The situation developed rapidly, and we had to act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure. Unfortunately, this meant it was not realistic to provide creators with advance notice before making this change. We know this is not ideal, and we apologize for the abruptness of this change.
I think this is what bugs me the most here. Yes, things escalated quickly, but not as quickly as implied here. The letter, calling out Itch and Steam specifically, was posted July 10th or 11th. Steam acted to remove certain offending content by the 15th. By that point it would’ve been prudent to assume that if even Steam wasn’t immune to these sort of pressure campaigns, Itch certainly wouldn’t be. And yet, no public action was taken here for a full week after that.
You had to have known days before taking action that the action would be necessary. Even a simple 24-hour warning that NSFW content would be temporarily delisted and reviewed and that there was no need for immediate panic - even if, indeed, there was reason to panic - would’ve gone a long way towards cooling off the sparks before they erupted into a wildfire. Instead, no public statement was issued until hours after the fact.
Obviously, yes, the payment processors taking this excuse to apply pressure are the root cause of the issue, one that puts you in a difficult position for the future of the site no matter what direction you choose. But it’s unrealistic to say that this shitshow was completely unavoidable.
EDIT: To be clear, I’m basing my assumption that the deindexing is temporary on the phrasing from the update post:
Pages will remain deindexed as we complete our review.
The unwritten implication is that the remaining pages would be re-indexed after the review is complete. If this is not the plan, that’s something you’re going to need to clarify sooner rather than later.