Every few days, 27-year-old Rosario checks Steam. He wants to make sure his visual novel about a queer sex worker, Parfum Nostalgique, is still up on the popular PC game distribution platform. He’s heard of games getting pulled from Steam for simply having LGBTQ+ content, and just as many stories of creators who are surprised their games have survived an ongoing culling. “Nobody really knows what gets a game taken down,” Rosario told Polygon in an interview.
Rosario is one of many indie game developers affected by the payment processor dilemma that’s taken hold of Steam over the last few months. In 2025, a compendium of games was delisted from the platform in part due to a campaign waged by Collective Shout. The extremist organization has made no secret of the fact it wants gaming platforms to enact stricter rules against games that feature violence against women, regardless of the context under which it transpires and with no care for the nuance the depiction might hold. Earlier this year, group made a point to reach out to executives at companies like Visa and Mastercard to convince them that their technology was being used to purchase morally questionable content. Payment processors deny that they’ve played any part in the pressure to take down games with sexual themes, and they say that they’re fine with anything so long as it is legal. But representatives from major platforms like Steam contradict those narratives by claiming pressure was exerted by intermediaries who represent the interests of the payment processors.
In other words, the edict to pull or refuse NSFW games may not have come directly from entities like Visa or Mastercard, but the groups that did express concern to Valve work in tandem with those processors. If this sounds messy, that’s because it is. Things have only continued to unravel as game developers claim they can no longer use Steam’s early access model for adult games, yet still lack real clarity about what rules they’re breaking and how to avoid them.
Meeting that moment, Rosario has recently released a pay-what-you-can zine called Holding the Baby: How to make and distribute physical games in the age of digital download dominance. The idea is that, if digital platforms are exerting too much control over what people can or cannot play, then perhaps it is time to take back control through self-distribution. It’s an initiative that might sound daunting, especially for indie developers with limited budgets and time. Yet Rosario believes developers have much to gain from physical releases.
When Rosario refers to physical games, he’s not talking about CDs or cartridges. Those are certainly options, but one of the most cost-effective forms of physical media are USB drives. And USB drives don’t have to be boring rectangular sticks. They come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors. You can have a flash drive that’s shaped like a key, or a flash drive that pops out of a credit card.
Critically, mediums like this allow for a far more bespoke experience than a standardized store page can. Platforms like itch.io do allow for more customization than Steam does, but ultimately, you’re still limited by a specific shape and format. When you bring physical distribution into the mix, the only real limit is your imagination. To illustrate this point, Rosario points to his own game. During events and while engaging with real-world customers, Rosario pulls out a circular “wafer” USB, which can hold information on a thin stick that folds down. The USB has been adorned with luscious illustrations on the front, and dangles from a large blue tassel. All of this wraps around a larger card that’s shaped like a classic perfume bottle. Looking at it, you might not even realize it’s a game at all.
And why stop there? Rosario also points toward releases he’s done where the games are contained in sheer envelopes, with green twine and a red seal that’s evocative of a rose. If you want to go one step further, you could make a custom wax seal to hold it all together. Whatever the case, the point is to make holding and opening games special.
Rosario didn’t come up with the idea of distributing art this way, and credits forerunner organizations like State of Play, which sells games in cassette tape boxes. And Rosario is aware that pivoting to self-distribution doesn’t really solve the larger issue. But as he sees it, we’re already living in a brutal world that’s often devoid of joy. Turning games into art projects like this could help developers tap into the positive reasons they make games in the first place. It also makes it more likely that the player’s experience with the game will be more memorable.
“I think everyone’s game should have the opportunity to be more than a game, but a memento of a day in someone’s life, an object that sits in their house, a personal belonging,” Rosario says. “When I sell a physical copy, it starts its journey, traveling on its adventure. If I left it up to a mass marketplace or a social media algorithm to distribute my work, all I’d have to tell me my work was reaching people would be a quick, underwhelming check of numbers.”
Developers don’t necessarily have to rush to abandon Steam, even if the environment is full of uncertainty. And Rosario says he’s grateful he can be on the platform, which makes finding community easy and convenient. It’s not about giving the finger to Valve, either. But recent events should be a wake-up call to developers, Rosario says. Payment processors, and by proxy distrubution platforms, cannot always be on the side of the creators.
“So where are we supposed to go if we can’t trust our platforms to have our backs?” Rosario muses. “I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it would be wise if we all took some steps to take back the means of how our work is distributed in some way.”
If you ask Rosario, he has no idea why his game is still up on Steam. Parfum Nostalgique is not a salacious adventure full of sex, but he also knows some developers have gotten dinged for way tamer content. But Rosario’s dreamed of being a game developer since he was 7. He’s not about to let some invisible force entirely what happens next.
“It’s naive to suggest that everything would be fixed if we all delete our games from Steam and Itch.io, and move onto our own websites, and I don’t want anyone to think that’s what I’m trying to say, but there simply should be no attempt at a Library of Alexandria for games,” Rosario said. “It’s not sustainable, it’s not reliable, and we need to shift our attention to more methods of distribution that are.”