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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by byzxor@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

so itchio has shadowbanned any games tagged with 'nsfw', 'adult', or 'erotic' so they don't show up in searches, and several devs have reported that their r18 games have been removed from the site with no warning

So itch.io/games/nsfw still shows a few thousand titles, but using traditional adult tags to search within there shows 'no titles'. (src)

And @itch.io is now denying payouts to the creators affected by the takedowns with no notice

"Accounts that are in violation of our terms are not elligible for payouts" (src)

There's quite a lot of examples of these in various threads now.

It seems to get a bit weird though with some games still appearing on steam.

Also worth noting: Jenny Jiao Hsia's autobiographical opus Consume Me, which won the Grand Prize at this year's Independent Games Festival along with a few other awards, is also delisted in itch search (but also has a searchable Steam listing) (src)

itch.io has been pretty open and transparent for their entire existence afaik and dropping all this without warning feels pretty bad

ETA: Here's the official announcement

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[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 27 points 1 week ago

itch.io is also a lot "smaller" than Steam in terms of the teams behind it I'd wager, and they probably have a lot less money for legal representation and probably had the screws turned to them a lot harder due to that.

Yes how little was communicated sucks, but they genuinely might have not had a lot of choice if the payment processors were really turning the screws to them. They don't have the wealth to fight something like this like Valve does, and even Valve bent over for this.

this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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