There is a purchase I've made in the past (which I won't name right now because I'm waiting for a reply from the developer) which is now no longer downloadable from my Library. The developer removed all the downloadable content and replaced it with a 0-byte placeholder.
Are Itch.io developers permitted to do this? It seems like if we purchase content here we should have some kind of protection from a developer who decides to permanently delete it, regardless of their reasons for doing so.
That's a loophole in the system we have. Creators can't simply delete a project that has been bought by people already: they'd have to contact support, and give a good reason. But we can't prevent them from deleting old project files, otherwise they'd keep accumulating as they're replaced with newer versions. So some creators have taken advantage of this by deleting all files from projects they no longer want to make available, instead of simply taking them private. We're not sure how we could allow creators to change which files they offer for download while preventing them from deleting every file, or for that matter replacing them with placeholders. If you have an idea, we'd like to hear it.
Well, I think that yes there are at least partial solutions that would help. But from what you wrote in your reply, it sounds like itch does not keep backups of the all the files that developers upload to their projects. Is that the case?
And also just to clarify: You describe what happens as being a "loophole in the system" - Does that mean that itch does not permit developers to remove files in this way, and for the times that it does happen, itch at least has the authority (if not the capability) to undo the changes?
We prevent creators from removing projects. We don't prevent them from removing files. That's the loophole. And we don't keep backups of those files, to the best of my knowledge (I could be wrong). So we can't undo the changes ourselves either. How would we even be sure when it's justified to do it? Most creators change files in order to give players new versions of a game, which is a good thing and shouldn't be made difficult.
If itch does not keep backups of anything, then that obviously makes any potential remedy pretty meaningless. I don't know what the financial situation of itch is right now, but if the ability to have at least a single backup is achievable then that's the first step I hope you would make.
As far as changing the rules for developers goes, I think at least one change to the rules could be made stating that developers are not allowed to remove content to such an extreme that it leaves customers who purchased it with virtually nothing - an empty text file as is what happened with my purchase (that has since resolved by the developer), or replacing a game with an image, audio or video file, etc. I can remember at least one instance of Valve reversing a similar change that was done to a game on Steam, so I expect that would be not be a difficult rule to enforce.
I think giving a prompt to the user who is looking to exploit this loophole about just setting the project to "private" instead would help (user attempts to upload a different file type, large discrepancy in file size, radically different name. Have the system check for these things). Some people may be doing this out of ignorance and that would at least cut down on the numbers in theory. Another thing that would help in this situation is a "punishment" system to discourage this kind of behavior. From what I understand, users who do this don't face any repercussions at all. Updating TOS and putting these two things in place should be enough to dissuade most the folks from doing it.
