I'm a bit disappointed about that decision because that means stuff I have / haven't read will be hidden and open the door for more stuff to be removed you say you aren't changing the story but that was part of the reason I started playing this no hate I have sadly just lost interest because of this Decision so I wonder how much of it now hidden
That is sadly part of a fear that many people will have. People reading the itch version will always second guess everything. When one scene ends, was the scene experienced in its entirety or was some dialogue and images removed? They will have to wonder, was a sentence taken out or was an entire paragraph taken out? Did we see all of the cuteness from Marruk or were we deprived of some of the cuteness? While it was made clear from other replies that the story is going to be told the way it was always going to be told, that can still be an area of nuance. For example, an anime that does a faithful retelling of the story from the manga, will often have a lot of content cut out compared to the manga. While you will still get an understanding of the story, if you go back and read the manga, you will still often find dialogue that reveal little things about a character that while not very important to the plot, it works to add more substance to a character. Other times it can be smaller details that contribute to world building where the anime may skim over in order to maintain pacing to have a strong showing for the first 12 episodes.
One of the issues that has lead to such widespread overreaction (itch initially delisting all NSFW including simple strong language and violence), is because the responses from Stripe used terms that are subjective in nature. There is no telling if their definition of adult content was narrowly defined as what was seen in in the game mentioned be collective shout (a game which both platforms quickly removed long before the censorship campaign ever started), or if they defined it more broadly where anything more extreme than Mario Cart is considered prohibited.
While my example is more extreme to convey the concept, since there are many ways to interpret the verbiage, it will be impossible to understand how far the content filtering/ censorship goes, and due to how VNs often work, it can be difficult know what is missing, and that will create a sense that something is missing with many scenes, even if nothing is actually missing between the censored version and the uncensored version.
One potential workarounds will be to clearly indicate when something is censored, but that will then interrupt the flow of the story and change the overall experience. Imagine watching a serious movie and in a scene, the actor pauses a conversation they are having, and looks at the camera and then states that on the 29mm T 1.8 lens on the ALEXA mini LF is not fully centered of the focus ring and that will lead to uneven wear on both the focus ring and follow focus module. Something like that will change the whole vibe and feeling of the movie.
Overall it complicates things in ways that seem unnecessary considering that other VNs, including ones with lots of NSFW content are back to posting uncensored updates with no negative impact to their listing.
it's probably because this one is where you could pay if you wanted but now it can't be but I do wonder how many scenes are censored this game had some intense parts some scary scenes, some sad or depressing parts, and a little bit of explicit stuff I don't know what this content filter blocks I'm just disappointed not even mad because scenes like that I found interesting even one of the explicit scenes I thought was a bit funny and I don't know if mastercard or visa are at a point where they are willing to let nsfw content be something you can buy so it will probably be a while before those scenes are added back like I said no hate to the creator I just not as interested as before I don't know those are just my thoughts
Technically, a self censor path would allow a full restoration of all monetization options. Though depending on the extent, it could change the story. For example, what if they made a E rated version of Doom: The Dark Ages?
I was thinking of having it nowhere near the download page. The idea is establishing a clear decoopling such that no aspect of new payment processor TOS additions can apply, thus making it so that until the situation is resolved, there will be at least some transaction path open through the platform for one time donations.
Then once itch gets a better understanding of any restrictions thhe payent processor has, or better yet, if the protests work in reversing it all, then they can revert everything to how it was before.
The only thing that changed is the scene where the MC masturbates in the shower thinking about porn on his laptop has him lying in bed thinking about the movies on his laptop instead of porn. Everything else is the exact same. The movies instead of porn scene already existed in the vn since a sfw version has always been developed parallel to the rest of the story.
like I said I didn't know what scenes were hidden and I don't know what scenes will be hidden in the future I always played the nsfw version and that was the scene I thought was a bit funny because of how the mc reacts but part of were my disappointment comes from is how vague all of the policies I have read from Mastercard Visa and PayPal are I'm pretty sure horror things are included and this game has horror elements and I don't know if that stuff can be taken out of the story so it then can be monotized again another thing is it will probably be a long time before this stuff could be added back and new stuff added Mastercard and Visa have both said that they allow legal content while actively blocking stuff so it might be soon but it will probably be months or a year or two before this is reversed