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
I’ll be brutal.
If folks want to actually do something about this, let’s make /c/stopcensoringmedia.
I’ve been following this story farther than most of lemmy, but I keep being read on blind eyes.
This is fascism in praxis. It is Capitalism’s final goal. If you don’t want your media to be financially coerced to be censored, you need to provide the means to share it, propagate it, and support it. This is a call for illegality, but laws are for the coercives.
So if you really feel like you want to protect something from becoming lost media, I urge folks to ensure payment processors do not engage on leveraging the means of trades.
too smart;ELI5:
it’s time beat the bad guys with guns and booty🎁