Who is Collective Shout? The group behind the Steam and itch.io campaign

Collective Shout is an Australian campaign group. It describes itself as “a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”. In July 2025 it wrote to six payment companies about games sold on Steam and itch.io, and within two weeks both stores had removed or hidden adult games.

This page sets out who the group is, what it has campaigned on, exactly what it asked for in 2025, and what is and is not known about its role. It is a reference page. It describes the group’s position and its critics’ position, and takes neither.

Key points

• Collective Shout is a registered Australian charity founded by Melinda Tankard Reist.
• It campaigns by pressing companies, advertisers and regulators. It has no legal powers.
• It has campaigned against games before, including Grand Theft Auto V in 2014.
• Its 11 July 2025 open letter asked payment companies to stop processing payments on Steam and itch.io.
• The stores then acted themselves, and the results went much wider than the games the letter described.
• Mastercard says it required nothing. Valve says the pressure reached it through processors citing a Mastercard rule.

Who they are

According to its own website, Collective Shout’s mission is “to bring about cultural change and societal transformation through holding corporations, advertisers, marketers and media accountable”. It campaigns against what it sees as the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.

The group’s method is consistent across its campaigns. It identifies a product, an advertisement or a performer it objects to, publicises it, and asks supporters to contact the company involved or the regulator responsible.

What it campaigned on before 2025

Games were not new ground for the group. Wikipedia’s article lists these campaigns among others.

The Grand Theft Auto V campaign in 2014 used the same approach the group would use in 2025: it did not ask a government to ban the game, it asked the companies selling it to stop.

The 2025 campaign

No Mercy

The campaign began with one game. No Mercy was a game about sexual violence that went on sale on Steam in spring 2025. Collective Shout started a petition against it in April. The game was made unavailable in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, and its developer withdrew it worldwide on 10 April 2025.

After that, the group looked for similar games on Steam and itch.io.

The open letter

On 11 July 2025 Collective Shout published an open letter addressed to the chief executives of PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Paysafe, Discover and JCB. The letter said the group had found hundreds of games on Steam and itch.io with themes of rape, incest and child sexual abuse. It asked the companies to “immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games”.

Two points about the letter matter for everything that followed.

• It was addressed to payment companies, not to the stores. By the group’s account, as reported by Wikipedia, it had sent thousands of emails to Valve without a reply. Stevivor reported that supporters sent more than a thousand emails to payment companies.
• It asked for payments to be cut off from the stores as a whole, not for particular games to be removed.

What the stores did

• 16 July 2025: Steam added a rule against content that “may violate the rules and standards” of its payment processors, card networks and banks, and removed a set of adult games. Most had incest themes.
• 24 July 2025: itch.io deindexed all adult content from its search and browse pages. Its founder named Collective Shout’s campaign as the cause and said the site acted quickly because “our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform”.
• 31 July 2025: itch.io restored free adult content to search. Paid adult content stayed hidden while it negotiated with payment partners.

The full sequence, with every statement dated, is in the timeline of NSFW games removed from Steam and itch.io.

Did Collective Shout cause the removals?

The group has claimed responsibility, and itch.io named it as the cause. What happened between the letter and the removals is less clear, because the companies in the middle have given different accounts.

Mastercard said on 1 August 2025 that it “has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms”. Valve answered through the press that Mastercard had not contacted it directly, but had communicated with payment processors and their banks, and that those processors then came to Valve citing Mastercard’s rule 5.12.7.

That rule, in the Mastercard Rules, bars transactions that Mastercard considers damaging to its brand, including sales of material showing non-consensual sexual behaviour. It applies to legal content as well as illegal content.

So the chain, as far as the public statements show it, ran like this:

1. A campaign group writes to card networks and payment companies.
2. Banks and processors, applying the card networks’ standing rules, raise concerns with the stores.
3. The stores change their own rules to keep their payment methods.

Collective Shout did not ban anything and has no power to. It supplied the complaint. The rules that gave the complaint force already existed. How those rules work is explained in how payment processors decide which adult games can exist.

What the group asked for and what happened

There is a gap between the two, and much of the argument about the campaign is about that gap.

itch.io’s action reached every adult page on the site, whatever its subject. Neither store has published a list of what was removed.

The criticism

The campaign drew strong objections from developers, players and industry bodies. The main ones were these.

• Payment companies as censors. Critics argued that card networks and banks should not decide which legal works can be sold. A petition addressed to Visa and Mastercard passed 205,000 signatures within days.
• Collateral damage. Games that had nothing to do with the themes in the letter were hidden or removed. Wikipedia’s article records reports that many games by LGBTQ+ developers were affected, and cites a game about recovering from domestic abuse that was caught although it contained no explicit images.
• Vague rules. The International Game Developers Association said it was alarmed by vague enforcement that removed games “often without warning or explanation”, and asked for written guidelines and an appeals process. The same statement said the association does not support content that promotes sexual violence or sexualises minors.

The group’s response

Collective Shout has said its target was specific. Its campaigns manager, Caitlin Roper, is quoted in Wikipedia’s article as saying the group was “not looking to ban any instances of explicit or adult content”, and that its objection is to material depicting violence against and abuse of women.

Its critics reply that the letter asked for payments to be cut off from whole stores, and that a broad result was the foreseeable effect of that request.

Both statements are accurate descriptions of the record. The letter named particular themes, and it asked for an action that could not be limited to them.

Why it matters

The campaign showed how adult games can be restricted without any law being passed. A store’s ability to take card payments depends on rules written by card networks and applied by banks. Anyone who can persuade those companies that a store is a risk to their brand can change what the store sells.

For developers, the practical lesson is to know the payment rules as well as the store rules, and to keep a channel to players that no store controls. The options are compared in where adult games can be sold.