Processor Pressure: Steam, itch.io, and Your Risk

TL;DR. Payment processor pressure on adult content in 2025 was not a theory: two large digital platforms, the game store Steam and the indie marketplace itch.io, delisted swaths of adult content within weeks of each other after an activist group routed a pressure campaign to their card processors rather than to the platforms directly. itch.io said the quiet part plainly: if it lost the ability to accept payments from a partner like PayPal or Stripe, it would impact every creator's ability to do business. That is the same mechanism that nearly forced OnlyFans to ban explicit content in 2021 before it reversed course. For an OnlyFans agency, the takeaway is not panic about OnlyFans specifically; it is that payment rails, not published policies, are the real control layer over adult platforms, and a roster whose entire revenue sits on one platform inherits that platform's single point of failure. This post explains the playbook, why OnlyFans has weathered it so far, and the concrete diversification levers that make your agency resilient to a shock you do not control.

Adult platforms rarely die because a government bans them. They wobble because a card network or a bank decides the risk is no longer worth the volume, and once the payment tap tightens, the platform has no product. That is abstract until you watch it happen twice in one summer to companies far larger and more mainstream than any single creator's page. In July 2025 both Steam and itch.io removed adult content under pressure that arrived through their payment processors, and itch.io was unusually candid about why it had no choice. If you run an OnlyFans agency, the instinct is to read that as a gaming story, someone else's problem. It is not. It is a live demonstration of the exact chokepoint your entire roster's income runs through, and the only rational response is to understand the mechanism and reduce your exposure. This is an operator's guide to processor pressure: what happened, why adult platforms are the target, where OnlyFans sits on the risk curve, and how to build a revenue base that survives a shock to any one rail.

What actually happened to Steam and itch.io in 2025

Start with the facts, because the story travels in distorted forms. In mid-July 2025, Valve, the company behind Steam, quietly added a rule to the onboarding documentation developers must accept. The clause bars content "that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers," singling out "certain kinds of adult-only content." Within the same window a batch of adult games was pulled from the store. Valve did not publish a count, and the figures you will see quoted come from third-party trackers rather than an official tally, so treat any exact number as unconfirmed. What is not in doubt is the stated cause: the rule names payment processors and card networks as the standard the content must not violate.

A week later, on July 24, 2025, itch.io went further and was far more explicit. It announced it had "deindexed" all adult content flagged as not-safe-for-work from its browse and search pages, meaning the work still existed but became effectively invisible to anyone without a direct link. In the same statement it explained the stakes in language every agency owner should read twice. Losing PayPal, it noted, would prevent it from sending payouts to many people, and, in its words, "if we lose our ability to accept payments from a partner like PayPal or Stripe, we impact the ability of all creators to do business." It said it was "actively reaching out to other payment processors that are more willing to work with this kind of content." That is a platform stating on the record that keeping the lights on for every creator depends on a relationship with a handful of payment companies, and that it would rather delist content than risk it.

Two large, mainstream, non-pornographic-first platforms, delisting adult content within roughly ten days of each other, both citing payment processors. That is not coincidence. It is a pattern.

The activist-to-card-network playbook behind payment processor pressure on adult content

Here is the mechanism, because once you see it you cannot unsee it. Neither Steam nor itch.io decided to purge adult content on principle. The pressure was engineered, and it followed a well-worn route.

The named group behind the 2025 campaign is Collective Shout, an Australian activist organization. It is not a subreddit or a spontaneous user revolt; it is a registered advocacy body with a stated aim of removing content it objects to, in its own framing even when that content is not illegal. When its direct appeals to a platform go unanswered, it does not sue or lobby a legislature. Instead it writes to the companies upstream of the platform's revenue: the card networks and payment processors. In 2025 it published an open letter directed at Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Discover, Paysafe, and the Japan Credit Bureau, urging them to stop processing payments for the platforms hosting the content it opposed.

Understand why this route works and you understand the whole risk. A card network does not care about a culture-war argument on the merits; it cares about brand risk, chargeback exposure, and regulatory attention. When an organized campaign threatens to attach a card brand's name to the most extreme content it can surface, the network's cheapest move is to lean on the acquiring bank, which leans on the processor, which leans on the platform. The platform, facing the loss of its ability to take money at all, folds long before the card network has to do anything formal. The activist never has to win a public debate; they only need one risk manager at one processor to decide the account is not worth the trouble. That asymmetry is why the payment layer, not the content-policy layer, is where adult platforms are actually governed.

Why adult platforms are the standing target

None of this is new in kind, only in visibility. Adult platforms have always been the softest target for this playbook, for three structural reasons.

First, the industry carries a permanent risk premium. Card networks classify adult content as high-risk regardless of how compliant a specific operator is, because the category is associated with higher chargebacks, fraud, and regulatory scrutiny. That means adult platforms run on a thinner bench of willing processors, so losing even one relationship is disproportionately damaging, and every partner in a small pool has outsized leverage. The same dynamic plays out at the level of an agency's own business account, which is why debanking and building resilient business banking is a live operational concern and not a hypothetical one.

Second, the reputational attack surface is enormous and easy to weaponize. Any large adult catalog will, somewhere, contain content that looks indefensible when isolated and shown to a payment executive. An activist does not need the platform doing anything wrong at scale; they need one screenshot that makes a compliance officer nervous.

Third, the platforms have almost no counter-leverage. A giant retailer can threaten to move its enormous low-risk volume elsewhere and be courted back. An adult platform is a customer the processor was already ambivalent about keeping, so the threat of walking away is empty; the processor may quietly prefer it. The appeal works far more reliably against an adult platform than a mainstream merchant of similar size.

Where OnlyFans actually sits on the risk curve

Now to the question that matters for your roster: does this mean OnlyFans is about to fall over? Almost certainly not tomorrow, but it helps to be precise about why, without false comfort.

OnlyFans is, by the numbers, a serious and profitable business, and scale buys resilience. Its most recent full-year figures put gross fan spending at roughly 7.22 billion US dollars, with about 5.8 billion flowing to creators, across 4.63 million creator accounts and 377.5 million fans. It reported net revenue of about 1.41 billion dollars and pre-tax profit of about 684 million, run by a lean team of around 46 employees, and has paid out more than 25 billion dollars to creators since 2016. A platform of that size, profitability, and payout history is a customer the payment ecosystem has strong reasons to keep, and it has clearly invested in the verification, moderation, and compliance that make it defensible to a nervous processor in a way a chaotic marketplace is not. That defensibility is exactly what OnlyFans sells to the financial system.

But scale is not immunity, as the 2021 episode in the next section makes clear. OnlyFans has also seen a change at the top: founder Leonid Radvinsky died in March 2026, and in May 2026 a 16 percent stake was sold to Architect Capital for about 535 million dollars, valuing the company at roughly 3.15 billion. Ownership transitions do not by themselves threaten a platform, but they are exactly the moments when strategic direction, risk appetite, and processor relationships can shift, and a prudent operator watches them rather than assuming permanence. The honest summary: OnlyFans sits well up the risk curve relative to a Steam or an itch.io, because it is bigger, cleaner, and more valuable to its processors. It is not off the curve, and no adult platform is.

The 2021 read-across: OnlyFans has already been here once

You do not need to speculate about whether the chokepoint applies to OnlyFans specifically. It already happened.

In August 2021, OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content effective October 1 of that year, and its founder attributed the decision to pressure from banks and payment processors, the same upstream actors that surfaced again in 2025. For a few days the entire creator economy on the platform faced deletion of its core product. Then, on August 25, less than a week after the announcement, OnlyFans suspended the ban, saying it had secured assurances from its banking partners that it could continue to support all creators. The policy that would have gutted the platform was announced and reversed inside a single week, driven entirely by the state of its payment relationships.

Read that episode carefully, because it cuts both ways. The reassuring edge is that OnlyFans had enough leverage and commercial value to get the assurances it needed and reverse the ban, which a smaller platform could not have done. The sobering edge is that the ban was announced at all: for several days, the survival of every creator's income hung on a negotiation between the company and its banks that no creator or agency had any part in or visibility into. The lesson is not that OnlyFans will ban explicit content. It is that whether it does so is not fully in OnlyFans' hands, and it was never in yours. The only defense against a risk you do not control is to reduce your exposure to it.

What single-platform concentration means for your agency

Translate this into the vulnerability sitting on your own books. If every creator on your roster earns essentially all of her income on one platform, your agency does not have a diversified revenue base. It has one revenue line, replicated across many accounts, all depending on the payment relationships of a single company you cannot influence and get no advance warning from.

This is concentration risk, and owners underestimate it because it stays invisible right up until it is total. A platform that is fine for years is fine for years, and then one payment-processor decision changes the policy overnight. The failure mode is not gradual; you do not lose 10 percent of revenue and get time to react. You lose the rail, and with it the ability to collect, and every account is hit at once because they all share the single point of failure. An agency is supposed to spread risk across a portfolio. If that entire portfolio sits on one platform's payment relationships, you have concentrated the same single-platform risk many times over and called it a roster.

Your true business risk, then, is not a bad month or a churned creator; those are survivable. The risk that can end the agency is a shock to the rail everyone shares, decided two or three layers upstream in a conversation you read about only after the fact. Resilience means building so that such a shock is a serious quarter, not an extinction event.

Practical diversification levers

Concentration risk is solved by building revenue and infrastructure that do not all depend on the same rail. There are three levers, in rough order of how much control they hand back to you.

Platform diversification: do not run a roster on one store. The most direct hedge is to have your creators earning on more than one subscription platform, so a policy shock to one does not take the whole roster to zero. The point is not to abandon the platform that pays best; it is to keep a live presence and audience elsewhere so a fallback exists before you need it. This is only a partial hedge on processor risk, because rival platforms often lean on an overlapping set of payment companies and can face the same pressure, as the near-simultaneous Steam and itch.io actions showed. It still helps, because different platforms have different risk appetites and processor relationships, and a shock rarely hits all of them the same way at once. Our guide to platform diversification and the credible OnlyFans alternatives covers which platforms are worth a real presence, and the main alternatives run on comparable economics, with the head-to-head on which of OnlyFans and Fansly pays more showing both taking the same 20 percent cut, so diversification here is about resilience, not a better headline rate.

Payout-rail diversification: own the collection layer where you can. A subtler exposure sits inside your own finances. How you collect money, from the platform, from clients, and from direct sales, is itself a chokepoint, and relying on a single processor or business account recreates the platform's vulnerability at your own level. Spreading how you bank and collect, and understanding the processor decisions that shape how agencies bill their clients, means a problem with one rail does not freeze the whole operation. You control this level most directly, so it is the cheapest resilience to buy.

Owned channels: hold an audience no platform can delist. The most durable hedge is to build audiences your agency owns rather than rents. When Steam deindexed content, the work became invisible in search overnight, and any creator who depended on that store's discovery lost the connection instantly. A creator with a direct line to her fans keeps that connection through any delisting, because it does not run through the platform at all. This is why building a fan email list as an owned channel is a resilience play and not just a marketing one: an email list survives a platform ban that wipes out rented reach, and it is the one asset a processor decision cannot confiscate. Owned channels do not replace the payment rail, but they preserve the audience, the harder thing to rebuild, so that if you move a creator to a new platform you move with her fans intact.

A concentration-risk scorecard for your revenue base

Turn all of this into something you can score, because a risk you cannot measure is one you keep ignoring. Once a quarter, rate your agency on five questions, and treat any red answer as a project rather than a worry.

One, platform concentration. What share of total roster revenue depends on a single platform? If the answer is essentially all of it, that is a red flag by definition, regardless of how healthy that platform looks today. Green is a roster with a real, earning presence on more than one platform.

Two, payout-rail concentration. If your primary way of collecting or banking money were frozen tomorrow, could the agency still operate? If the honest answer is no, your own finances carry the same single-point-of-failure you are hedging at the platform level, and this is the cheapest one to fix.

Three, owned-audience share. For your top creators, what fraction of their fans can you reach directly, through an email list or other owned channel, without a platform mediating? If that number is near zero, a delisting does not just cut revenue, it severs the audience relationship entirely.

Four, early-warning visibility. Do you actively track the signals that precede a shock, ownership changes, processor announcements, policy-language updates, and organized campaigns, or do you find out when revenue drops? You cannot control the shock, but noticing it a week before your competitors is worth real money and is nearly free.

Five, continuity plan. If your primary platform announced a content ban next week, do you have a written plan for where each creator moves, how her fans follow, and how you keep collecting in the interim, or would you improvise? The 2021 OnlyFans episode gave the whole industry less than a week of warning. Assume the next gives you the same.

Run that scorecard and the abstract fear of processor pressure becomes a concrete list of gaps, each with an owner and a deadline. You cannot stop a card network from leaning on a platform, but you can make sure that when it happens, it costs you a hard quarter instead of the agency. If building that resilience is a job you would rather delegate than staff, it is exactly the kind of behind-the-scenes work a white-label partner handles across a full roster. WhaleFinders operates as the marketing and operations arm for OnlyFans agencies, and that conversation starts on Telegram at t.me/whalefindersupport.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly happened with Steam and itch.io in 2025?

In mid-July 2025 Valve added a rule to Steam's developer onboarding barring content that violates the standards of its payment processors, card networks, and banks, and a batch of adult games was removed around the same time. On July 24, 2025 itch.io deindexed all adult content flagged as not-safe-for-work from its browse and search pages. Both cited payment-processor pressure, and itch.io stated plainly that losing a processor like PayPal or Stripe would impact every creator's ability to do business.

Does this mean OnlyFans is about to ban explicit content?

There is no specific indication that it is, and its scale, profitability, and payout history give it strong commercial value to its payment partners. But the honest answer is that this is not fully within OnlyFans' control. In August 2021 it announced an explicit-content ban under banking and processor pressure and reversed it within a week, which proves the chokepoint applies to OnlyFans and not just to gaming stores.

Who is Collective Shout and why do they target payment processors?

Collective Shout is an Australian activist organization that campaigns to remove content it objects to, in its own words even when that content is not illegal. It targets payment processors rather than platforms because that route is far more effective: a card network worried about brand and regulatory risk pressures the platform through its bank, and the platform folds long before any formal action is needed. It never has to win a public debate, only make one processor decide an account is not worth the trouble.

Why are adult platforms more exposed to this than mainstream ones?

Three structural reasons. Card networks classify adult content as high-risk by category, so these platforms run on a smaller pool of willing processors where every partner has outsized leverage. Any large adult catalog contains content that looks indefensible when isolated and shown to a nervous compliance officer. And unlike a giant low-risk retailer, an adult platform has almost no counter-leverage, because the processor was already ambivalent about keeping it.

What is the single most important thing my agency can do about this?

Reduce single-platform concentration before you are forced to. Concretely, build a real earning presence on more than one platform, diversify how you collect and bank money so no one rail can freeze you, and build owned audience channels like an email list that survive any delisting. The audience is the expensive thing to rebuild, so protecting it matters most, and the cheapest fix is usually your own payout-rail concentration. You get little warning, so prepare in advance and keep a written continuity plan.