here is what leafo said on discord:
(re someone asking about the email and this particular post)
Looks like they shared the entire notice we sent to some accounts. I don't have anything else to add on top of that as I think it accurately describes the situation.
...
When you opt your account into our payouts system, you are asking us to take on the liability of selling your work on all of our merchant accounts, payment processing services, etc. As described in the email, there are many factors that contribute to the risk associated with running an account for someone. Our goal is to enable the most creators to use our service as possible. However, when a seller knowingly shares content that may pose potential issues, it becomes unfair to the rest of the creators we serve.
I try to avoid mentioning revenue share in these types of discussions, as we aren't asking people to set their rev share to anything specific to get access. But, the arrangement I described above can be especially disheartening when many of these sellers also set their rev share to 0. I'm fairly sure the devs are very much aware of the risks and are purely taking advantage of the situation. It's a lose-lose situation for itch.io. Unfortunately that leaves us in a tricky position and we sometimes need to make the difficult decision about what accounts are eligible for certain features.
Hope that gives you some clarity about our process.
(when asked if any particular revshare would resolve the problem)
Please re-read my message. We are not asking accounts to set their revshare to anything specific.
so here is what it smells like is happening, to me:
itch is already in a precarious position due to acting as, essentially, porn laundering — you can't sell explicit stuff through paypal, but you can slap it on itch and have people buy it through paypal there
so i'm guessing they had to jettison a relatively small number of devs for a combination of reasons, which i speculate could include
- only having nsfw games
- disproportionately many chargebacks (something porn is infamous for, big reason merchants hate it)
- having low revenue share
- themes that a guy in a suit somewhere may find dubious
- god knows what else
in which case there... can't... really be a clear line, because the line is just "is worth the risk to collect payments for". even if there were a line that were somehow quantifiable, at best that would get them to "the risk we've determined these devs pose is exactly balanced out by how much money they give us" which is still not great
again i don't actually know anything beyond the quotes above (and leafo has not commented either way on any of my speculation), but this makes the most sense to me. it is not an ideal situation, but i trust leafo enough to assume there are multiple conflicting forces and it is infeasible to explain them all publicly
it certainly doesn't look at all like itch is ending all adult game sales. i mean, it would be completely ridiculous to do that by emailing one dev at a time
Like, I read @leafo's post and understand it, but without actual communication on what particular themes might be disallowed or what rev share might put you on the chopping block, this still makes Itch feel like a much much less hospitable place for nsfw content than any of us thought it was a day ago. I appreciate that making arbitrary decisions based on a number of soft factors is probably a lot easier for leafo and the platform, but now it feels like I've got a gun to my head and no idea what I have to do to keep the trigger from being pulled.
