i've only been able to personally identify 6 specific accounts that itch has shunted to direct-to-you payments. i don't want to name and shame here, but of those...
two are subverting the normal itch model in favor of a "subscription" model, where every time they release a new build of the same game, they hide the previous game page and create a new duplicate one, so anyone who owns an old build has to buy it again.
this seems like the shape of thing that might create some accounting headaches and irritate a fraud department somewhere. (one of the two also had their rev share at 0%.) it also just feels a bit slimy so i wouldn't enjoy being on the hook for it. remember, the whole idea here is that the money goes into itch's bank account, which makes a lot of things become itch's problem. i can very easily imagine this puts you on kinda thin ice to start with
and this is why i'm not surprised itch wouldn't want to... try and give a clear guideline to individual accounts? because this kind of model already suggests to me that they might try to stop exactly on the guideline. "how much can i get away with" kinda vibes. and "i'm not touching you, i'm not touching you" is not really something i would want to deal with, when it's my ass on the line. for free
maybe you wouldn't make that leap. sure. i'm not saying it's definitely correct, only that it's a reasonably plausible thing to expect
one is a studio of two people that has published 40 games, the oldest of which is from march 2022. their twitter is from dec 2021, so i don't think it's a backlog either.
a handful are demos of others, but they are mostly distinct, paid games. over a quarter of them are bejeweled clones with different pinups attached, but i lost track of which ones i'd checked so i don't have an exact count. several are minesweeper, several are jigsaws. a couple of them also explain they use entirely generative artwork, and while i can't be sure if any of the others do... well i don't know what exactly is going on here but it smells just a bit fishy
suffice to say, i would also hesitate to have this activity go through my bank account
for the other three, i have no idea. nothing that i can see publicly stands out as financially dubious. one of them only sells incest games, but they aren't the only one doing that, so there must be some other factor but i can't figure out what it is. how annoying.
but it is very, very conspicuous that half of them are doing something publicly-visible that immediately sets off fraud-adjacent alarm bells for me... but that also isn't quite outrageous enough to ban outright, and would be difficult to draw a clear line for anyway.
and i've seen all three of these developers making outraged posts about this without ever once mentioning that they're doing anything that could even be considered unscrupulous. i am left feeling a little bit like they've tried to manipulate me into joining their outcry on false pretenses, by framing this as though itch targeted them completely at random. i really do not like it.
anyway it's looking like itch may have decided, based on a combination of factors, that these accounts are too risky to accept payments for. you know, like they said they were doing. and it makes sense to me that they don't want to just say "so you've got, you know, a whiff of fraud", or try to work it out like "can you do a bit less fraud? that would be nice" because neither of those conversations are going to be productive. and they can't give out the secret formula because you don't tell everyone how you do fraud prevention, any more than you explain how your spam detection works.
and that's not to say these devs were doing fraud. but people who are in charge of money? hoo boy, they don't like anything that even reminds them of fraud.
i dunno. i am, of course, still just guessing. but i did a bit of legwork (thank you, fellow attentive nerds on discord), i found at least some traces of a pattern, and that pattern is a reasonable explanation for how itch is behaving. do with it as you will.
edit: i've briefly spoken to two of the other three devs (all but the incest one). one is absolutely confident they weren't doing anything weird, and their work looks extremely vanilla. they did have their rev share at 0% but i can't see why that would be enough in absence of any other factors. the other doesn't seem to have been doing anything unusual at all and had their rev share left at default, which makes them a total mystery.
so this is not a complete answer, but all i can guess for the rest is that there are financial details none of us are privy to and which itch is not at liberty to divulge. that sucks! sorry, best i've got
Working as a bank teller taught me that, when the person handling your money suddenly becomes uncharacteristically tight-lipped, it usually means they legally can't tell you what is going on, including the fact that they can't legally tell you. It is supremely frustrating to be on the receiving end of that, but money is serious business and there is a lot of regulation that exists for good reason.
Like, if I'm a bank teller and you trip some threshold that triggers a fraud prevention mechanism, I am not going to explain what you did. It would be very bad for everyone if I was handing out the manual on how to do fraud without getting caught.
It's hard to separate when a bank is being shitty (they definitely do this) and when you have run up against some federal regulation that is in place for an extremely good reason. But either way, getting mad and yelling at the teller is not going to get you to the root of the problem.
