SnepShark

Slowly making dogress

22, just graduated!

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Play my strange games over on snepshark.itch.io!

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

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:


SnepShark
@SnepShark

…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)

… 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.

thank you. I haven’t wanted to point this out in the discord ‘cause the people saying it are clearly just lashing out after having been put in a bad situation (and very likely through little fault of their own if your guess is right), but every time someone said something like “but all the games that got hit were vanilla stuff, your game is way more a of a risk than mine” to someone making more niche games for queer/furry/etc. audiences was just… not fun to read


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

it takes seconds to speculate that it's a forthcoming full adult game ban, but hours and days to actually go through, talk to people, and suss out what the truth is. something something metaphor for what's wrong with society at large.

(this is not blaming any one person as much as it is just "yep these problems sure happen a lot, huh")

there's a whole thing here where people are primed to suspect a particular motive or reason, and they latch onto it when it looks even remotely plausible, even if it only fits a small fraction of what's happening

like, what ban on sexuality has started out by making a change to the sales of a handful of vanilla hetero things? not even taking them down, just "you gotta sell them yourselves sorry". that doesn't make any sense!

and it drives me nuts but the way people justify it leaves me with no idea how to even begin to chip away at it

the other problem is of course you get the people who saw the speculation, latch onto it, and then manage to miss all of the updates that the sky is in fact not falling, so it will never die

I saw people saying it was explicitly targeting queer people and trying to ban queer people off the platform, and while I hadn't dug into it that deeply, I was pretty sure that it was going to end up being pretty basic hetero porn stuff. I get really annoyed by how often people like to treat "queer content" and "adult content" as the same thing. There are times that adult content bans disproportionately affect queer people, but that was not the point being made by the post I saw. They went straight to "itch is banning queer content!"

Thank you for doing Journalism.

Whatever the reason is (porn-related, porn-correlated, or just roll of the dice), it sure seems that some aspect of the forces involved means that Itch cannot be as transparent as everyone would like and that sucks. Lack of transparent information is the biggest lubricant to any rumor-mill.

Plus, as you've noted, particular victims being bad actors and trying to self-promote themselves into good standing. Definitely seen that happen before, repeatedly.

haha, i don't know if it quite qualifies as journalism when most of it is guesswork

and yeah people in the itch discord keep pressing for more information and i just think... he can't. obviously he can't. this isn't like a big company where support is twelve levels removed from decision-makers and there's a whole PR department and anything anyone says needs approval. that is The Guy. that is Leaf Itch. if he had something to say he could just say it, so there's gotta be a very compelling reason he hasn't

This is what is suspected right from the get go. Thanks for following up on leads, I think your assessment is very likely, especially compared to the other speculations going on.

Its really frustrating that people will jump straight on the misinformation bandwagon, hopefully this point of view can reach them.

in reply to @SnepShark's post:

yeah there's one or two people who don't seem to get that "risk" is a business term that means something, and it's not just... "i feel iffy about this because someone might not like it". that interpretation doesn't make any sense at all here but it's just lodged in a couple brains