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I suggest you read up about how internet infrastructure works.

Even if Itch would lose their domain name completely from one day to the other, your things would not be gone. You would have just to wait the few days (or in this case hours) to reach Itch again.

Just like agaisnt ddos, as coincidentally also happened this week, you can't really protect against these type of srewups. Maybe the involved parties will update their tools and policies to avoid embarrassing scenarios like this in the future.

As for your archive, sadly, Itch is not a safe cloud space to store your purchases till you use them. There is always the possibility that the developer choses to remove the files. Look up what happened with Oxenfree this year. If you sell things here yourself, you know firsthand what is preventing you from removing files. (Nothing).

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what about oxenfree, the stuff is on steam?


More importantly this isn't a screw up by a ddos. This is laziness by funko. and I suggest you read about ownership.

Oxenfree was on Itch, too. It was removed a short while ago.

My point was, that Itch is still there, even if access to it is temporarily blocked. Either by dns shenanigans or by ddos or by any other infrastructural mishap. For a user there is no big difference - the site is not reachable.

Was removed, or chose to leave?

Both. In a way. Just search it on the net. It was not removed by Itch, if that is what you meant. There is no guarantee that the developers will maintain an Itch presence. I have seen it happen several times for various reasons that content disappears. 

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The fact that content can simply disappear even for those who purchased it is unacceptable. A copy needs to stay, otherwise property rights are infringed. We are not renting our purchases.

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On the other hand you are not purchasing storage space either. I think as long as you were reasonably able to download the things you paid for, then Itch has fulfilled their end of the bargain.

Think of it this way, if you paid for something at a physical store and then forgot to bring it home, you should be able to go back and get it within a reasonable time frame. But if the store closes down 6 months from now and you still haven't retrieved your item, it's really your own fault and it is unlikely that you will get your item even with court involvement.

Similarly, you cannot expect Itch servers to exist forever. You should be downloading things as you purchase them and preserving them on your own hard drives which you can easily have multiples of for security. 

Some items won't work with Itch downloader sadly, a regular "get everything" option would be very welcome. And I agree, it's not storage space, but I expect to be reasonably warned in case of shutdown

This is a case by case decision, but I believe if a developer sells anything and does not give an apropriate grace period to download it, Itch would see that as grounds for a refund request.

There is more of this in the tos. But basically, your rights as in licenses and such to use the software are unrevokable. But there is this kinda loophole, that neither Itch grants it's continued existence nor the developer is required to keep the files on Itch indefinetly. It has happened lots of times with all those cloud services where you could buy digital files - and not even download them. It is quite an outrage and #1 argument against drm. Coincidentally, drm is frowned upon on Itch and I have seen such very, very rarely.

well ok I think we can all agree that Denuvo is the worst drm and in general they are predatory

...that's not how digital goods work Einstein!!

Go away.