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nortti OH1CAU

@nortti

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i feel fucking crazy when i witness this order of events happening in real time

  1. a few devs receive an email essentially saying "based on a number of factors, you are too high-risk for us to collect payments on your behalf any longer"

  2. based on absolutely fucking nothing, one of them declares that itch is ending all adult game sales

  3. everyone some people just... accepts and believes this, because someone wrote it down. no one those people don't questions why itch would make such a sweeping policy change over email to one account at a time individually

  4. this is repeated so often that it's taken as a fact because it's been said in so many places

please, please, please think for like five seconds oh my god what are we doing

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

driftinggarden
@driftinggarden

i think the conversation is much more nuanced than that. the posts ive seen have interpreted the issue less as "i am 100% sure that itch will end all sales of adult content" and more that "itch has/is making a category of 'high risk creators' that it will no longer accept payments for, and that category can at any time expand to include more and more people." having a category of art that is "too risky" to sell on a platform that was considered less restrictive than the rest is bad news, even if this was all predictable, even if this only affects a few people

even restricting the privileges of a few people creating work that was, at least to my knowledge, not actively hateful or destructive sets a dangerous precedent. i think the assumption that the number of devs who receive consequences because of this policy change will continue to grow is a correct one.

and sure, that might just be how online venues function these days, and perhaps it was inevitable that itch would fall in with the pack re: assessing risk on adult content. maybe itch was never going to be as friendly to artists as we wanted. but it is still upsetting to feel like a place where you could sell adult content might view your work as risky and further limit the ways you can get legally paid for your labor. from the posts ive seen, i don't think everyone is assuming that all adult content could be banned, let alone that itch will tank b/c of this, just that itch has become less of a safe haven for art that is in some way challenging. and that is a real shame

you wrote in your response to bigg that you believe that leafo is balancing a lot of factors while making this chance, and while im sure that's true, that's not what matters to me and other people upset about this. the issue isn't whether or not leafo's decision is carefully considered or a knee-jerk reaction; the issue is how space on the internet to get paid for work that isn't safe for banks and advertisers is shrinking, and this will affect people's lives

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i wrote this moments after seeing someone explicitly say "itch is starting to transition all adult content creators off of this payment system etc etc". specifically, the word, "all". much like the devlog from perverteer which bigg cited to me and which i've seen cited numerous times since:

Rather sad news today. itch.io has effectively ended the sale of adult games on their platform.

doesn't seem very nuanced.

i... wish that people would believe me when i say that i am seeing opinions that i am seeing.

that analysis seems particularly unfair to itch. the overall vibe seems to be "well itch should go to bat for us", but they have been going to bat for us this whole time. itch is a handful of people, few enough that the things they individually care about bleed through into how the company behaves, and this is clearly something they care about. describing it as "falling in with the pack" is baffling to me — the pack is tumblr and facebook, where you're not allowed to post a titty at all. even twitter, bastion of musk-brand free speech, has been moving to make porn inaccessible if you're not logged in. itch doesn't do any of that. itch isn't even restricting selling anything! itch is saying that, for whatever reason, they can't take the payment-related heat on behalf of a few specific devs any more. and that sucks but i don't know what more to ask for.

i very highly value space on the internet that makes room for sexuality, which is exactly why i find it dismaying to see people instantly turn on one of those spaces, after it appears to have been backed into some sort of corner, seemingly because of being one of those spaces.

leafo even includes a mention that it's a big fucking bummer to go to bat for people, even when they are especially troublesome in some unspoken manner, and then find out that they are giving itch 0%! nothing! just, yeah, shield us from all this crap for free. he thinks the devs know the risk itch is taking on their behalf, but i'm not sure that's true. i've seen a lot of depressing commentary from adult devs today that feels like they think itch owes them seamless sales with 100% insulation from all outside forces. but i think "itch is obligated to hold my money in their bank account" is kind of a hard sell.

this is meandering a little, sorry. the discourse is definitely not all thoughtful and it is getting to me

i don't know. maybe i'd feel differently if i hadn't had multiple conversations with two itch people over the years, which is probably like half of the staff

yeah it sucks. it looks arbitrary from the outside (though i've only seen a couple of specific accounts affected so i can't really compare) and it seems like there's something preventing them from giving specifics. maybe they will come up with something they can say in the near future. if not, fundamentally i don't feel like anything has changed: i'm still subject to the whims of the platforms i use. every terms of service in the world says they can delete you or anything you posted at any time for any or no reason at all, even cohost's. my spouse and i have been erased from things just because enough people got in touch with the folks in charge to go "umm there's Drama about them" and they decided we were too much to deal with. no rules violations, no terms of service, no appeals process. just human beings making decisions about how much they can bear on behalf of strangers.

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kiophen
@kiophen

A similar thing that I love is when someone decides to actually read one of the millions of website's TOS and posts a big scary warning about it. They see the part that says "You give the company the right to copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, display, perform, distribute etc your uploaded content" that's there to legally allow the company to have the content on their servers and they say "THEY ARE STEALING EVERYONES ART!!!!! WTF!!!". Repeat for every single company on earth because this is in literally every terms of service I've seen

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sarahzedig
@sarahzedig

i certainly understand the hair trigger when things like this have happened to plenty of once-essential platforms in the past... which is all the more reason why folks ought to, you know, double check real quick and see? just to be safe. this is very much a shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater situation and it's not particularly fun to see in motion

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UncreativeOpinions
@UncreativeOpinions

I can see dramas like this in cohost's (near) future too.

There are some absurd claims being thrown around given the nature of Itch as an entity and its history. But a lot of people repeating the claims have no idea of this history (and probably no reason to) so they just default to assuming its like any other tech company.

(I don't think Itch has handled things particularly gracefully. But I don't think such a way exists. All that says about Itch is that they haven't magically invented one.)

This will happen to cohost too. It's all 'eggbug' and 'chosting' now because a large portion of the audience know of the founders, or know people who know them.

But with time the userbase will be detached enough that there will be Facebook style "REBLOG this to affirm your right to stop cohost OWNING YOUR SOUL in perpetuity" memes, with comments about how cohost deliberately blocks reblog visibility so you can't see the truth about how popular this is!

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dropbear
@dropbear

I did a quick lookup of games I'd consider "high-risk" and they're all still up, so sounds more like "unless you increase the percentage given to us from 0% to something reasonable enough to help fend off charge-backs, we're not gonna be able to help you".

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arina-artemis
@arina-artemis

I think you are, in part, misrepresenting the issue.

The thing isn't that Itch is officially ending adult game sales. It's that now every adult game creator is basically under constant threat of Itch throwing them to the wolves (of Stripe and Paypal). Heck, you even acknowledged "the gun" (your words, not mine) in another post.

And when asked, an Itch person started wiggling out of a straight answer, talking about "revenue percentages" and whatnot.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i said in the same post that i feel like that's always been the case. but this post is about having seen it claimed multiple times that itch is ending all adult sales, which is not true.

i also said in that post that i don't think there is a straight answer

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arina-artemis
@arina-artemis

I'd say that, from a certain point of view, it definitely feels like Itch is ending all adult sales. Why would anyone risk selling on a platform if, at any moment, they can be declared "high risk" and have their business frozen and revenue seized?

I think the straight answer here is that Itch isn't willing to work with adult game artists and would rather just find a solution for itself. Which is exactly what Tumblr did. Which is what OnlyFans tried to do to make itself "more appealing" to conservative rich people.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

why has everyone been selling on itch when that has always been the case for the entire website? we know paypal and stripe don't like being used for anything sexual. we know itch has been doing it anyway. there has been nothing stopping paypal and stripe from simply cutting itch off at any time, and they would be well within their rights to do so since itch is knowingly violating their terms of service.

that's a strange interpretation. tumblr outright banned anything explicit site-wide, and itch... is... not even remotely doing that. it sucks that their paypal shield isn't holding at 100%, but i don't understand treating 99.8% like it's exactly the same as 0%. we aren't owed access to their platform and bank account.

but i'm repeating myself and going around in circles and neither of us is going to enjoy this conversation. for what it's worth, i've caught glimpses behind the curtain from time to time over the decades, and i do have a very rough idea of what an incredible pain in the ass it is to deal with money — especially other people's money. and to me, itch's actions look like the sort of thing you only do when all the other options are much worse.

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arina-artemis
@arina-artemis

but i'm repeating myself and going around in circles and neither of us is going to enjoy this conversation.

I mean, yeah. I can't say anything that wasn't said to you already by other people. And since you brushed off their concerns, there's no reason for you not to brush off mine.

We'll see what happens I guess.

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