so itchio has shadowbanned any games tagged with ‘nsfw’, ‘adult’, or ‘erotic’ so they don’t show up in searches, and several devs have reported that their r18 games have been removed from the site with no warning
So itch.io/games/nsfw still shows a few thousand titles, but using traditional adult tags to search within there shows ‘no titles’. (src)
And @itch.io is now denying payouts to the creators affected by the takedowns with no notice
“Accounts that are in violation of our terms are not elligible for payouts” (src)
There’s quite a lot of examples of these in various threads now.
It seems to get a bit weird though with some games still appearing on steam.
Also worth noting: Jenny Jiao Hsia’s autobiographical opus Consume Me, which won the Grand Prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival along with a few other awards, is also delisted in itch search (but also has a searchable Steam listing) (src)
itch.io has been pretty open and transparent for their entire existence afaik and dropping all this without warning feels pretty bad
Assuming that this is due to pressure from VISA/MasterCard - like it’s been with Steam.
It’s patently bizarre how a company whose only purpose is transferring money from account A to B can then arbitrarily decide what people are allowed to buy and sell.
It’s one thing to refuse to be an acceptable payment method for NSFW games, but to forbid the store from selling them at all? That’s just megalomania, and a great pointer to why monopolies (and duopolies) are A Bad Thing™
This is the whole point of capitalism. Those who control the systems, control the people, and capital exists to ensure that the people do not control the systems.
What I don’t understand is - WHY?!? They make money off of any transaction made via them. By doing this they are literally making less money. Reputation? I don’t see how it would reasonably be affected?
I want to understand why, what is their incentive to do this?
Blame Melinda Tankard Reist. She started this whole mess.
Are there trustworthy sources that it’s VISA/MasterCard, or is this speculation?
I mean, I would not be surprised at all, since they have a history of misusing their power (iirc they were the reason OnlyFans nearly went SFW), but before calling names, I’d like to be certain.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/valve-confirms-credit-card-companies-pressured-it-to-delist-certain-adult-games-from-steam/
Sorry for being pedantic, but the only confirmed information in that article is “payment processors”. The author seems to just assume that this means credit card companies (what is a reasonable assumption, as said), but it does not sound like that part is confirmed…
No longer an assumption - from itch themselves: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
They only mention “payment processors”, not Visa, MasterCard, PayPal,… So, this does not answer which payment processor(s) are behind the push.