This morning I woke up, checked itch.io, and saw that one of my games had been removed. Confused, I went to my PC and realized that not only that game had disappeared from the listings— ALL THE GAMES ON MY ACCOUNT HAVE DISAPPEARED FROM THE LISTINGS.
The itch.io administration has kept me in an unjust permanent quarantine since January of this year, so I thought it was a specific attack from the admins against me and went to the community posts to complain. Then I saw that it wasn’t just me. They removed ALL NSFW GAMES from ALL developers.
Why did they do it? I'm not 100% informed on the whole thing, but apparently a game called “No Mercy” was recently published, and it was so controversial it got banned from Steam and from itch.io. But it didn’t stop there. The banks—YES, THE BANKS—decided they would no longer support Steam if it kept hosting games with incest or who knows what else. Steam said: “Okay, boss,” and changed its policies to ban such games.
I have games with incest; Love’s Heart itself contains incest. Why not? Minors shouldn’t be able to play this type of game to begin with. And for adults—what’s the problem? If you like incest in video games, go ahead, here are options to add it to your playthrough. If you don’t like it, just ignore it. It’s perfectly normal, nothing to make a fuss about. Like it? Play it. Don’t like it? Ignore it. But the banks got obsessed with banning it, and both Steam and itch.io gave in.
But itch.io has decided to go even further. The creator of itch.io, leafo, has REMOVED ALL NSFW GAMES FROM THE LISTINGS, regardless of whether they contain incest or not.
Here’s the post he wrote about it: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
The worst part is they did it without warning. Not that it would have been any less serious with notice, but this way it feels like an even bigger betrayal against those of us who trusted itch.io to publish our games here.
And at least there are big game developers who no longer depend on itch.io for promotion. They have Discord servers with thousands of members, Patreons with hundreds of supporters, their own websites, and who knows what else. But I, since January of this year, when the unjust quarantine they imposed began, have had less and less visibility and support on itch.io. And now they do this to me? This completely destroys me—so many games published with love on this platform, and now they won’t reach anyone new. I don’t have an audience elsewhere; I depend on itch.io to grow. And the admins were already screwing me over for no reason—what am I supposed to do now?
This situation is simply unacceptable.
What can we do about it? If you want to take action, just speak out. Go to the itch.io community and open new posts complaining about the situation and sharing your opinion. Join the itch.io Discord and share your thoughts there too—always respectfully, of course. Complain and apply pressure so the administration reconsiders this mistake. I’ve already spoken up myself.
If you’re not following me elsewhere yet, please do—I need your support now more than ever, as itch.io is simply screwing us over like this. You can follow me especially on Discord and Patreon, where I always post the latest news and releases of my games:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/CapkyGames
Discord: https://discord.gg/rnBMqZbCdQ
Have a great day. I’m definitely not going to.
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Afaik, some activist group called Collective Shout is pushing for this, because of their belief that all porn victimizes women, even if the porn contains no real-life people involved. And they don't give a wit to context, bc gd MOUTHWASHING was also nixed. So, even if one shows rape, incest and/or extreme kink, even in a way that says some of these things are bad, that doesn't matter.
Being a cis lesbian, I find this view of theirs condescending, irrational, and wholly misinformed. It really does feel like the company is run by a group of sex-negative Gender Criticals, who don't do the few good ideas they have any justice. As long as smth is tagged well, it should still be allowed to exist.
I'm sorry this is happening to you, and I hope you figure smth out. Perhaps GameJolt?
Yes, what that group is doing is shameful—acting like they are the moral authority and trying to decide what people can or cannot consume.
Thank you so much for your words. I am glad you have this stance—I completely agree with you.
I do not know GameJolt, but I will look into it. Thanks.
I’m also extremely upset by this news, but alas, nothing can change it, no complaints will help fix it, once they said and they did it right away, it means they didn’t want any problems, will they return the NSWF content? Unlikely.
Of course complaining helps. If you say nothing, it means you approve of the decision, and then there's no reason to change it.
The problem is if you only complain for a couple of days and then forget about it. For itch.io to seriously consider reversing the change, there would need to be real damage. How? By leaving itch.io, of course. For developers, removing our games and not publishing here anymore. Or at the very least, setting to 0% the share we donate to itch.io from each sale. For players, stopping the use of itch.io or at least no longer buying games there.
Will we do that? Some of us, yes. But probably not enough to cause real damage for itch.io to reverse the situation.
As for what you said at the end, yes, of course they'll bring back NSFW content. What they're doing now is reviewing all games and removing those that violate their recently tightened policies. When they're done, they'll bring back the rest. The problem is the damage they're doing to us, the developers, in the meantime—and the damage to our freedom. They've banned one of my games that doesn't break the rules at all, and they just didn't care.
Looks like we can’t trust any agreement as far as we can throw it, because might makes right. Time to train then.
What a disgrace this is.
The more I live, the more I’m pissed with life
Can’t a man goon/fap in peace?
Apparently, no...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIAYtHiCjN8
Nooooooooooooooo...