The discovery that Collective Shout may have goaded Mastercard and co into demanding changes has fuelled this argument, given Collective Shout's connections to certain fundamentally religious and conservative-leaning organisations such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and Exodus Cry - both of whom signed Collective Shout's open letter from July 11th.
In an investigation for Vice, Ana Valens dug into the history of these groups, which I'll summarise with a few pieces of information from my own research. Exodus Cry are an American Christian non-profit advocacy organization who seek the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, from porn to strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. In 2013, their founder and CEO, Benjamin Nolot, compared abortion to the Holocaust and described gay marriage as an "unspeakable offence to God", though he says his views on these subjects have changed since.
Scenes from Leonida in the first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer.
Image credit: Rockstar Games
NCOSE, meanwhile, were founded by American clergymen in the 1960s, and have asserted that pornography at large is a "public health crisis". Katherine Cross wrote a piece for Game Developer in 2018 about NCOSE's previous attempts to have games featuring "sexual exploitation" removed from Steam, concluding that "what these groups actually want has nothing to do with the dignity of anyone, and everything to do with restoring a traditional gender order that criminalizes both sexual expression and sexual labor."