GOG Comments on Payment Processors' Steam Censorship

GOG sees the mounting pressure from payment processors on Steam and other PC storefronts as a game preservation issue, with a company official saying as much in a recent interview. The remark offers a broader perspective on the Steam censorship wave that sparked significant controversy in recent months.

In July 2025, Steam removed hundreds of adult games from its digital store offerings. Valve cited pressure from payment processors as the sole reason for the move. The development sparked significant online backlash, directed at both payment processors and Collective Shout, an Australian activist group that took credit for lobbying them, denouncing the targeted games as forms of “sexploitation.”

Payment Processor Censorship Is a ‘Game Preservation Issue,’ GOG Argues

In a recent interview with Automaton West, GOG Senior PR Piotr Gnyp called the current squeeze a “game preservation issue,” noting that any title delisted from a digital storefront for any reason is potentially lost forever. “It is particularly worrying when games are potentially vanishing due to external pressure,” Gnyp said. A conservationist’s perspective of this sort hasn’t exactly dominated the recent discourse on the matter, but it is very much in line with GOG’s broader mission to preserve “good old” games—the idea that inspired its original name before the acronym took over.

While the censorship efforts have affected both Steam and Itch.io in recent months, GOG has so far resisted such factors, not least because it’s a curated storefront rather than a free-for-all platform. According to Gnyp, the company makes selections based on quality and relevance, but also looks to those that align with its “values and audience.” While not everyone wants a platform to handle curation for them, GOG’s pitch is compelling because it centers on DRM-free downloads and offline installers. This means that even if the company were to go out of business, all previously purchased games would remain playable, provided they had already been downloaded.

Gnyp also stresses that GOG, Steam, and every other digital storefront are bound by laws in many countries that they operate. Although those laws may not always be consistent, they are not central to the 2025 censorship wave, at least not directly.

It is particularly worrying when games are potentially vanishing due to external pressure.

Several anti-censorship petitions blew up in response to the recent wave of Steam game delistings. However, not a single title caught up in the ban wave has returned to Valve’s storefront as of mid-September 2025. Most remain completely unavailable for purchase. Unusual as these removals may be, Gnyp says that delistings are “impossible to avoid completely.”