In case you are not aware, an organization called Collective Shout - https://www.collectiveshout.org/ has been applying pressure to MasterCard/Visa which are the payment processors for most sites. This led to pressure being exerted on both Steam and Itch. This has led to most nsfw games on itch being delisted from organic searches and the outright removal of some of them.
The TLDR is that this means looking for NSFW content on itch is now left for direct searches only, and many of the games you know and love could have been completely removed from the site as well. There's no way to know the damage until the delisting is over, but there are at least 10-15 games that I've heard from around the grapevine that have lost their pages that were reported in either other itch devlogs or on discord servers I've been a part of.
What does this mean for Games from Me?
I have recently been in development for a game called Fur Party. You may have seen me posting content about it on my bluesky/twitter. I was getting prepared to do marketing for it now that the core gameplay experience is mostly complete and art is the thing that is missing. Unfortunately this has put me all on the back foot, so I set up a subscribestar to act as an alternative storefront.
Here's a sample of the key art along with some of the romanceable characters! There's gonna be at least 10 with actual sex and flirt sequences as well as several bonus arts for various partygoers.
What do you get from the subscribestar?
For $6 you get access to all of my games and any concepts/arts that I'm working on for my new games. It's barebones at the moment, but does have RC: Moushley and RC: 3D up there. And once Fur Party is complete, that will also be downloadable from that platform.
I'm wishing sanity to all the individuals affected by this and hope that they are able to find solutions that allow them to display and sell their works. This is unacceptable treatment for the entire nsfw community and has left us with only stopgaps and last minute responses.
What can we do about this?
https://x.com/EromancerGames/status/1948452913573232806
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:kogqmdmg4ihosd3cgfgyn5rb/post/3lupsglwjqc2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSJtVUPePY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5BsyS_WE1k/
https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy
Several people smarter than me have ideas and potential suggestions for how we can respond, ranging from contacting the card companies themselves, signing petitions as a Us citizen, or spreading the word until someone is able to come up with a concrete and actionable plan.
If you have any reasonable ideas or actionable ones please feel free to post them below or spread them around, the more we get people talking about this, the better it will be for us all.
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phone calls to the payment processors responsible seem to be making waves so far. That is how collective voice did it and how we should do it back. I'd also suggest folks contact local representatives about how this infringes our rights.
just keep out hope man, we will defeat those f****** payment processes and banks eventually
I have already signed a petition that has reached last I checked 33,000 plus signatures and that is just one method.
eventually people will have enough and that will push the governments in the world to step in and stop the banks and payment processes for doing this.