What started as social media griping is morphing into a loosely organised campaign aimed at jamming up the works at the credit giants. Reddit and Bluesky are now packed with calls to flood Visa and Mastercard’s support lines with emails and phone calls in a bid to make the backlash too big to brush off.

Valve and itch.io have pinned their policy shifts on fears of losing access to the payment infrastructure. The issue is these processors impose shadowy rules about what content is allowed, and the vagueness is causing chaos well beyond the usual smut-peddlers. Valve and itch.io warned that this kind of squeeze could hammer more than just fans of digital filth.

In a now-vanished Reddit post from the Steam subreddit that earned over 17,000 upvotes, users reported that customer service reps from both Visa and Mastercard seemed well aware of the issue.

One commenter said: “They’ve gotten multiple calls on the subject of adult game censorship,” but the reps admitted there was little they could do."

That’s hardly shocking, since most of these poor sods are trained to deal with missing cards and fraud alerts, not cultural crusades. But the mob knows that. It wants to crank up the pressure until Visa and Mastercard start haemorrhaging money and has to back down and allow adult game payments.

"Emails can be ignored, but a very very long queue making it near impossible for other clients to get in will help a lot as well," wrote one Redditor, currently top of the pile in the discussion.

Others suggest a more diabolical approach by accepting the call-back option to clog up that queue too, then immediately call again to help choke the live queue.

Emails are being fired off to the customer support drones and higher-ups at the companies, with names explicitly called out by the Australian activist group Collective Shout in its letter demanding the removal of adult content from game stores.