this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why (www.404media.co)
submitted 3 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/games@lemmy.world
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Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why.

Developers I spoke to said the community estimated around 80 to 90 repositories containing the work of 40 to 50 people went down recently, with many becoming inaccessible around late November and early December. Many of the affected accounts are part of the modding community for games made by the now-defunct Japanese video game studio Illusion, which made popular games with varying degrees of erotic content. One of the accounts Github banned contained the work of more than 30 contributors in more than 40 repositories, according to members of the modding community that I spoke to.

Github didn’t tell most suspended users what terms they broke to earn a suspension or ban, and developers told me they have no idea why their accounts went down without notice. They said they thought they were within Github’s acceptable use guidelines; even though they make mods for hentai games and things like interactive vibrator plugins, they took care to not host anything explicit directly in their repositories.

Archive: http://archive.today/eNOI1

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[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world -4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-visa-backlash-adult-games-removed-online-stores-steam-itchio-ntwnfb

In the two weeks since announcing the letters sent to major payment providers including PayPal, Mastercard and Visa, video game marketplaces Itch.io and Steam have announced policy changes.

Steam, which has an estimated 132 million active monthly users, earlier this month removed an estimated hundreds of titles in response to pressure from payments processors.

https://exploringthegames.substack.com/p/why-steam-removed-nsfw-lgbtq-games

Recently, several NSFW and adult-only games were removed from Steam and Itch.io, not because Valve or Itch.io wanted to, but because payment processing companies, such as Visa and Mastercard told them to do so.

What started as an effort to remove something truly horrible ended up as censorship hurting innocent creators. While the intention may have been to pull illegal, immoral, or exploitive games, games that were removed were also just NSFW or adult only games. One of these games was VILE, and the first time I heard about this situation.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/valve-confirms-credit-card-companies-pressured-it-to-delist-certain-adult-games-from-steam/

"We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks," said Valve. "As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store."

Valve's reaching out to devs impacted by the change "and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future." Just, you know, so long as those games get the seal of approval from Valve's payment processors, I suppose.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

None of that negates anything I said. Everyone is aware of the context of that debacle, you were replying to someone that wasn't even drawing a conclusion from it.

[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world -4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What you said and what you meant were two different things.

The wording of the OG comment original commenter's absolutely lent itself to conspiracy theory level inference that it was steams fault.

They not only didn't actually answer the questions I asked. They claimed "nobody is talking about it" which is demonstrably not true.

Further, they went out of their way to play what about blah, but didn't give and explaination of how that related to the conversation being had or their original point.

Then you show up with language that could be taken one of two ways, and when I respond with proof from what I took from what you said "I now have reading comprehension problems" because you "didn't mean" what they said in relation to payment processors (which only entered the conversation because one person who was not the OG commenter brought it up), and I continued the conversation in that vein.

So either you chose to answer me on the wrong part of the thread, or it's your own fault you were misunderstood.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The wording at the top level was "No one’s saying anything about any of it, which feels like that’s on advice from their legal counsel." It seems like the main confusion was on the implication of the term "No one". I inferred from the reference to legal counsel, they're mainly talking about storefronts, not gamers, being silent. As such, I'm guessing you were eager to show how loud people (gamers) are on the issue; but that probably wasn't the intended meaning.

In fact, I took the initial claim to mean the opposite; with Github taking action against Adult games in the same form as an attack that took place on Steam, it's suggesting a common perpetrator. But I could safely assume most commenters here know Steam is not owned by Microsoft; hence that blame automatically goes outside of that domain.

Even if you didn't take that implication, you can just look at the simple statements made; "Hey, this is like that other thing that happened. What's in common here?"

[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world -1 points 2 days ago

One of the articles I linked you to had not just Steam but other payment processors talking about it.

So are we talking about Steam making statements about why they refused to accept the game Horses on their platform, or are we talking about payment processors? Because the thread you started responding to me in is the one about payment processors and as a result that is the vein in which my responses have been directed. And since news outlets have been very outspoken about the likelihood that Horses was refused due to payment processors pressuring Steam to better adhere to their Terms for content sold, it was reasonable to assume that that's what you meant.

If you would like to talk about Steam's removal of other games, or you would like to talk about Horse's rejection specifically, you're going to have to say so.

Microsoft isn't selling products on GitHub. They bought it to have control over open source projects and code.

Even if they were going to sell ad space that's still not the same conversation as the one about payment processors. At best the only similarity might just be that MS might find porn content to be detrimental to their image. Because that's the BS reason payment aggregators gave for not allowing porn content every time this has come up.

But MS has been disallowing nudity, pornography, and other adult content on their products and ad aggregation service for more than a decade now. So either this was house keeping, it was an afterthought, or someone complained. And considering just how little MS cares about the complaints of consumers and consumer groups normally, I doubt it's the latter.