If you're like me and you've kind of spent the last week obsessing with the bizarre and unfortunate trend of basically censoring EVERYTHING remotely-offensive to hypocritical prudes in Western governments ("NSFW for me and not for thee") or, apparently, credit card companies who go above and beyond the reactionary call of some extremist feminist group on Australia I still know next to nothing about and start blaming Grand Theft Auto or...uh...the original Duke Nukem for everything wrong with the world, know you're not alone.

Also know, however, that these smaller PC gaming storefronts are fighting back. Yes, even itch.io.

Some things that have been done and you can do:

• itch.io has always had cool bundles that supported charities actually worth caring about in the moment, and now, as I suppose is their form of damage-control after being spooked into de-indexing even LGBTQIA+ games the last couple of weeks, they're hosting a Queer Games Bundle right now to support queer solo devs affected by the latest useless round of anti-trans censorship. You can donate as little as $10 or donate $60 if you happen to be more flush with cash than most right now--I gave $20. Honestly, I can't see myself ever playing any of these same-sex dating simulators as a straight man not personally aroused by this stuff, but I feel it's the thought and my money that counts, and itch is conveniently organized in such a way that games from these bundles never flood your personal Game Library unless you specifically choose to download them from the bundle links. Plus, even though I didn't have as much passion and work ethic for solo game dev as I thought, the one RPGMaker game I did upload to itch, "Squeakamo: The Quest for Cheese" managed to earn me an extra $12 from some kind stranger on that website who apparently liked my one semi-serious attempt at solo game dev enough to give me money for it, so it's only fair I return the favor to other aspiring solo devs with my $20 gift, regardless of their background.
• I think it's over now, but Good Old Games' (GOG's) response to this, in typical Polish/CDProjektRed fashion, was to offer a "Right to Buy Games" free bundle full of obviously NSFW/offensive games, most notably the notorious Postal 2, over the weekend to tell the kinds of people that scapegoat video games for real-life violence or genuinely feel even the likes of Pokemon are somehow gateways into real-life cockfighting, or something, that they can't tell us what we can and can't download on these storefronts. Frankly, Postal 2 is the only "good" and "high effort" game I got out of this, the rest is just no-effort smut from before real time video game graphics could even render subsurface scattering on skin or anything that makes female characters look softer and sensual, as opposed to mid-poly mannequins, and of course like most well-adjusted (more or less) 30-somethings, "straight" dating simulators don't appeal to me any more than what I got in the itch Queer Bundle because I know spending time in these types of games will take time away from actually meeting and potentially marrying an actual woman while I still can. Just really emphasizes how ridiculous it is to censor these types of games out of fear that not even fully-grown adults can separate fantasy from reality, let alone children who should not even be aware of these games' existence in the first place, let alone interested in this stuff over the new Donkey Kong Bananza or something.
• Apparently there's this even smaller and niche website than either Newgrounds or itch.io called Zoom (not to be confused with the teleconferencing app) that is simply telling PayPal and Stripe to pound sand, as well trying to come up with alternative payment methods for their customers in the likely event payment processors retaliate harshly for this even-smaller website not bending the knee as quickly as Steam and itch initially did. @TomFulp may want to take notes from these guys. Zoom itself is basically a more Linux-friendly alternative to GOG, so if you hate Windows and Mac that much, you may prefer supporting Zoom over GOG. Unfortunately, this article at the end aptly demonstrates the slippery slope censorship can be, with Stripe in particular going from "don't worry, we'll only ban poorly-made incest games you've never even heard of" to "you know, let's ban the old 2D Duke Nukem games that most people under the age of 35 haven't even heard of, just in case it turns kids into school shooters too" in only a couple of weeks.

It is extremely unfortunate we have to deal with gaming-related moral panics again--I mean, I've personally been around long enough to remember similar panics like the attempt to ban 1993's Doom after the 1999 Columbine shooting, of course the "Hot Coffee" mod scandal with early 3D Grand Theft Autos, or even the game burnings (like book burnings but with games) after the Sandy Hook Shooting, but I would assume in an age where even our grandparents at least experienced video games in the form of Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, or even the first controversial video game (Death Rally), that the days of people who don't even know what video games are telling even grown adults they're not "ready" for M-rated content would be long gone in 2025. But like how these right-wingers unintentionally made stuff like the latest SuperMan, the latest Season Premiere of South Park, and even Stephen Colbert and American night show hosts in general more relevant than ever, we can fight back just as hard, if not harder, because there are more of us!

Lots of serious stuff in this post, unfortunately. I'll be back with some fun Punk n' Gunk stuff next time--despite, or possibly because of my anxiety the past couple of weeks, I am making unprecedented progress on my latest, and longest, cartoon yet!