I have two big problems with this:
- Exactly no one who buys adult content wants to use "direct pay". You're basically giving your credit card number to a stranger at that point, and that completely eliminates any safety associated with buying content through a site like itch.io.
- You aren't just hurting developers. You're also hurting large numbers of users who have already paid for content from those developers, and now have no way to get future updates for the software that they have paid for.
There are plenty of ways for a company with as high a sales volume as Itch to deal with adult content. Use a separate merchant account through a bank that understands what it is being used for, is aware of the high chargeback rate, and charges higher fees accordingly to make up for that. Then require that adult content publishers have a certain threshold of revenue sharing to compensate for the higher payment processing costs. Nobody would fault you for that sort of decision. It is simply part of the cost of doing business.
Unfortunately, there are *no* realistic ways for individual developers to deal with it, because companies like Stripe and Paypal have blanket bans on adult content, so all the services that are available to an average consumers are unusable, and I can pretty much guarantee that nobody, and I mean nobody in that space has the sort of industry clout or the sales volume to be worth the hassle for any bank that provides merchant accounts, much less the money and expertise to set up their own PCI-compliant billing service. And small companies in this space who have tried to do so in the past have usually found themselves quickly shut down.
And your customers, of course, are caught in the middle.
Let me be a little more clear here, in case that second point above wasn't clear enough. What you're doing amounts to large-scale fraud against users who have bought content through your platform. And given the egregiousness of the way this was handled, the lack of any warning to customers, the huge number of people effectively defrauded by your company, and the completely 100% adhesive nature of your terms of service, I can pretty much guarantee that that the class action waiver that I just noticed in your terms of service won't be worth the cost of the paper that you didn't print it on. If this ends up in court, this decision will be seen as a very expensive mistake.
So the way I figure it, you have two options: refund every penny you have charged anyone for banned content without taking that money away from developers, and eat those costs as a cost of choosing to leave an entire industry, or figure out a way to solve this problem of your own creation in a way that doesn't cause financial harm to both developers and end users en masse.
And it would be wise to make a commitment to do one or the other before things go too far and you can no longer take it back, and before your former customers start issuing so many chargebacks that it causes your merchant account provider to shut you down entirely, making your previous problems seem like a stubbed toe by comparison. Because that's pretty much the only way that this will realistically end unless you find a way to fix it.