Here’s a short versions for those who just came by and have no idea what’s going on :
- Itch.io’s blog post about this
- An association called collective shout gave an open letter to payment processors (Visa, Mastercard & Paypal) to stop operating for products that include rape, incest and child abuse
- The payment providers then forced itch.io to comply with this, otherwise they wouldn’t offer payment processing for all of itch.io
- Itch.io needs payments to keep their server running, so they had to quickly comply by de-indexing all games tagged as “Adult”, “Nsfw”, “Lgbt” and some other tags
- De-indexed means you can’t find it when searching, but if you know a game’s name you might still be able to find its itch page on Google. You also keep it in your library if you bught it before, thankfully.
- As collateral damage, many games that are legal but still tagged as adult because they can treat about serious subjects (Bullying, medical conditions, or even sexuality without having scenes of rape and incest etc) got de-indexed as well.
This sucks, but here are some things you can do.
I’m hoping this is just a temporary solution before some solution is founs, because a payment provider having a say on which content on a third party platform is sold is, I think, not the greatest of ideas at all. If you want something and can pay for it then you should be able to get it. If it’s illegal then it’s itch.io’s role to ban it (which they already did for the game looked at by Collective shout), not the payments provider to remove an entire section of a website with thousands of games and creators getting income from it.