Everyone who cares should also make a complaint to Valve saying they won’t be making any more purchases until they reverse their censorship decisions
stripe is apparently looking into being able to allowing NSFW content in future, which makes me happy
Honestly I’m really happy with how itch.io is handling it. Making sure they still get their money, but quickly reintroducing the games, and telling us the exact reason why they had to disable those games in the first place. Great management.
Agreed, I am genuinely impressed by this, this is unironically a better run, better organized response to a situation like this than most billion dollar + companies that trade on the stock market would pull off.
Absolute kudos and bravo to the itch.io team!
Ehhhhhh. Happy is a strong word.
I think itch is doing a much better job now. I think they still completely removed things from people’s accounts (sort of. It is still there, we just can’t access it. Maybe) and cut off a LOT of developers’ entire income source with absolutely zero warning outside of some whinging in a discord. I want to say it was almost a full day later before any official statements were released?
They are course correcting and hopefully this goes somewhere. But the trust thermocline is breached and no developers are there by choice anymore. Similarly, as (primarily) a consumer, I genuinely don’t feel comfortable buying games on itch that I am not planning to fully back up myself.
Its a lot like with the Unity shitshow a few years back. Game dev can’t pivot overnight but mastodon was lit up with “so… what else is out there” from the more vocal devs and bsky is the same for storefronts.
I empathize with the developers because unannounced interruptions to their revenue streams are not good. I don’t know why itch made the initial decision to implement their changes the way they did, but my guess is they got a series of strongly worded letters out of the blue from payment processors and were given a timeline of “IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE” and had to shut off the tap and adjust or risk their own ability to receive ANY payments.
Even if they handled it badly, which maybe they did, it’s a better measure of a company/person in how they address mistakes or bad moves. They aren’t perfect but they seem to be trying to address concerns and be transparent, at least as transparent as they feel they can be in an uncertain situation where they have to protect themselves legally and operate from a position where every official statement they make will be blown up by media. So they need to be very, very careful how they communicate to risk further damage.
Remember, itch IS NOT the bad guy here, it’s the payment processors. Do not lose sight of that.
I can absolutely understand why people who have had their livelihoods disrupted are unhappy but I empathize with the position that itch is in and I care a lot more about how they course correct and manage fallout, even if they make bad decisions when faced with requirement to take immediate action (and I can’t even say whether they did or not, nobody can, because nobody but them has the facts), than I care about whether they made a bad decision in the moment.
People, good people, fuck up all the time. How they manage the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.
If they keep doing the same shit over and over it’s a different story.
PS: I have no dog in this fight except I think what the payment processors are doing is wrong, but it doesn’t explicitly affect me at all. I’m also not particularly educated on this except for what I read in the news, I’ve never used itch at all. I just don’t think payment processors should be in the business of casting moral judgments on legal transactions. IMO it should be ILLEGAL for them to deny services for LEGAL goods and services.
I empathize with the developers because unannounced interruptions to their revenue streams are not good.
You can emphasize with suddenly telling companies to get fucked and figure it out themselves during a time of REALLY big economic certainty (seriously, game dev is a wasteland) and think it is “not good”? Good for you!
given a timeline of “IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE” and had to shut off the tap and adjust or risk their own ability to receive ANY payments.
That REALLY isn’t how things work and that still doesn’t excuse silence outside of whinging on discord.
Remember, itch IS NOT the bad guy here, it’s the payment processors. Do not lose sight of that.
There are multiple “bad guys” here.
People, good people, fuck up all the time. How they manage the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.
Say it with me: Corporations are not people.
Good, itch fucked up. Really great that absolutely nobody else has been impacted except for John Itch. Oh… wait…
Like, seriously, read what you fucking posted. “I can understand how companies might have been afraid that they would be forced to fire everyone they work with and go bankrupt but, really, isn’t the important thing that itch learned a lesson?”. Like… the only thing missing was a ukelele.
That REALLY isn’t how things work
It definitely can be. I haven’t dealt with payment processors in this way, but I’ve had (spurious) DCMA takedowns that required my service providers to act immediately, or else they’d get sued. They did notify me, but gave me about 2h to figure something else out.
A payment processor is in full control of payments across your entire site (unless you have multiple, I guess). They can pull the rug with no notice if they want. Doesn’t seem nice, but nice isn’t part of the business model.
Pretty much this. Back when this went down the good people of Bluesky, who are totally not like Twitter users, called for itch.ios blood. Calling them sellouts, betrayers and whatnot. Big brain move right there.
Entirely seriously:
While this is far from some kind of total victory, that a conversation is happening at all is much better than that not being the case.
I am guessing payprocs did not have any fucking clue the extent of backlash they would receive from just being extremely vauge / heavy handed.
Hopefully this can at least result in some more concrete and specific definitions of what they will and will not allow, so that existing platforms at least have an idea of what the actual rules are, and then from there, potentially a more targeted public pressure campaign could manifest.
If itch.io manages to get them to actually clarify the rules, this could lead to other platforms, Steam, Nutaku, etc, also reworking their allowed/not allowed games, now having more clarity and less fear of being totally nuked for violating vague guidelines.
True, this is good news. But, it should not have come down to the entire fucking government of Japan weighting in on the global impacts of this insane decision!
Is this truly the amount of mountain-moving we have to do to counteract a single organization’s opinion? There is a clear difference in effort required between one side and the other.
The issue isn’t the amount of effort required to undo one action.
It is the complete lack of effort every other time this is done. Gamers Rise Up STILL pretend this is some watershed moment that nobody could have foreseen. And while it is always dangerous to consider The Internet to be a monolith, you can even see threads here where people didn’t care when it was just “incest and furry shit” on Steam.
Let alone when it was basically the entirety of Pornhub a couple years back.
And that is the problem. This kind of shit happens. Why should a megacorp fight it when nobody will care one way or another and this avoids any bad press? Why should news outlets report on it when the outcome will be “Ugh, fucking scammer journalists. How fucking dare they put that behind a paywall or have ads”?
So they just kind of acquiesce to the loudest voice in the room until people DO care.
The lesson to take from this isn’t that we need government intervention every single time chuds do anything.
The lesson should be to ACTUALLY support independent journalism that covers shit like this. At the very least, shut the fuck up when you see a paywall from a blog run by some of the most established and prestigious investigative journalists in the tech space. Preferably consider throwing a buck or two their way so they can pay for legal fees.
And… ACTUALLY support good smut (that aligns with your preferences, morals, etc). Everyone (except some of the aces) likes to get a bit frisky with themselves every so often. Rather than always just pirate that shit consider throwing a few bucks at creators (and games) that do it right. You’ll find you get a LOT more of the stuff you like (see: The rise of “chick porn” in the late 00s/early 10s… and the overabundance of stepsister washing machine porn in the 20s…) AND it shows stores that there is actually a market for that and it might be a bad idea to kill it.
Because first they come for the smut. Then they come for the art.
Is this truly the amount of mountain-moving we have to do to counteract a single organization’s opinion?
It looks like another commenter has already well replied to this, but uh, yes.
thunder crack
Welcome… to the real world.
…
Video games are treats.
Treats only flow by the arcane and abstract machinations of those with power, and those with power are fickle, greedy, and often do not busy themselves with the minutiae of the affairs of the hordes of useless eaters.
I agree with you, the power differential is absurdly vast, the situation is plainly ‘unfair’ by most viewpoints…
… but the question that matters is what are you going to do about that?
deleted by creator
Too late itch.io They have forfeited my trust.
I hope by itch.io you mean visa and mastercard and you’ll never use their services again.
It was stripe BTW, visa and MasterCard are not payment processors.
Their hands were kinda tied mate. It’s not like they revoked already downloaded content.
do you have the same energy towards steam, who capitulated earlier, harder, and hasn’t seemed to be interested in negotiating, despite being much much more powerful and influent than itch?
Steam’s bans were (as far as I’ve seen) far more targeted at content that is a lot tougher to defend. It’s a lot tougher to defend rape and incest content than just all porn and nsfw. Obviously it’s all fantasy and fiction, but it’s still more difficult.
Itch.io went full into banning everything labeled nsfw, LGBTQ, violent, etc. The fact that Steam had a much more targeting impact implies to me that they used their stronger position to negotiate prior to the ban rather than itch.io that banned first and is now trying to walk that back.
I can’t help but wonder if Itch is intentionally going for a malicious compliance route. As you say, it’s tougher to defend rape and incest content, so if they’d opened with that they likely wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much media attention. But by doing it this way, half the internet is talking about payment processors forcing itch to delist NSFW games, even giving juicy headlines like LGBTQ games being disproportionately affected. Then Collective Shout of all groups was forced onto the back foot and forced to say “wait no we just wanted the rape and incest games gone” but now that the story is out there it has a life of its own.
Even if they didn’t do it on purpose, it seems like it’s created a much more effective movement than if they had done it “properly”, regardless of the reason for why it worked out this way.
