Great news, perverts/freedom enthusiasts: You have a bit more than 24 hours left to score some free “adult” games, whether for ideological reasons, or, really, any other reason you might want to play a video game where you do a Bejeweled-style Match-3 in order to get anime women to take their clothes off.
This whole thing is going to take a bit of unpacking, so bear with us for a second here. Over the last few weeks, there’s been a fairly nasty conflict bubbling up in the video game sphere, centered on credit card companies, censorship groups, and the companies that take our money in exchange for said video games. In brief: A group called Collective Shout, which touts itself as fighting against “the objectification of women”—but which often gets criticized for being basically just anti-porn—has claimed credit for yelling at companies like Visa and Mastercard, accusing them of enabling (and taking money for) financial transactions for adult games. And while Mastercard, specifically, has denied that it then turned around and passed this pressure on to online marketplaces like Steam and itch.io, it’s undeniable that both services have spent the last couple of weeks removing or delisting adult games from their catalogues, with especial focus on those titles that push hardest into taboo topics like incest or sexual violence. (In a statement trying to reshape the narrative a bit, Mastercard says its policies just say it can’t be used to buy illegal things, and that it hasn’t told anybody to pull any specific products. But given how disastrous losing Mastercard’s support would be for a service that basically runs off credit card transactions, it’s not hard to see how the Valve-owned Steam might get proactive about pulling potentially objectionable material from its listings.)
Enter into this conflict GOG.com (formerly Good Old Games) another online game retailer that, despite its original name (and remit) does sell a fair number of modern games. Owned by The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, the marketplace put up a page this weekend that allows users, for a limited time, to freely obtain a number of adult titles for free. Once you scroll past the attendant horniness, the “Freedom To Buy” page ends on a bit of a mission statement: “These games are at risk of disappearing. We believe that if a game is legal, you should be able to buy it now and decades from now. We fight back by making these games visible, accessible, and undeniable. Freedom to buy is freedom to create.”
We’re just going to say this upfront: A lot of the games on offer here do not look very good. (From reading around, the best of the bunch is probably Hunie Pop, which gets a fair amount of credit for being a decent Match-3 game beyond the sexy bits.) (Also, Postal 2, the obvious outlier of the group, can be fun for a few minutes, in a puerile sort of way.) But the quality is, in many ways, beside the point: We can’t remember precisely which historical figure first said “I don’t agree with your mega-horny Pokémon Snap clone, but I’ll defend to the death your right to make it,” but there’s still a pretty obvious principle being fought over here. Many critics of the shift have noted that, once marketplaces begin normalizing removing art—even art that we might find personally pretty objectionable—at the whims of payment processors, then the moral judgments of the loudest voices become the standards that all would-be commercial artists have to abide by. Which is, y’know, pretty scary, given what the loudest voices in our society have been bellowing of late.
GOG’s “Freedom To Buy” offer extends through Sunday, August 3.
