Itch has responded.

Itch has posted a post hoc explanation for their actions.

My reaction is basically: so?

There's no way anyone should believe they had to literally like minutes to comply. They chose to carry out this action in the dead of night with no notice or communication, and only posted the justification after they got torched on social media. Many games were totally removed, some of which were apparently (hopefully) misidentified. These include non-erotic LGBTQ+ games and even some horror games. Paying customers who own these removed games can no longer get them, and devs who built an audience on Itch had no way to communicate with that audience prior to being forced off the platform.

Look, I like Itch. I've done business on their platform for years. I've stuck up for them, recommended them to other devs. I've kept the revenue split with them at or above the recommended/default level for my entire carreer on their site, and I've always believed they are a valuable and important service in an industry dominated by the whims of Steam. But could this be the final form of a problem they've always had?

Recall a few years ago when they changed their algorithm, also with no notice--they even tried to gaslight devs at first that it hadn't been changed. At the time, I dealt with Itch's staff, and the feeling I came away with at that time was gloomy. I felt disrespected and devalued. At the time I swallowed that feeling, but in the post I wrote after the fact, I think that feeling still came through:

Likewise, there is a presupposition that games outside the very tip top of the top are actually undeserving of whatever success they've garnered--that it's some sort of snowball effect, what the staff calls "popular for being popular" and attributes to their own algorithm granting these games "free" exposure. It's not that games like mine steadily climbed the list on the back of quality updates and constant pavement pounding, but that Itch.io arbitrarily granted us a stroke of success that fed into further, even less deserved success.

Itch staff often responds to issues with game visibility, for example, when a game isn't boosted after an update, with a dismissive "we don't guarantee you anything" kind of reply, and literally won't even hear devs out about this stuff a lot of times even when it's clear they made a mistake on their end. I think Itch treats devs well most of the time, but there's this sneaky bit of contempt they seem to have for devs that ever even dare to suggest that Itch is useful for discoverability and find that important. Like we're taking advantage by getting traffic on their platform. They make you feel like a beggar asking for a handout when you ask them anything about this, and tell you to go pound the pavement on your own like you aren't already. It's very frustrating and insulting.

While I obviously condemn anyone harassing or abusing the Itch staff, I do genuinely hope that there can be some level of self-reflection here. Devs should have been given the opportunity to at least communicate with their audiences. Buyers of content should still be able to get that content (even Steam managed that one); this has NOTHING to do with payment processors as the payments were already made. I hope Itch will treat devs with more respect and transparency going forward.

As I said, I like Itch. This is not their finest hour. I might've made the same decisions about adult content if I were in their shoes, but dropping those changes in the dead of night without notice and without letting buyers access their owned content: that's inexcusable.

As for my games: they are still currently up, but my all my money on the platform is frozen and my account seems to be under some sort of review, so we'll see how things go.

Edit: Also, who knows if Patreon is next or not, and they have their own problems, but I have to shout them out, they got into it with the payment processors a few years ago and actually worked out a deal with them. Patreon basically went to the mat for their adult content creators, and are the only company I know of that has ever actually protected, even if imperfectly, my Constitutional right to express myself with goofy porn games. Decent post editor these days, too.

Of course, many people did and do get purged from Patreon, but it's just further proof the Itch had room and time to work some things out, there's no reason they had to do what they did this way.