To Whom It May Deeply Concern,
I write to you not with courtesy, nor diplomacy, but with a blazing fire of indignation and righteous fury over the suffocating, authoritarian, and frankly disgusting actions of your organization. Collective Shout - an entity that masquerades as a moral guardian - has become nothing short of a censorship machine, functioning under a warped, puritanical crusade to erase anything that doesn’t fit your rigid and Cherry-picked version of “appropriate” content. Your behavior is not that of a benevolent protector of society, but that of an ideological inquisition seeking to annihilate freedom of expression wherever it dares to show a shred of originality, edge, or nuance.
Let me be unequivocal - your group has no moral high ground. You do not represent “all women.” You do not speak for society. And you most certainly do not speak for the millions of us who value artistic liberty, diverse storytelling, and the personal responsibility to choose what media we consume. You are not a grassroots watchdog. You are a self-appointed, unelected censorship lobby, whose behavior reeks of the same Orwellian overreach one might expect from repressive regimes.
Let’s get right to it. Your efforts to pressure Valve (Steam) and indie platforms like Itch.io into delisting and banning games - particularly ones that explore adult themes, anime-styled art, edgy humor, sexuality, or uncomfortable subject matter - are not only anti-consumer, but blatantly authoritarian. You paint all creators with the same broad brush, declaring their content harmful or exploitative, while ignoring context, nuance, genre, intent, and even satire.
Worse yet, you treat adults as if they are infants incapable of making their own decisions, demanding companies act as your moral police. You Cherry-pick games out of thousands, often misrepresenting them, weaponizing outrage, and demanding total erasure from the public sphere - not regulation, but outright obliteration.
This is not advocacy. This is ideological fascism dressed in progressive drag.
You’ve reduced a complex, multifaceted cultural medium like video games - a legitimate form of art - to a battlefield for your performative outrage and virtue signaling. Your idea of helping women or protecting children apparently includes silencing artists, crushing small developers, and bulldozing consumer agency into the dirt.
And don’t even get me started on your hypocrisy. You rally against fictional content while staying suspiciously silent on real-world abuses that aren’t politically convenient or ideologically aligned. You have no issue rallying your digital pitchforks against harmless visual novels or fan-made indie games, but where is your energy when it comes to holding major corporations accountable for systemic exploitation in media, fashion, or advertising?
You see, your activism is selective, convenient, and ideologically filtered. You only care when it serves your brand. You don’t protect people; you curate narratives. And you dare to insult the intelligence and autonomy of every free-thinking adult in the process.
I speak as a centrist, someone who believes in balance - in protecting the vulnerable without infantilizing society or handing over our civil liberties to mobs of moral puritans. I also speak from a mildly conservative perspective when I say: enough is enough.
You are not the solution. You are part of the problem.
You’re not just silencing perverse or extreme content (which already has laws and community moderation in place). You’re silencing weirdness, art, criticism, uncomfortable stories, and mature themes, and you’re doing so under the false pretense that you are “protecting” people. The truth is, you don’t trust people to think for themselves. And what’s worse - you don’t want to.
And what do you think happens when organizations like yours suppress, stifle, and silence under the guise of righteousness? You drive people underground. You create resentment. You provoke backlash. You feed the very anti-feminist and anti-progressive sentiments you claim to oppose.
Congratulations. You’ve helped burn the bridge to discourse and torched it in self-congratulatory flames.
In the heart of justice and the restoration of creative freedom, I call upon your moronic organization - or any platforms you have influenced through coercion - to reverse and revoke every single action taken against affected games and developers. This includes but is not limited to: restoring delisted games, reinstating wrongfully banned creators, and issuing public apologies to the individuals and small studios you’ve dragged through the mud. The damage you’ve caused - reputational, financial, emotional - is not something that should be swept under the rug. You owe the global indie development community a reckoning. You must repair what you’ve broken, admit the overreach, and stand down from policing artistic expression that falls outside your moral doctrine. Otherwise, history will remember your group as a blight on creative culture - a bitter footnote in the timeline of digital censorship, authoritarian activism, and social overreach.
You are free to hold your values. But you are not free to enforce them on others under threats, manipulation, or corporate pressure. We didn’t elect you. We didn’t ask for your judgment. We don’t want your crusade.
Stop harassing game platforms.
Stop treating artists as criminals.
Stop silencing those who don’t think like you.
And above all else, stop pretending you’re doing this for anyone’s benefit but your own self-righteous vanity.
Because if you continue on this course, rest assured - a cultural pushback will come. You are already being viewed by many not as protectors, but as moral tyrants. And history does not remember tyrants fondly.
You have every right to exist. But you do not have the right to dictate what the rest of us can see, play, create, or enjoy.
Stay out of our libraries. Stay out of our hard drives. And for the love of liberty, stay out of our lives.
Sincerely and unapologetically,
A Centrist Who’s Had Enough
The activism of Collective Shout is just puritanism cosplaying as feminism. Do not be fooled, feminism is not anti-porn per se. Especially not more modern versions of feminism.
They would read the first sentence and laugh. They’d send the letter around to their friends so they can all share the laugh.
President of Collective Shout here,
Thanks for posting this in a place I check regularly. I’ve heard your concerns and we’ll stop immediately.
Good thing they posted it to all those other communities in case you didn’t read it here eh?
Also, why are you a centrist? In this day and age, knowing what the right wing is about?
I expect that they mean to express that they were not engaged with any political system in the past and don’t expect to engage with any party that already exists. It might also express that they will disengage from politics when they determine that they can stop addressing this particular issue (whether that is because the issue was solved or not). Perhaps it helps to be “not tainted by government or mainstream parties’ scandals” (or vice versa).
I don’t align myself with the right or the left. because there is some bullshit on both sides, not that I completely dismiss legitimate concerns.
Ah, a both-sider, I see.
I suppose the gerontocracy on center right democrats is a problem, and the fascism and child rape and the fucking-hell-everything-else on the far-right republicans is a problem.
You can join us on the left if you want to. American politics has failed us.
Centrism doesn’t exist, just another word to mean liberism.
Oh ok so you’re a fascist. Got it.
Leftist here, I agree.
Stop chasing fictional media and work on those damned Epstein files—that’s sexual abuse that has actually happened.
Consider your audience. “You are part of the problem” (meaning “I am the enemy of the person reading these words”) is probably not what you wanted to communicate. “Collective Shout is part of the problem” (meaning “The person reading these words should help to neutralize Collective Shout”) probably is. Addressing someone that you don’t want to engage in “diplomacy” with is probably a bad idea. You might want to use words such that you address people who you want to cooperate with.
I don’t know what this group is and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Most of all I don’t understand why this is posted in a retro gaming community
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collective_Shout go to “Video Games”.
Alternatively, one could go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Video_games
Thank you. I read the entire article and I don’t really understand what the OP is trying to achieve with this post, which no one from that group will read, just as no one from that group has ever played a video game. They just seem like publicity-seeking busybodies with time to kill between complaints about their neighbors to their HOAs.
In particular I still don’t understand why any of this is relevant to retro games. Modern games, sure. But it doesn’t look like they’re trying to get Crash Bandicoot banned from Steam.
You can take my mother/daughter hentai games from my cold dead dick.
Are you sure that something like incest wasn’t illegal to start with in many places where Steam operates?
I would speculate that many places ban incest containing media and Steam simply didn’t bother following these rules.
That’s a whole different discussion compared to the messaging in OP’s text.
It’s also a wholly different discussion from what they’re getting removed.
Is it though?
Valve openly refused to honour legally required refunds because of the culture of corruption and criminality that is unfortunately extremely prevalent in the US.
I believe it was complaints from Australia that forced them to provide refunds on a global level.
How is this different?
My point is they’re NOT only getting incest and very niche things removed.
Looking through Steam tracker it does seem to be incest and fetish porn games removed:
https://steam-tracker.com/ (you can sort the table by date).
Or am I missing something? I am genuinely curious.
I am no supporter of Collective Shout, but there are many examples of US tech companies ignoring local laws due to a toxic mix of corruption and arrogance. Steam initially not giving refunds is one relevant example.
I don’t understand OP’s post. If you want sexy/porn games on Steam (I even have 1 or 2) best option is to comply with local laws and get rid of incest, rape and extreme fetish content.
The devs can setup a patreon (without explicit references to incest) and email new builds to subscribers. It’s not unreasonable to expect a few hoops considering the nature of the content. I would even go as far as saying that it’s in their benefit to keep a low profile (i.e. not be listed on Steam).
Just confirming: Did they only ban hentai games? I did some research and one of the games they got banned was literally a rpg rape simulator. (And I thought ManHunt was the goat of fucked up games).
I’m not saying hentai games are inherently immoral, or shouldn’t exist. But them getting removed from steam does make sense to me. Porn goes on pornhub, not netflix.
Steam isn’t Netflix
vap·id /ˈvapəd/ adjective offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.
Yes, that’s what your posts do. Interesting how you remain unself-aware, though…
lmfao ok bud.
"Just confirming: Did they only ban hentai games? I did some research and one of the games they got banned was literally a rpg rape simulator. (And I thought ManHunt was the goat of fucked up games).
I’m not saying hentai games are inherently immoral, or shouldn’t exist. But them getting removed from steam does make sense to me. Porn goes on pornhub, not netflix."
With all due respect Canaconda, frankly ANY adult game can have pornographic and sexual contents, including GTA of all games. I get that truly malign games that obviously encourage violence and other heinous crimes, must be banned, I understand that, but they are targeting ALL games that have adult elements at all. They’re overzealous pricks and bitches, and art destruction is something I have extremely strong views against.
ANY adult game can have pornographic
Yes but they don’t. Come on.
A movie can have a sex scene, that doesn’t make it porn. A porno can have a story and run 90 minutes, that doesn’t make it a feature length film.
Karens have been coming after GTA since before you were born I’d wager. Before that it was Dungeons and Dragons. GTA exists. DnD exists. Hentai games will still exist.
IMO if you can call them overzealous pricks and bitches… you’d better be open to me pointing out that experiencing moral outrage over hentai games is not a good look or a healthy mental exercise.
@Canconda @ToxicHolyGrenade ;) i think you can google yourself for the special scenes in Dragon Age: Origins , The Witcher , GTA 5 or Leisure Suit Larry … that are the 3 games out of might head wich had alot of publicity because of this topic. With the same argumentation those groups might try to remove or change those games too …
Exactly! Except those games bring in millions to billions of dollars more in revenue.
They’re not gonna remove them from their store and it’s asinine to conflate no-name hentai games with international IPs like GTA and Dragon Age.
@Canconda i don’t think that it’s currently about the money. this is another fight against liberal ideas. In the last months i have seen bigger companies giving into a certain speech … or do we want to talk about all those companies even outside of the us who don’t talk about DEI anymore ?
this is another fight against liberal ideas
My proletariat brother, it is always, always, always, about the money with corporations.
They don’t give 2 shits about fuck as long as they make money.
End of the day not enough people buy hentai games for them to justify keeping them. It’s literally that simple.
@Canconda who knows how many people get moved by this topic. Let’s say noone believed in >1.4m people signing a petition for game preservation either … noone would have believed that europeans say that US Tech Companies should be regulated even if it means worse tarrifs … if you already give up before trying to change something you lost already. From my point of view this creates something which can be used in a really bad way for content moderation ( some would call it censorship ).