itch.io

Note, that this is all speculation on my part. But there is a thread every day that someone has to wait a month for a thing that should only take days. So obviously support has too much to do and things will get delayed, done wrong, not at all or some sort of automation does it wrong.

It costs money to give support and since it is easier to just deindex creators to reduce tickets, they might have bitten in that vile fruit. Or maybe there is a completely different reason. But this is not how you deal with creators on a platform. Steam requires 100 bucks to publish, so they obviously can afford some hours for every creator to give support if necessary. Even if that creator does not sell much.

Itch should consider some similar approach to have some kind of verified accounts or whatever. With money verified. It is too easy to post stolen stuff and malware and too easy to fake-report real creators. Like, ignore most of the reports from un-verified accounts and against verified accounts. So you have a hard time fake-reporting and the real reports have more weight. Even a small amount of money is a big deterrent against the kind of crap itch has to deal with. They could keep things mostly like they are, but they could mass-ignore many tickets from fake troll accounts and make it easier to remove the fake publisher accounts.

Might be naive, but there is a problem with the way things are handled now. At least I see this problem. Or is there another explanation, why reported stolen games are indexed within a day of publishing* and stay that way, and creators like you get deindexed and others complain about not being indexed for a month? (Yeah, you will probably be the last person knowing an answer to that one, sorry for asking rhetorical questions ;-)

* I kid you not. The games I report have an account less than a day old, publish their stolen game/malware and are in the browse section. Meanwhile there are threads about games that are not indexed after a month. How sick is that? Or did I mistake indexing and publishing mechanism and your publish date and account creation date are re-adjusted once you are indexed? But I do not think so. The game date might be adjusted, but not the account age. It is R-72021, if someone with access to tickets should read this. The account was created 15 hours ago, the game and creator are searchable and in browse and to my understanding that means, they are indexed. But I can tell after a few seconds, that the game/profile is 95% fake and after less than a minute, I can tell with 100% certainty, that it is fishy.