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Petition to Itch.io asking them to stop targeting adult creators!!

A topic by randomaussieguy created Apr 26, 2023 Views: 816 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 4
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Please sign this petition and share it if you think that the developers creating adult content deserve to still be able to sell their content here!!


https://petitions.eko.org/petitions/stop-itch-io-from-punishing-adult-content-cr...

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Signed! But it doesn't look like many people have seen this petition

Deleted 62 days ago
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almost signed thinking they were arguing the opposite direction XD

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Yeah I feel like that's probably on purpose lol

Deleted 62 days ago
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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.

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You are still allowed to promote your NSFW games in Release Announcements. However you must do it in a way that:

  • Makes it clear that it is a NSFW game
  • The promotion post itself is SFW
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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

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I'm going with the rules as enforced rather than written.

I've seen plenty of people posting NSFW projects in there. As long as they censor it sufficiently that the post is SFW the mods leave it up. Otherwise they get told to clean it up.

Deleted 62 days ago
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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.

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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.

I agree that itch.io often unfairly targets a lot of the adult creators. There are a lot of creators that don't one hundred percent clarify what their game is and thus cause confusion but then there's other stuff that's fairly vanilla that seems to get hit by the random lottery of 'ban them, ban the non-believer' with no explanation given at all.  I just discovered f95 was a pretty open place, but it's also still not the most professional, there's also just a lot of content that gets allowed on steam because they believe more in the idea of total freedom than itch, which is weird given what itch.io's mission statement is. I wish there was a bit more clarity in some ways, and just more conversations like this one.

an nfsw forum would be a great place to talk to other creators, ask for advice, and learn more about the creation process. it would have to be 18+ but if 4thewords can do it, why not itch?