How would have applying moderation years ago enabled Itch and Steam to sell porn games today?
It's one thing to have occasional issues with stuff slipping through the cracks, that happens. But it's a completely different thing to just not do anything for years. In the case of Steam, let's just take the recent Nazi scandal [1] - reports of users using blatant Nazi imagery and vocabulary date back almost a decade [2] and that's the oldest thing I could find in a minute of Googling, I 'member this being a thing even years before Trump's first presidency but honestly I can't be bothered to search for more old Nazi shit at 9 o'clock in the morning.
Had Steam done something about the Nazis back in 2017, I guarantee you that 2024 Bloomberg piece wouldn't ever have come into existence. That's seven years in which Steam did nothing to combat users using swastikas - stuff that could trivially be caught using machine learning, even back in the time.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-14/white-sup...
How would moderation help when the games that are being removed from the platforms are perfectly legal, and in compliance with the terms the platforms out on the creators?
The only problem with the games is that a highly influential group of people views them as immoral, and use them as a stepping stone towards achieving their broader goal of censoring all adult content.
The nazi thing may have brought a little bit more attention to Steam but I really can't imagine it was a big decisive factor instead of Steam's allowing of porn games and displaying them on the best selling lists with the adult options enabled