Itch has effectively banned the sale of my games on their platform, unfortunately. You can read more about it here.
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Hello Perverteer,
Your statement that Itch has banned the sale of your game has been bothering me ever since you made it but I couldn't quite put my finger on why was that... 🤔
Until I finally noticed that many other creators of porn games still sell their games on Itch and it is only now that I notice the contradiction with your statement of Itch suddenly becoming puritan and banning porn games.
So I read the announcement that you quoted again and then I noticed a detail which eluded me at first.
Itch never banned porn, it is actually some third-party payments providers who suddenly became puritan and denied their services to porn content and Itch merely informed this change of policy from these third-party payments providers while still remaining the haven of creative freedom that it has always been and I still can pay with my card to buy porn games from Itch as if nothing has ever changed which is why your statement has been subconsciously bothering me until I understand this contradiction.
Which makes me curious how do you explain it? 🤔
No, itch.io hasn't banned all pornographic content from their platform. They've just made it impossible for my account to sell anything. This has happened to similar developers, but not all and I believe it is still happening from time to time. The reason why those specific developers and myself were targeted has never been made clear by itch.io. The only reasoning I got from them was the following (also quoted in the news posts I made around the time it happened):
This decision was made after considering various factors related to your account, including nature of content, risk, disputes, and the resources required by our team to review payments associated with your account.
As far as I can tell my game sales weren't overly affected by refunds and or fraudulent charges. So I'm still not sure what prompted the account restrictions.
Oh so it is your account specifically and you don't know why?
Hmm... "risk, disputes"... Could it be because you first included Star Wars' Twileks into your game and even if you did modify it to avoid copyright infringements, your Twill specie is still dangerously close to Star Wars' Twilek specie's intellectual property and Itch anticipates the "risks" of potential "disputes" with Disney's legions of copyright lawyers? 🤔
But what about "reviewing payments associated with your account"? Why would Itch need to review your payments? This is weird because Itch has always granted autonomy to creators and intervene only when requested to so who requested Itch to review your payments? 🤔
You really have to press Itch for answers because you need to know what is the issue with your account so how about you humbly ask Itch what is the issue with your account so you can think of solutions to solve it and restore your account's right to sell your creations, which would at the very least provide you an actual understanding of the issue, yeah? 😉
No, I don't it has anything to do with copyrights, there's a different procedure for that. As for reviewing payments, itch.io conducts a payment review each time they pay out the funds that have been collected on their website to a developer, so I guess it's related to that.
Pressing itch.io is futile. Their support is terrible and there were a couple of forum threads about the situation where they just reiterated their general statements, the same was true for specific support requests.
I didn't know that Itch reviewed every payment, I thought all was automatic and Itch intervened only if asked to. But how does Itch review payments? What does that actually mean? And how would reviewing your payments be any different from reviewing other creators' payments if Itch systematically reviews every payment, what have yours so special? 🤔
Well, this is disappointing revelations, I guess no one escapes entropy, everything unavoidably deteriorates with time... 😞 Or this is the price of success? Itch has grown so popular that they have grown overwhelmed with users to take care of and don't have any time to actually deal with anyone anymore? 🤔
Wait, now that I am reading the forum topic that you linked, I noticed some more intriguing details...
First, "the topic was locked by No Time To Play for being controversial" so I went to their page and they are a mere creator just like you with nothing at all on their page which indicates any authority on Itch forums, there is no mention of them being an administrator nor a moderator, so why did they lock a forum topic without any authority and why is their community posts history full of them bossing around everyone without any authority badge? 🤨
Moreover, they are basically nihilist since they basically state on their creator's page that:
I make games because the alternative is to lie down and never get up again.
I make art because art is good. One of the few good things we have in life.
I write about it all so that others get a better shot at success than I did.
So we basically have a depressive failed creator who didn't get a shot at success, who makes games in order to not lie down and never get up again because art is one of the few things they appreciates in life and who states into their very name that they don't even have time to play as in no time to have fun and enjoy themselves, so how are they any qualified to manage other creators when they already failed at managing themselves to the point of growing nihilist, huh? Actually, this is a good question that I might ask themselves personally...
Now the interesting answer to this forum topic is the pinned answer from leafo who is an actual administrator and therefore actually holds a position of authority to speak in the name of Itch and who provided the complete version of the message that Itch sent to specific creators and it contains a very important sentence that you did not include into your quote of the message since you quoted this part:
This decision was made after considering various factors related to your account, including nature of content, risk, disputes, and the resources required by our team to review payments associated with your account.
While omitting to include into your quote the end of this paragraph which is:
To provide uninterrupted service to as many users as possible, we can no longer facilitate payments for your account through our Payouts system.
Which is actually the most important part of this announcement because it confirms my previous hypothesis that Itch has grown so popular that they have grown overwhelmed with too many creators to manage their payments and that they are lacking time to manage everyone's payments so they are now selecting which accounts take the most of their time to manage their payments and yours somehow take more of their time to manage your payments than other creators' accounts which is the real question here: Why does your creator' s account's payments take more time to manage than other creators' accounts? Any idea? 🤔
Now since the complete message that Itch sent you includes links to PayPal, Stripe and Payoneer's terms of services, I followed these links and checked their terms about porn and while you were correct that Stripe prohibits pornography, PayPal's terms of service don't mention any prohibition of pornography and now that I think about it, I should have already known this because while I always pay with card to buy my porn games, I still see PayPal as another option for them which unmistakably shows that PayPal doesn't mind being used for pornographic transactions otherwise it wouldn't be a payment option for porn games and this is confirmed by their terms of service which do not mention any pornographic prohibition, the word "porn" doesn't even appear anywhere into their terms of service at all. 😉
As for Payoneer that you did not even mention, yeah, their terms of service do prohibit pornography which makes PayPal the only possible option to manage your payments. 😉
And as I stated, I still can pay with my card to buy many porn games from Itch without involving PayPal which confirms that Itch didn't prohibit pornography either, the actual issue is as they stated:
This decision was made after considering various factors related to your account, including nature of content, risk, disputes, and the resources required by our team to review payments associated with your account. To provide uninterrupted service to as many users as possible, we can no longer facilitate payments for your account through our Payouts system.
Which means that reviewing and facilitating payments associated with your account require resources which interrupt services to other users because yours take more time and resources than others which is why what you actually need to figure out is why does your account take more time and resources for Itch to manage that they decided to not manage it themselves anymore and suggested you to use a third-party service such as PayPal to manage your payments instead? 🤔
This is confirmed further into Itch's apology that you also omitted to quote into the message they sent you:
We’re sorry we’re unable to provide our full service to everyone, but sometimes we need to balance the needs of our community at large over individual sellers to ensure we can continue to operate smoothly indefinitely.
This says it all, allow me to rephrase this: "Our community has now grown so large with so many users that we have grown unable to provide our full services to everyone and we have to abandon users who take the most time and resources in order to balance the needs of our whole community." and that's pretty much what this means. 😉
Conclusion and my suggestions to you, Perverteer:
- Switch your payments to PayPal as their terms of service don't mention any pornographic restriction.
- Ask Itch why is it that your account takes specifically more time and resources to manage than other accounts because THIS is the actual issue and THE question that you never asked even though THIS is THE question that you should have always asked to get an actual answer so do it now. 😉
As for me, now I'm going to ask No Time To Play why such a depressive failed creator who has grown nihilist to the point that they even state into their very name that they have no time to play, no time to have fun, no time to enjoy themselves, ever thought themselves as suited to manage other creators when they already failed to manage themselves to begin with because I am curious about their justifications for bossing everyone around without any badge of official authority and without any love for anything at all which makes them closed-minded and uptight while you take care of your own account as I suggested, @+! 😏
By the way, I would also appreciate that you consider my feedback and suggestion about musics in TFUV, bye! 😉