Itch.io still should have stood up to them even if it meant all payments being blocked. It is never ok to give into bullies. Giving in shows them they can get away with it and they will keep taking more and more away from you until there's nothing left.
Other people have already suggested crypto as a temporary option.
Also itchio taking away peoples purchased games is extra scummy. Not even steam did that.
Stood up? How? Steam couldn't even do that and they were far bigger than itch.io ever was. That's a bit laughable. Unlike Steam though, itch.io had no internal control of what gets it and what not and also offered if I recall correctly mostly payment through US services (and every delay that would come with that), so they literally have to go nuclear to be able to comply like Steam, which will inevitably hurt them financially, especially since it's way smaller team than Steam ever was. It sucks but there is not much they can do until they make sure they comply, which means a lot of games will be gone for some time and some will never come back.
How? Any way you possibly can. You or I don't know for a fact Stream couldn't have done anything as we don't work there and do not have access to their financials. If I were Steam I would go full elon musk and tell them to go f themselves (just like he did to the advertisers), then begin building my own payment processing infrastructure. Either that or by making my own crypto currency that doesn't rely on any other company.
Wild take in response to "The owner of twitter deliberately made its bot praise hitler and spout racist conspiracy theories, which is someone everyone fucking saw and only someone engaging in bad faith would deny that" but okay.
Also pretty wild that you're derailing the conversation like this. You on mastercard's payroll or something?
The problem is that leaves every dev in the position of not making any money whatsoever from itch.
It also results in the site being shut down within a couple months, because there's no way in hell they have the funds to actually maintain the servers and whatnot for terribly long without an actual cash flow.
No it doesn't. It means stopping all purchases on the site until you set up your own payment processor. No games would be removed. Unless you mean people who don't already own them not being able to buy them in the meantime.
They haven't tried it so you cannot say it can't work. Let's not act like some sites don't rely on donations. I'm not talking about paying devs while doing this, just paying for server costs.
You are suggesting something along the lines of "Power went out? Make your own power grid that supplies your entire region!"
This is not a feasible solution for basically anybody.
Of literally every entity affected by this, to date, literally only Valve could maybe pull it off. Because it takes a fuckton of money, time (time you're making zero profits during), and getting a lot of banks to cooperate with you (which also takes a fuckton of the money you're rapidly losing).