almost signed thinking they were arguing the opposite direction XD
I am genuinly interested about your opinion on Steam. They have adult games. Infact they do host games, that were "targeted" on Itch.
Also, what about Patreon. Many have that too, especially, if they are too small or unfinished for Steam.
Maybe Gamejolt is more to your liking. They purged the pixel nudes - and lot's of games that were actually sfw as well, as is the way with purges.
I for one would welcome a split in a kid-friendly itch and a mature-friendly itch. That might also get rid of all those disgusting "horror" games. Especially the English speaking countries equate mature with nude pixels. But violence and scary stuff is not kid-friendly. It is for mature audience.
But till then, (de)activating the content in search and browse has to do (wich sadly does not filter out the horror games).
Oh, and promoting games is discouraged for all games, not just nsfw. If you see threads with promotion, no one bothered to complain about them, it does not mean they are allowed. And with less than 100 page views a thread, why bother. But it is specificallly forbidden for adult games in the one place where you do can promote your game in public forum, the announcements. Understandable, as you have to put screenshots in those threads.
No NSFW or Adult content In order to be inclusive to as many people as possible, our public community is not for posting adult content, you will have to find somewhere else to promote it.
I am not sure about that. This is written in the rules above the announcements.
If the intent was to merely telling people the obvious about not posting nsfw "content", as in, videos/images in the threads, they should have said so. Instead they wrote, you have to find somewhere else. Not, you have to post it in a sfw way and tell people clearly that it is a nsfw game.
But I admit that this is not worded very precise. They should exchange content with games/projects. Or add what you wrote. Hmm. Maybe they used content, because this also for assets and other projects. But "posting adult content" is quite clearly putting nsfw stuff in the posting, and not equivalent to promoting adult content.
Well said.
I do not like most horror games here, because of low effort. Putting in gore and shock elements is just very easy, so indie devs can put that in, with little budget and skill, I believe that is a big part of the reason why there are so many horror games here.
The reason I asked about Steam, is because Steam is the biggest fish for game publishing on PC. If you look at AAA releases, you might see their logo beneath the title alongside Playstation and Xbox. Some other stores do not sell games directly, but sell Steam keys to those games. Maybe in other regions other stores are more popular.
See here (you need to click satellite view for better information) https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/
Well, and this biggest fish does do publish those indie adult creators of cartoon nsfw stuff.
And Patreon is the most popular crowdfunding subscription service. It fits well with the pay what you want method so favored on itch. You might have seen Youtubers and other influencers promoting their "patreon". They also have nsfw cartoon stuff.
I agree, almost none of the games I see target kids even if their 'kid friendly' though I personally love the horror here. There is no shame in making low budget slasher films, and should be no shame in low budget spooky video games. There's a certain charm to them that's just entirely absent now. There are of course a ton of actually good or unique horror games too. as far as the visual novel thing, that's probably me your talking about lol.
the promotion thing is a shame really. If itch just followed the same path as other self publishing websites, or sites designed for creators then they could just have an nfsw 18+ part of the forum for adult games to be freely advertised and discussed. I feel perhaps some of the reason that there is almost no reviews, or discussions on less popular games is because it's not actively encouraged.