Lacey 🐇

me:

@leafo i know you can't be clearer on the precise reasons for shunting accounts onto "direct to you"

but is it hypothetically possible that, for comparable reasons, the same might be done to an account that had only ever sold SFW games?

not to ask about a particular situation, but whether there could conceivably be any such situation

leafo:

Good question, I can think of at least one developer off the top of my head in our past where we may have considered using this restriction if we had it implemented at the time. It's the same justification: mitigating risk. We assume a liability & cost with running accounts in our Payouts system, and sometimes we have to make the difficult decisions for the greater stability of the platform.

Unfortunately I don't think it's appropriate to share who this is and why, as we do not make private account matters public.

this was everyone's first assumption, but itch never actually said anything of the sort, so... i asked

feel like this bolsters my theory, which i've since refined into "customer fraud". it matches almost everything:

• fraud is vastly more common with sexual work (which is a big part of why no one wants to touch it), so nsfw games would be far more likely to be affected, but not necessarily the only ones. check

• it's not about anything the devs or games are specifically doing — so there would be no obvious pattern among the affected accounts, nothing for itch to ask anyone to fix, and nothing they could offer clear guidance about. check

• itch would have no reason to take down the games or accounts, or even ban them from sales; they would only want to get themselves out of the sales process. check

• there would be no crystal clear threshold for what is too much of a problem, and there would be a lot of guessing involved — is this a recurring pattern or just a spike, is it likely to continue, is it likely to happen with future games, is there something about the games that seems likely to attract more of it, etc. it would all add up to a very fuzzy measurement of, well, "risk". so, check

• it would indeed be pretty frustrating to have to deal with this (and all the downstream financial services breathing down your neck) only to find that several of the impacted devs are also expecting you to do it for free. however a higher revenue share wouldn't magically make the problem go away, since giving itch a cut doesn't actually do anything about the downstream financial services breathing down their neck. check

• people who feel cheated are much more likely to do chargebacks, so devs who do weird stuff with sales (like the faux-subscription model) would be over-represented. check, i think

• i'm now up to a list of like 20 affected devs (3 do the faux-subscription thing), and the vast majority make fairly vanilla hetero stuff with 3d models — i.e., extremely mainstream. i suspect that would attract a larger share of distant randos (who would have fewer qualms about doing chargebacks or whatever), vs a closer audience who feels some personal investment in you and your work (and actively want you to have their money)

leafo has even sorta-kinda acknowledged in discord that the affected people could try again (when one asked), since itch doesn't forbid making multiple accounts (as long as you don't use them for anything shady). and since itch didn't make any specific complaints, the games themselves are presumably still fine. but also he would be unable to explicitly offer this as advice since it is likely (but not guaranteed) that the same factors which attracted fraud in the first place, however arbitrary they may be, would attract it again. so that all checks out too.

the only murky bit that leaves is exactly why itch can't just say "a big part of this is customer fraud". granted, fraud is Actual Crime and something you detect with a lot of heuristics, so they couldn't give details, of course. but i don't know why they couldn't even say that's what's happening in general terms.

my best guess is that someone downstream thinks itch has a customer fraud rate that's too high, which is the sort of thing that can jeopardize your ability to take payments at all, and so itch urgently needed to prune the biggest sources of it. but even saying that's what they're doing could be used as a hint to figure out how someone is measuring "too high", and you want to keep your fraud heuristics as close to your chest as possible.

regardless, itch's tight-lipped stance is closer to making sense with the fraud theory than with anything else i've heard. there are plenty of explanations that fit 20% of the affected games but make no sense with the rest and contradict half of what itch has said. this accounts for just about everything, i think.

unfortunately, if i'm right, that means it basically comes down to plain old bad luck and you can't do anything to prevent it. it has nothing to do with what you do or don't do; it is entirely about the whims of the crowd. if you get cut off then it is, ironically, your own customers doing it to you.

that's business, i guess.

but if you're doing anything quirky or personal or queer, i would guess that your audience is very likely to feel invested in what you're doing, and you'll almost certainly be fine. i can take some other guesses at what would minimize risk but i don't want anyone to think i'm giving the magic formula here

i tried explaining this to someone personally and he completely rejected it. among other things, he pointed out that steam and patreon and twitch all say you're not liable for chargebacks.

but i think some of us have lost some perspective in a world where most of the websites you visit are owned by billion-dollar international corporations. itch is like, five people. that's 1 more person than cohost. the guy in charge isn't a ceo; he's just the guy who wrote the website. there's no war chest. there's no VC cash. there are no investors (as far as i'm aware). it's not laden with ads that make it millions a year. it's not owned by fucking amazon.

and that means it doesn't have to answer to a board or stockholders or advertisers, but it is very vulnerable at the point where the money comes in, and it doesn't have a billion-dollar buffer for when something goes wrong.

itch is basically a successful indie project, the thing we are all aspiring to make. i don't think itch really has many more resources than any of us do, except that they might make enough to like, afford a lawyer or accountant when necessary. but it's not like they can pick up the phone and call John Google and have a chat. they only have so much weight they can throw around

and i'm not privy to specifics, but the one thing i'm pretty sure about is that financial fraud is fucking radioactive. if a gateway you depend on says you have too much of it, you reduce it, or they drop you and run. doesn't matter if it's fair; doesn't matter if you followed all the rules; doesn't matter if it's not your fault and you did nothing wrong.

that does suck, especially if it impacts you. and a lot of platforms try to hide all that kind of stuff behind a curtain, so you can just think of them as a magical machine you put Content into and get Money out of. but it seems itch is not quite big enough to pull that off 100% of the time.