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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 69 points 7 months ago (2 children)

This smells suspiciously similar to the stuff affecting adult content on Steam, like Horses. No one's saying anything about any of it, which feels like that's on advice from their legal counsel.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 40 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I think they are testing the waters of just open warfare against indie developers. Microsoft has no interest in platforming their competitors. They start with the adult games because no one is going to defend them. Once the precedent is set, they go after everyone else. They do the same thing with porn as a vehicle to attack free speech.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I don't see it. Indie developers would comprise the vast majority of open source projects. Many of them add value to their own products, and they know it, which is why they're largely a services company now. And the timing is so close to everything going on with adult content in other places.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 26 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    What about the last 20 years of Microsoft make you think that adding value to their products has anything to do with their business model?

    Tech companies don't make new shit anymore and they haven't done it for a long time. All they do now is steal our shit and sell it back to us. All Microsoft does now is remove existing features and put them behind higher paid tiers.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [+] -7 points 7 months ago

    What about the last 20 years of Microsoft make you think that adding value to their products has anything to do with their business model?

    The part where they tried to make an Apple app store and it didn't take. The open ecosystem of Windows is the thing that allows it to continue to exist and dominate. And the open ecosystem of open source software actively enhances their ability to sell companies server infrastructure, which makes them more money than Windows does.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] -5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Go on then. Talk about it. Which other games besides Horses (the feature adult content) have been removed from or not allowed to launch on Steam? Because that platform is full of porn games and the Horses thing was about sexual themes involving minors.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 20 points 7 months ago (1 child)
  • [+] -10 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Again. This wasn't on steam it was on the literally payment providers who forced the issue. If steam can't accept payment for your game, of course they're going to delist it. That's not what he said. He said steam is trying to clear porn games.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    He said steam is trying to clear porn games.

    No, I didn't.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [+] -10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    This smells suspiciously similar to the stuff affecting adult content on Steam, like Horses.

    With this sentence you basically implied that Steam is removing or not allowing porn games.

    You never in any of your comments mentioned payment processors. If that's what you meant, that's what you should have said.

    You also claimed nobody was talking about it when literally everybody everywhere was talking about it when the news first dropped. So much so that Mastercard made a statement about it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Sorry, let me try.

    This smells suspiciously similar to the stuff affecting adult content on Visa, like Horses.

    Oh. No, wait, you don’t sell games on Visa. Let’s try again.

    Actually, what you call Linux is really GNU/Linux-

    Dammit! Stupid pedantry setting!

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    So, when pornhub had problems with payment processors it wasn't pornhubs fault they had to remove content.

    But when steam removes some content because payment processors won't let them take payment for that content it's steams fault. Have I got that right?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    You’re inventing further wording than what’s written. The game is hosted on Steam, and that’s the entity that sent the takedown notice - those are just the facts. Plenty of people blame Visa more than Valve for those actions.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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?"

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 0 points 7 months 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Man, your reading comprehension is really bad.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I said what I said. You decided my argument was something other than what it actually was. You decided to engage me about it in a bad faith argument. You're fault not mine.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    This is the first time I've replied to you. There's that pesky reading comprehension again.

    When they said, "no one is talking about it," they were talking about the GitHub incident, not the Steam/itch.io one.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Exactly. Steam is so laissez-faire about adult content that removing one game, without elaborating, and allowing so many others sounds exactly to me like it violates or risks violating a law somewhere, and so they're covering their asses, maybe even preemptively. I'm not a lawyer, but their advice is often to just shut the fuck up. Epic sure was excited to host it when Steam declined and then did the same thing. For all I know, the reason GOG can host it but the other two won't is that maybe GOG doesn't operate in a country where some law makes that game a problem for them.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    They did elaborate though. They explained that the game had depictions of children with adults in sexual situations and the game developer removed one scene and paid some lip service about how they were just small adults. Steam didn't buy into that and wouldn't allow the game on the platform which is a reasonable take.

    Would you like to give the names of specific other porn games involving children in sexual situations? I would like to see that list because I'm pretty sure it violates the law in several places.

    You seem to be suggesting that Horses got treated differently for invalid or incomprehensible reasons and that isn't true from literally every article I've seen reporting on the situation.

    GOG is based out of Poland, and I'm sure Polish law absolutely does cover children in sexual situations in media.

    But we also don't know what the developer went on to change in the game since it was submitted to Steam with acception of the part highlighted by Steam specifically when they denied it.

    This developer may have gone on to change several things that clear the bar in Poland but not everywhere else.

    In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn't validate that claim.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn’t validate that claim.

    Quite the opposite. The reason I suspect there's something legal behind behavior like this is that it is so laser targeted to this game. Especially when it was immediately followed up by their competitor eager to host the game (which had already removed the content named in Steam's initial reason) and then changing their mind at the last second.

    What I see in common between Horses and Github is that it appears that they see it as a bad idea to explain publicly why they're doing what they're doing, and that smells like a legal reason to me.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Microsoft went and changed the TOS for GitHub intentionally to remove this content. Valve hasn't made changes to the TOS to exclude sexual content. They specifically never allowed sexual content that included minors in sexual situations.

    Those are not the same thing.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    So why did Epic also remove the game at the last minute?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Tell me very specifically what that has to do with Steam?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Quite frankly, it doesn't. This thread is about the removal of adult content from multiple different places that happens in suspicious proximity to the removal of other adult content, such that it sure feels like it's all connected.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments