Hello!

It happened to me to buy games on Itch, only to see said games getting deleted by their developers at a later date.
The first time, the game got retired but the game page somehow remained as a black, nameless rectangle in my game library. The second time, a bundle of three VNs simply disappeared without a trace.

First of all, I want to say that as a developer, I appreciate having the opportunity to delete my games. Itch is not only a commercial platform, but home of many personal pieces, experiments and jam games. Sometimes developers want to take distance from ideas they've outgrown, or simply scrub old games off their professional portfolios. This is good.
I wonder, however, if this process could be better handled, especially when it comes to commercial games.

I don't mind having "lost", my money, but I would have liked to get a message from the developer, or at least a generic notification. I don't even know when the bundle of VNs got deleted, and I never got around playing the third one.
This makes me a bit sad.

My proposal is:

• Allow developers to send an optional message to all owners of a game before deleting it
• Notify owners of a game when a game in their library gets deleted
• Allow owners to remove the ugly dark rectangles in their library ;;

I'm curious to hear your comments/experiences/ideas!

Thanks for the feedback. Handling deletes in a tricky issue. If something is purchasable then we'll push back and try to work with the developer before they can delete it. We do provide them instructions about how to contact all the owners about next steps before we let people delete paid projects. This is a manual thing though, and not handled through an automated system. It's pretty rare when this happens so we're happy to work with the dev to get it sorted out.

Regarding the "black rectangles," this problem exists outside of just deleting. Developers are free to do whatever they want to their page. I think maybe a broad solution would be for someone who owns something to have the ability to archive or remove a purchase from their so it's not shown directly in their library.