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
As someone with no interest in predominantly NSFW games, it does bother me a bit that that is the most common type of game that show up for me unless I disable NSFW completely.
But my problem is exclusively with the algorithm and not with those games. I’m surprised that in 2025 a 200+ hour rpg with one implied sex scene may get tagged with the same ‘NSFW’ category as a Sex Simulator type of game, with no way to hide one without also hiding the other.
All itch.io had to do was create a “monetization-unfriendly” tag and aplly it to those games and hide them behind an opt-in toggle (with some proper notification for current users). They could even target their ads based on that toggle and get even happier advertisers with it.