornography if we could, right?

The important thing I need to address is that I’m not defending a good chunk of the games that are delisted or banned from steam - a lot of them are terrible and promote very unhealthy fetishes. But the point I’m making is that people behind these initiatives don’t distinguish between extreme fetishes and “vanilla” things, their main goal is to ban all of it entirely.

For now, they are doing it through the pressure on payment companies to disavow the undesirable content themselves, once they manage to get their foot in the door, they will push the window of what is and isn’t acceptable even further. It will inevitably go into all depictions of sex in media, which will of course also include anything related to LGBT content, which later will be pushed further and further to remove anything related to sexuality, even healthy depictions. That means that Witcher series, Cyberpunk 2077, Mass Effect and even games like Bayonetta are all potentially in crosshair.

To anyone who thinks that this is fear mongering, slippery-slope fallacy and it can’t happen in the USA – it already did happen before with Comstock Act[en.wikipedia.org] and Hays code[en.wikipedia.org]. This is the past these people are fighting hard to bring back - and in that world, there is no difference between Hentai Grape Dungeon 3000 and strip club in GTA.

I've seen a bunch of peopel smugly saying "Oh, so if they are against muh hentai games, why aren't they against X, Y or Z?" to which I can only say "Don't worry, they are". And they are coming after them too, just a bit later.