It's a complicated, confusing, and frustrating mix of shit. "Hey sexual abuse is wrong" is something that everyone should agree with, but stomping out anything that has to do with sexual abuse or even just sex in general is NOT the way to deal with it! You don't remove a splinter by chopping off the arm. The group Collective Shout is a group that seems to really want to do good but is doing so by punishing anyone who has ever even touched sex work with a ten-foot-pole.
The game "No Mercy" that was (supposedly) the catalyst for this whole thing is a pretty disgusting game, absolutely. I don't think that a game like that should have been made. But I do not think that the answer to "there was a gross game that made me uncomfortable" should have been "force this website to take down anything and everything that makes me feel icky"
I seriously don't envy the itch team. I know everyone says that they should have fought harder, but we don't get to see what happened behind the scenes-- there could have been legal threats, threats from the credit card companies that required immediate (less than 24-hour notice), itch could have been fighting them for awhile, they could have caved in and rolled over immediately-- we don't know. All we really know is that a group that has lofty goals that claims to care about people's wellbeing is pressuring credit card companies to fuck people over.
