GOG is gifting away a collection of grownup video games to protest censorship

In partnership with builders, recreation market GOG (Good Old Games) has launched a new website referred to as FreedomtoBuy.games that’ll allow you to obtain choose “adult” video games totally free. GOG believes the web site takes a stand “against the quiet erasure of creative works from digital shelves,” a response of kinds to latest choices from Steam and Itch to delist sure violent and sexuality-explicit video games from their respective platforms.

GOG is presently providing 13 video games totally free for the subsequent 48 hours, some with well-known scandals and others that appear to fall into the “NSFW visual novel” bucket that makes up nearly all of sexually-explicit video games on digital storefronts. The titles accessible to obtain are:

• Summer’s Gone — Season 1

POSTAL 2, a graphically violent open-world recreation, is a notable inclusion as a result of it was banned in New Zealand in 2004 and delisted from the German version of Steam in 2016. HuniePop, one in all a number of “adult-only” video games Twitch streamers are explicitly forbidden to stream, is sensible on the listing, too. GOG has made a concerted effort to protect video games of all kinds, together with maintaining them in order that they run on present {hardware}. The level of constructing these video games accessible to obtain is as a lot about preservation as it’s about highlighting how apparently straightforward it’s to strain digital storefronts to take away content material, although.

Valve’s choice to delist titles from Steam was chalked as much as a brand new rule that requires video games to abide by the requirements set by the cost processors that work with Steam. Itch supplied an analogous clarification for the delistings on its storefront, pointing to strain cost processors had been receiving from a nonprofit referred to as Collective Shout. In the method, indie video games like VILE: Exhumed have been delisted, primarily for depicting issues that may make a sure group of individuals uncomfortable.

Itch, for its half, appears to be attempting to deliver again as many video games to its storefront as it will possibly. The platform is restoring free NSFW video games, and says it is nonetheless in talks with its cost companions about restoring paid video games to its storefront.