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⚠️ A NOTE ABOUT ITCH.IO ⚠️ Dear #GameDev: I'm not going to pretend I know all the details, or that I should be considered an expert, but we need to talk about this situation. 🧵 P.S. - Jump to the end of the thread for what you personally can do to help address the situation.

If you're unaware of what's happening, Itch.io has deindexed NSFW and LGBT+ content from their website. It's being reported that they're deleting some projects, shadowbanning others, and withholding payouts from NSFW and LGBT creators. See the linked article for their explanation of the situation.

Why is this important? Itch.io has been a bastion for "non-traditional" games for years now. Porn, furry, kink, queer... as long as they're not harmful, pretty much anything has been allowed.

Whether you personally enjoy these games or not is irrelevant. They deserve to be made by those who enjoy making them, and they deserve a platform where they can find an audience. Itch.io has been that platform, and it was decimated overnight.

Where does the blame lie? The foremost agitator is an organization known as "Collective Shout." They're an anti-porn TERF group lobbying to remove games from the internet if they violate the "traditional" values.

The group has claimed credit for the recent changes to Steam's payment processor policies which target adult games, and now they've successfully lobbied Visa and Mastercard to stop processing payments for Itch.io if NSFW and LGBT content isn't removed from their platform.

In response to the threat, Itch.io started the process of cleansing their site, leaving many creators in the lurch. Keep in mind that Itch.io is not entirely to blame. I'm not here to defend ANY companies, but I can sympathize with the terror of facing litigation from Goliath.

As far as I know, we don't yet have details on what Itch.io received from the payment processors. It may have included a gag to prevent them speaking further about the situation. I'm not saying that Itch is in the clear, just that we don't yet have all the information.

SO, what should YOU do? Consider supporting the ACLU's campaign against Mastercard's unjust policies that impact this sort of issue.