I figure alot of site traffic will dry up for sites because of this decision. This was the best way for me to contribute to developers when I had extra money. Sadly, My issues with Patreon left a bad taste and has kept me from Subscribestar as well. I hope good results for you and thank you for your hard work. I'm still enjoying your game.
A lot of devs who received that dreaded email I talked to, still offer our games on this site for free (around 70% of the devs I asked). In my case, and others', so the players, who aren't the culprits, aren't punished. Other devs to get some promotion or for other reasons.
We can't monetize our work here because of itch policies, so only Patreon, Subscribestar and other minor platforms are left for us to do it (Steam isn't a viable option for a lot of devs). And I'm not talking about getting rich or even working on this for a living. I'm talking about covering the expenses. During 2023, only in Daz assets, I spent 36% of my Patreon and Subscribestar combined (raw) income. Add to that licensed music, taxes, hardware, internet, and professional services. Making a game, if you want to do it legally, is expensive.
I believe it is a combination of several factors, and not some itch policy against adult content. If they had a policy against adult content, they would ban you, like gamejolt did.
Yet here you are, and are even allowed to link to your other sources of income.
But there are problems with payments. Like you found out with stripe. The cheap payment processors that are available in most countries have some issues with adult content. Which is outragoues, since they are only parasites to real credit card companies that would even handle payments for real life porn.
Itch could step up to handle finaces different for adult content, but this would cost a lot of money. If you look at actual real life adult content, we are talking about taking half the money and having a minimum payout of over 100 bucks. This will not work for small time indie game payouts.
I hope they will offer some forms of additional optional financial methods of payment services. They need to take away some of the cake they let Patreon have at the moment. Patreon does have policy issues with adult content. They will ban you for content that is ok on itch.
A finished game might be released on places like Nutaku, gog or even Steam. But there are not many places for unfinished games - with payments for the developer.
By what I heard, it's one of the payment processors threatening itch.io because of adult games, and itch.io folding just months after they declared publicly they will support them.
Now there's no payments, so payment processors can't meddle into what isn't a business anymore. But also that's not what I would call support NSFW games.
Subscribestar have a minimum payout. And most of the devs there are indie like me. And I prefer they take half the money I earn than not allowing me to get any money through the platform. Besides, Steam, the biggest game platform out there, only takes 30% if you sell under 500k games, and that percentage goes down if you sell more. That's less than 50%.
Since Patreon is the "best" platform to monetize the game right now, most devs (me included) comply to their ToS to avoid getting banned.
If itch allowed something like Patreon with the restrictions of Subscribestar and allowed NSFW devs to monetize their games, I think they could take a big chunk of Patreon's customers, especially for games that update in long cycles. Some players could think "Why pay $5 monthly for 6 months without an update if I can get the game for $5 when it goes out on itch?". Yes, I know I'm talking about my interests, but I already have customers like that. They re-pledge to My Dorm's Patreon when there's an update and cancel after downloading it. That kind of customers should be itch target.
It's only common sense, or lack of it, on itch and the payment processors part. Economical theory says that, if there's demand for a product, someone will offer it. Right now there are three of big platforms that allow AVNs (with more or less restrictions): Steam, Patreon, and Subscribestar. So itch renouncing voluntarily to that market, after they stated on Twitter that they would support them, is only giving money to their rivals.
AVNs won't disappear. For most devs, doing this is a passion project that costs us a lot of money. If we are lucky, we can compensate it with monetization, but I guess that less than 5% of devs can make a living out of it. So if we invest our money and our time doing something we love, we won't stop doing it because one platform, like itch, doesn't like it. We will go to the platforms that allow it and work there.
In my case, I decided to continue publishing the game here for free because I didn't want to punish the players who don't want or can't subscribe to Patreon/SS. For this update, I wanted to do an SFW version to be able to monetize it on itch. It hasn't been as well received as I hoped (only 10 purchases when the last time Itch allowed me to monetize the NSFW version I sold 142 games) but I think it's a visibility thing. Most AVN players don't look for games in the general section. I will continue to publish it here (Early access SFW and when it becomes free, the NSFW version) for a couple of updates and see if it's worth the extra work. If not, I will return to publish only the NSFW version.
Is there a way to search for games on Patreon? I do not know of any. I think on Subscribestar you can search for similar accounts.
And Steam does not count in my book, because your product has to be near finished. They have quality standards on top of content restrictions.
You cannot buy development version games anywhere that I know of, except on itch.
On Patreon and Subscribestar you only get temporary access to a snapshot. You do not "buy" the game there, only whatever bonus the developer might give you. Same for other "donation" sites that enable devs to get money somehow.
The reason why people "sell" games on patreon/subscribestar is as you said. There is a market for that service. And that service is buying indie adult games.
(Oh, and the example above with the 50% or so was for real life porn. That is what those cam girls pay.)