3 days into the nsfw deindexing, i want to briefly discuss how this has impacted my analytics.

before the deindexing, i was getting 200-500 views a day, with ~100-200 browser plays a day.

after the deindexing, i have consistently gotten ~130 views for the past 3 days, and ~40 browser plays.

to me, this is not the end of the world. practically nobody bought my games anyway (but a big thank you to those who did!). it still kind of blows my mind to have 130 people look at something i made, every single day, when my more sfw projects in the past have had practically a hundredth that much attention.

so, life seems to go on. of course, it is very possible that my games will eventually just be banned. i sure hope that never happens. i try my best to make my games thoughtful and positive about sexuality, and i personally believe they are somehow important in a sea of misogynistic and violent pornography. maybe that's a bit egotistical. whatever.

one important note on that is: practically all the views are now coming from collections with my games in them. so, i guess, consider making collections of games if you have a nice relevant group of games to put together..? i'm not sure exactly how itch decides to recommend people collections but it does seem to sometimes put them in a sidebar next to searches.

one other thing: there is now a section in the itch.io rules saying that sexual games accepting payment should not be "animal-related." once again i personally find this very frustrating. i think my games, despite being about horses, are in many ways healthier about sexuality than many games about humans (for example, heart by hoof has extremely explicit consent, something that i have not seen in many other games).

either way, i am happy to follow the rules here. i earned almost no money off my games anyway; if they are unconditionally allowed on itch.io as long as they're unpaid, that's fine by me. i would love to somehow earn a living off of this art but i was never particularly close to that dream. my deeper hope is that following the rules in this way may even mean they could be re-indexed..? i mean, if itch.io itself is happy to host any kind of sexual content, and the rules only apply to the payments themselves, that seems like as much as i could really hope for.

one thing some folks might not know is that paid nsfw games on itch were always kind of... not thaaaaat legit? like, they always had a rule that your games must comply with the rules of the payment processors if they are going to be paid. and the rules of the payment processors were always that sex was just banned. so i really was not even clear if i could monetize my work in the first place. my understanding is people kind of just... have been doing it despite the rules, and that's fine by me, but it honestly doesn't seem like we could have expected that to not bite us later.

it is kind of sad, if a bit funny, that i only had payments set up for about a month before this happened. i should have really set them up february 2024 when i first made all the way through.

i hope i eventually find a way to earn a few bucks. until then, i'm happy to just see a few views keep coming in. that is still very cool to me. :)