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I mean, far as I understand it’s not actually at the cost of that pervy segment. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that every game that was delisted is gone forever, when from the start itch has indicated that it’s a temporary measure to avoid having a financial nuke dropped on them while they review the games one-by-one.

I don’t want to completely downplay the fact that some portion is likely to stay down…that still sucks. But from where I’m sitting, it sure seems like Itch is doing their best to preserve as much as they can with the extremely limited resources they have. I think some people are forgetting that Itch has a massively larger library than steam, while operating with a minuscule fraction of the resources & workforce–it takes them forever to do shit because they’re way overstretched.

I think it’s reasonable to say that this is hurting a ton of people, or that Itch should’ve planned for this situation better in order to minimize the damage (this happens to every platform that hosts adult content, sooner or later). But it feels like most of the folks I see talking about this mess are just yelling “HOW COULD YOU!” at Itch as if it would be better to ignore an existential threat to the site and immediately destroy every developer’s livelihood, and I don’t really see the point of that.

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The far better option would've been to leave them all up while going through them rather then taking them all down before doing so. As is, it prevents people from even seeing updates relating to games that were taken down if they weren't part of their library, so the devs can't even make plans to move development off-site in response to the censorship. On top of that, they also froze the assets of the devs of any adult-only content, so they can't pull any money out of itch, money they might need to pay for the development of their game. It would be far better to allow them all to remain up while going through them. Christ, no wonder so many devs have already made plans that the moment Itch puts their pages back up to begin directing players off-site to avoid Itch being able to pull this again.

The far better option would’ve been to leave them all up while going through them rather then taking them all down before doing so.

This kills the website

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Itch has a massively larger library than steam, while operating with a minuscule fraction of the resources & workforce–it takes them forever to do shit because they’re way overstretched.

True. But with that in mind, how long will it take for them to to ensure that the games live up to the "non-exhaustive" requiremens of the payment processors? As I mentioned in my OP, an admin promised that "visible labeling is coming", and this was six months ago. So just how long is temporary? The admins said they "await final determinations from our current payment processors" and "There are still unknowns that prevent us from providing a fixed timeline", which makes this "temporary" even more obscure.

Yeah, like I don’t want to pretend that it’s gonna be over in a jiffy or that the situation doesn’t extremely suck.

At the same time, as much as I’d love that visible genAI labeling I doubt it was actually that high on their priorities list–more of a declaration that they’re going to do it as part of their ongoing work on the site. By contrast, I’m pretty sure this mess is priority #1 for Itch right now since it represents a major threat to their business (for both market share & PR reasons).

It’s still going to take a while, way too fuckn long, just due to the volume of work–but I don’t think they’re being actively deceptive or acting in bad faith here, which is a vibe I kinda read from your OP. It seems more like they got taken by surprise and are trying to simultaneously deal with the immediate PR fallout from their base while also sifting through thousands of games by hand.

And you know what, coming back to your original post: I think this is exactly the sort of scenario the AI checkbox is trying to avoid. If they had imposed similarly strict tagging requirements for types of NSFW content (one of many possible ‘measures’ I’ve alluded to in my past post) the number of games brought down by this would’ve likely been far lower.

I agree that AI being treated as copyright infringement is unlikely at this stage (I think it should’ve been, but that’s neither here nor there), but with the number of lawsuits flying around in different jurisdictions it’s not a settled fact yet either. If even one of those went a certain way, itch would be in a similar bind as today–just with ‘everything from the past 2-3 years’ instead of ‘everything with NSFW tagging / matching a couple keywords in the description’.