In the aftermath of Github banning or suspending dozens of popular accounts, the erotic game modding community wonders if they should move to platforms like GitGoon instead.

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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611d

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.

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291d

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.

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-21d

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.

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1d

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.

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-41d

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.

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-51d

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.

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-91d

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.

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121d

He said steam is trying to clear porn games.

No, I didn’t.

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-71d

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.

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111d

“the stuff affecting adult content on Steam”

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

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61d

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!

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-21d

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?

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61d

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.

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31d

Man, your reading comprehension is really bad.

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-11d

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.

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31d

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.

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11d

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.

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01d

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.

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21d

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.

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-11d

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.

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11d

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

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01d

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

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01d

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.

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