You can sell porn all over the place online. Not every site has to be a porn site. This is a welcome change imo.
being too controversial
I love the effort to get a petition going. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of important nuance missing from the petition. Itch has not said "Adult content is not acceptable," nor has Itch "effectively ended the sale of adult games on their platform." Not all mature content developers have received this (as stated in this thread several times, including by the OP), and many continue to be able to sell their projects on Itch.
That said, a LOT of adult developers are legitimately concerned because this is happening to some developers and the criteria used to select those developers have not been clearly explained to the community. Based on Leafo's posts on Discord, we understand it has something to do with risk to Itch and the developers' revenue sharing, but we don't have a lot of detail around what those "risks" are, nor do we know what percentage of revenue sharing would be acceptable.
It seems like this is a change in policy, from a lewd-games friendly platform that was willing to take a risk that developers would select 0% revenue sharing, to one that is going to require a certain level of revenue sharing to offset the risks and costs of hosting certain types of content. But the community didn't receive any notice about the change in policy or the measurements or standards it's based on, so we're a bit freaked out because we don't know what we need to do in order to remain eligible for the "collected by itch" payment method.
I think the claim that Itch is doing something they've explicitly said they're not doing (i.e., de-platforming all mature content) isn't going to be received well or leave them inclined to respond favorably to the petition.
JMO.
The problem can't be the NSFW content, in that case just ban all that content and that's it.
The problem is not the rev share either, if you are looking to earn money, you force a minimum rev share to be placed instead of removing those people from your payment system.
The problem comes from violating the TOS of one of the companies that are used to pay/charge for the games. Here we can only guess what really happened, some mother who complained in paypal for what her son bought. A letter from paypal to itch. A consultant who alerted itch to a possible danger, etc.
The point is that any paid game that uses paypal, strep, etc. and violates their TOS, jeopardizes the relationship between Itch and that company, which is why Itch is separating them from their pay-per-collection system.
Itch has always been characterized by being reactive and is made up of a very small staff for the amount of content it handles (it's easy to find games that violate copyrights, for example). Possibly it is very difficult to apply this rule to all the games that exist (or maybe they simply do not want to?), surely they will try to protect many developers, but unfortunately there are games and developers that it is impossible.
If it's a low-profile game, you're probably fine, even if you don't follow paypal's TOS.
Games that attract too much attention, regardless of their rev-share percentage, will be a danger and therefore, they will be removed from the payment system.
The games that are in between, will be more difficult to classify, but for example, if you share part of your profits (more than 10% for example) you imply that you support Itch and its community and that makes you gain sympathy from the staff and they may try to be more lenient.
On the contrary, if you earn hundreds of dollars a month, with a rev-share of 0%, you will be perceived as someone who is not interested in being part of the community and therefore, the staff will have no problem applying strictly. the rules.
In conclusion, if you want to play safe, you must abide by the rules of paypal and the other companies (that means no more NSFW games that use the Itch payment system), if you don't, it is possible (not 100% sure) that you will end up receiving the email if your game attracts attention.
DISCLAIM: I don't work or know the itch staff, this is just an analysis based on what I've read these days about it.
This is entirely a guess on my part, but I think it's a reasonable assumption.
From what we've seen, I think the payment companies started to put some pressure on Itch to stop supporting adult content. Itch then looked over their adult games market, saw how much money they were making from it, and decided that it wasn't worth trying to hold onto that money compared to the risk of losing the payment companies support for the rest of the website.
Now perhaps some of this is due to revenue sharing issues, and that adult games proportionally didn't assign a good split on revenue... but I think it's most likely that they just don't get much revenue from them at all compared to the SFW stuff and the team didn't think they could fight Paypal or whoever was doing the pressuring on the issue for such little money.
Some people have pointed out that Steam still does adult games stuff, but I counter that with the fact that steam is more than large enough to just laugh in those companies faces if they tried to pressure Valve on the matter. The amount of backlash those payments companies would recieve if Valve was set against them is pretty large, and not worht the risk for them.
Perhaps I'm wrong but this is my take.
Well, for the time bieng, one cannot sell on itch, given certain circumstances, but that does not mean you cannot be on itch. You all realize this, do you not?
All those devs being aproved by Patreon and even Steam, you can still promote your other platforms, as you could before. You do realize, this is not usually possible on other platforms. While often frustrating in communication, Itch is a great place! Casually linking to your 7 other outlets, where the price might be less, try that on Steam. Itch even lets you integrate patreon in your profile; i hope they get some kind of affiliate linking bonus back from patreon.
So if you have paid only content, put a demo version here. Explain that you can only make sales via those other platforms for the time being. But please do not shit on itch for giving you free hosting. Banning adult content looks differnt.
I do not approve of devs using 0% share. If I could see that devs are sharing none, I might even avoid paying them more, or at all, because it is not only the dev that I would want to pay more, it is the platform too. But if the dev is not giving revenue, my intended donation to itch would be 0.
Even with general policy of free choseable revenue share, there can be exceptions or additional features . One would be mandatory minimum for adult stuff, as it creates more maintenance because of all those fundamentalists that report stuff that is against their morals. Or dealing differntly with overpayments. Or my favorite, add a bonus tip to itch button in payment, similar to concept of Humblebundle.
My concern is, that itch might drop certain features for real, like indie adult stuff, if it is no longer sustainable - and juding from comments here, many devs set sharing to 0 :-(
I had a look at how a hardcore site does it. They take about 50% and there is a minimum payout, like 100 bucks or more. Sounds familiar to that adult gaming site mentioned above.
Typical services used are ePayService, Paxum, Local Wires, Directa24, ACH, Direct Payments, EU Wire Transfer and International Wire Transfer.
So maybe it would be a possibility to offer an additional method that is fixed revenue sharing but has different payout method, for those that cannot use the existing ones. imho it is not helping to have devs be here and just have them point to other site that does do take big cut. Better take big cut on itch, where people can overpay. There are people that refuse to pay patreon or steam out of principle.
I believe that the biggest problem the devs are having is that this message being sent makes the change a fait accompli. There's no warning, no indication as to something that could be changed to avoid this step - they go from being fine as far as they know, to being prevented from using itch as they have been for years, in some cases. Content that was completed over a year ago, if not longer, is no longer able to be sold.
If this is because the dev theoretically violated the TOS of one or more payment processors, then the devs involved would probably appreciate knowing exactly what said violation was. In the PayPal TOS, the only thing straight-out banned is obscene material. And the judgment on what is or isn't obscene tends to be subjective (as a Supreme Court Justice said regarding one case, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it.")
For quite a while now, Patreon has not allowed content with incest on their site. That's frequently been dodged by changing relationships (mom becomes landlady, siblings become roommates, etc.). There's at least one VN I can think of on this site that makes little to no sense, unless you mentally translate these relationships back to what they "should" be. In many cases, such VNs are constructed so that a simple script can be added to change these relationships to incestuous ones. If that sort of thing is causing the problem, then similar solutions could be applied here; the dev would just need to know that.
By not providing such information (which might be provided to itch), the devs are left with a situation where they can't get around the problems - both because they aren't given a chance, and because they wouldn't know what the issue was.
While I realize itch is a small operation, they presumably use the services of lawyers (something most devs wouldn't think to do, even if they could afford to). The refusal to provide details may well be something that comes from lawyers. However, I would tend to think that knowing that a dev's content may violate the terms of service of itches payment processors, then telling devs to set themselves up to use those same payment processors for that same content is deeply unethical, and could be borderline illegal (it could be construed as providing bad legal advice - telling someone to do something you won't do because it might violate a contract). Note: I am not a lawyer, and I've never played one on TV, but I have seen almost every episode of Law & Order (et al.)
I'm not saying any of this is contrary to itch's stated policies, of represents a specific change to those policies. However, it does seem like itch policy may be being enforced more strictly. I believe it would greatly help the developers if itch could:
- Explain what has caused them to terminate the dev's ability to use itch to handle individual payments and sales tax/VAT/whatever on same;
- At a minimum, explain that there are explicit reasons why each dev has been picked out (even if for some reason itch can't divulge what those are);
- If there is a common set of underlying issues that can affect devs, publicizing what those underlying issues are, so that devs who may not know they may be violating TOS get the heads-up, allowing them to try to resolve any such issues before they become an actual problem;
- Consider signing up with a payment processor that doesn't put the same limitations on the content; and finally
- Consider requiring a minimum share percentage, if only on content marked NSFW. Not a popular move I'm sure, but if devs with such content place a heavier burden on itch, that has to be covered somehow.