My thoughts on the itch.io purge

I didn't want to talk about this because I don't wanna get all sad in here and I was done with the ranting. However I feel I owe you a word. So consider this something you don't have to read if you don't really care about this whole thing and just want game updates.

As you're almost certainly aware, itch.io just "deindexed" all adult games on the platform, which is a very cute way of saying they shadowbanned them, a.k.a. made them completely unfindable unless you have a direct link. This means no new people can find your game, and your audience is very unlikely to grow as a result.

Some people have taken to blaming a certain game or other doing a big no-no as the catalyst. I will not partake in this dogpiling.
First, because whether you may enjoy the content or find it distasteful (I did not play it), that doesn't justify this whole reaction, and it definitely does not justify throwing it under the bus in response. If a game breaks the rules just ban it and move on guys, it's no big deal, no need to have a meltdown. Second, I believe that's a bad excuse anyways. We've seen, over the past few years, a concerning rise in censorship at the hands of payment processors. In other words, this was something you could smell coming for a while. The figurative frog was being slowly boiled, if you will. Even itch.io, which was all too happy to immediately fully blame the game by name (because that's not gonna direct an angry mob to this one dude, real classy guys) AND some unimportant group for a situation which they have handled in a shockingly horrible manner, already made adult games a huge pain to find that required an unnecessary amount of hoops to jump through to begin with. Then they do this without even a one day notice? Am I expected to believe they really had a one hour deadline to remove all the content? I cannot find it in my heart to give them even the tiniest benefit of the doubt, I simply don't believe they were ready to fight tooth and nail for these games. It was always my suspicion that despite their claims, itch.io never really welcomed adult content, they merely tolerated it, and the way they've gone about this has only reinforced this idea.

They claim that they are reviewing every game and that once they're done the acceptable ones will be back. Some creators are huffing this cope hard, posting things like "I'll be back in no time guys cuz I'm a good boy :)" (lmao). I don't believe this is happening either. I don't want to insult itch.io here, because I know they are a small indie website run by a few guys. But that's precisely the reason. Even big multi-billion dollar companies take weeks to review every new game submission, yet these guys want to check their entire existing catalogue? With how many games are added daily, especially since the rise of AIsloppa? If they really are checking these manually, don't expect to see my game become visible again for the next few months. I think they're simply stalling for time in hopes the situation gets better for them (like payment processors stepping back after pushback, or finding a suitable alternate partner) and they don't have an actual serious plan for now. And if things stay the same, here's what I believe they're going to do: they'll run some sort of sitewide automated scan that checks for bad words or content in the images, which you may be able to individually dispute if you were incorrectly flagged. Then they'll make creators self-report if they have content too spicy, and/or tick a box that says "My game doesn't have anything bad I pwomis." And if it does you'll just stay hidden and people will get a big warning when entering your page too. Then they'll rely on some sort of report system where people can report games that don't disclose this content, and this + answering the disputes will be the only manual checks they'll do. Also they'll probably add a few extra annoying steps to see adult content, maybe even ID verification if they're feeling extra cheeky. If that happens I'll start publishing the public releases here as well, though that was going to happen eventually once the game reaches the file size limit.

Regardless, I will continue as always.