itch.io

The internet accelerates the spread of information and lowers the barrier to doing so. That lowered barrier led to Itch and Steam existing in the first place, and small-time creators being able to to business on those platforms. It also led to moralists becoming aware of said games, that they otherwise would have had no idea even existed. It also led to the bit of backlash that is now occurring.

In general, the old method of creating a soothing simulacrum of reality for people to inhabit via mainstream media consensus has been falling apart for over a decade now due to the internet. There's actually a lot of irony here: the Internet as a grand tool of free expression and democracy was a propaganda idea/meme pushed by exactly these same shadowy people in its infancy, because they hoped to use it as a trojan horse. Force countries like China and Russia to adopt it due to the undeniable economic benefits, then use it as a foot-in-the-door, allowing the chaotic, unregulated speech occurring there to undermine the authority and grip of the state-run media in those countries. Overturn the monopoly on information there.

It worked for a little while. Then it backfired. China got wise and started cutting themselves off from the western internet, homegrowing their own solutions that they could control. Russia as well, though to a lesser degree. And meanwhile, the tool that had been designed to undermine OTHER regimes stared to get a liiiitle too corrosive to the regime back home. The monster came knocking on Dr. Frankenstein's door. So they decided they'd had enough. In little ways, here and there, they've been dismantling it. No dislikes on youtube. No star ratings on netflix. Shadowbans, comments disappeared in the night, never to be seen again. An ever-increasingly hostile regulatory environment that herds everyone into a handful of social media sites, fish in an algorithmic barrel that are then summarily shot, again and again. It's beyond cliche to say, but this is, genuinely, 1984, a narrow landscape of expression and history that is utterly under control and utterly, immediately malleable to the whims of those pulling the levers.

That's what this is about. The internet has become a bit too free for those in power. It makes them more than a little uncomfortable now. So they're doing all they can to dismantle it, and replace it with something "safe." For them.

Horny games are just a footnote in all this, a prelude to a prelude. Collateral damage as the machine cranks up and roars to life.