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

    • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        “the stuff affecting adult content on Steam”

        You filled in the rest. I didn’t imply that.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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!

        • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          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?

          • Katana314@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            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.

            • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              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
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                2 days ago

                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
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                  2 days ago

                  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
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                    2 days ago

                    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
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          2 days ago

          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.

          • village604@adultswim.fan
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            2 days 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.