Honestly I’m really happy with how itch.io is handling it. Making sure they still get their money, but quickly reintroducing the games, and telling us the exact reason why they had to disable those games in the first place. Great management.
Agreed, I am genuinely impressed by this, this is unironically a better run, better organized response to a situation like this than most billion dollar + companies that trade on the stock market would pull off.
I think itch is doing a much better job now. I think they still completely removed things from people’s accounts (sort of. It is still there, we just can’t access it. Maybe) and cut off a LOT of developers’ entire income source with absolutely zero warning outside of some whinging in a discord. I want to say it was almost a full day later before any official statements were released?
They are course correcting and hopefully this goes somewhere. But the trust thermocline is breached and no developers are there by choice anymore. Similarly, as (primarily) a consumer, I genuinely don’t feel comfortable buying games on itch that I am not planning to fully back up myself.
Its a lot like with the Unity shitshow a few years back. Game dev can’t pivot overnight but mastodon was lit up with “so… what else is out there” from the more vocal devs and bsky is the same for storefronts.
I empathize with the developers because unannounced interruptions to their revenue streams are not good. I don’t know why itch made the initial decision to implement their changes the way they did, but my guess is they got a series of strongly worded letters out of the blue from payment processors and were given a timeline of “IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE” and had to shut off the tap and adjust or risk their own ability to receive ANY payments.
Even if they handled it badly, which maybe they did, it’s a better measure of a company/person in how they address mistakes or bad moves. They aren’t perfect but they seem to be trying to address concerns and be transparent, at least as transparent as they feel they can be in an uncertain situation where they have to protect themselves legally and operate from a position where every official statement they make will be blown up by media. So they need to be very, very careful how they communicate to risk further damage.
Remember, itch IS NOT the bad guy here, it’s the payment processors. Do not lose sight of that.
I can absolutely understand why people who have had their livelihoods disrupted are unhappy but I empathize with the position that itch is in and I care a lot more about how they course correct and manage fallout, even if they make bad decisions when faced with requirement to take immediate action (and I can’t even say whether they did or not, nobody can, because nobody but them has the facts), than I care about whether they made a bad decision in the moment.
People, good people, fuck up all the time. How they manage the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.
If they keep doing the same shit over and over it’s a different story.
PS: I have no dog in this fight except I think what the payment processors are doing is wrong, but it doesn’t explicitly affect me at all. I’m also not particularly educated on this except for what I read in the news, I’ve never used itch at all. I just don’t think payment processors should be in the business of casting moral judgments on legal transactions. IMO it should be ILLEGAL for them to deny services for LEGAL goods and services.
I empathize with the developers because unannounced interruptions to their revenue streams are not good.
You can emphasize with suddenly telling companies to get fucked and figure it out themselves during a time of REALLY big economic certainty (seriously, game dev is a wasteland) and think it is “not good”? Good for you!
given a timeline of “IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE” and had to shut off the tap and adjust or risk their own ability to receive ANY payments.
That REALLY isn’t how things work and that still doesn’t excuse silence outside of whinging on discord.
Remember, itch IS NOT the bad guy here, it’s the payment processors. Do not lose sight of that.
There are multiple “bad guys” here.
People, good people, fuck up all the time. How they manage the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.
Say it with me: Corporations are not people.
Good, itch fucked up. Really great that absolutely nobody else has been impacted except for John Itch. Oh… wait…
Like, seriously, read what you fucking posted. “I can understand how companies might have been afraid that they would be forced to fire everyone they work with and go bankrupt but, really, isn’t the important thing that itch learned a lesson?”. Like… the only thing missing was a ukelele.
It definitely can be. I haven’t dealt with payment processors in this way, but I’ve had (spurious) DCMA takedowns that required my service providers to act immediately, or else they’d get sued. They did notify me, but gave me about 2h to figure something else out.
A payment processor is in full control of payments across your entire site (unless you have multiple, I guess). They can pull the rug with no notice if they want. Doesn’t seem nice, but nice isn’t part of the business model.
Pretty much this. Back when this went down the good people of Bluesky, who are totally not like Twitter users, called for itch.ios blood. Calling them sellouts, betrayers and whatnot. Big brain move right there.
do you have the same energy towards steam, who capitulated earlier, harder, and hasn’t seemed to be interested in negotiating, despite being much much more powerful and influent than itch?
Steam’s bans were (as far as I’ve seen) far more targeted at content that is a lot tougher to defend. It’s a lot tougher to defend rape and incest content than just all porn and nsfw. Obviously it’s all fantasy and fiction, but it’s still more difficult.
Itch.io went full into banning everything labeled nsfw, LGBTQ, violent, etc. The fact that Steam had a much more targeting impact implies to me that they used their stronger position to negotiate prior to the ban rather than itch.io that banned first and is now trying to walk that back.
I can’t help but wonder if Itch is intentionally going for a malicious compliance route. As you say, it’s tougher to defend rape and incest content, so if they’d opened with that they likely wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much media attention. But by doing it this way, half the internet is talking about payment processors forcing itch to delist NSFW games, even giving juicy headlines like LGBTQ games being disproportionately affected. Then Collective Shout of all groups was forced onto the back foot and forced to say “wait no we just wanted the rape and incest games gone” but now that the story is out there it has a life of its own.
Even if they didn’t do it on purpose, it seems like it’s created a much more effective movement than if they had done it “properly”, regardless of the reason for why it worked out this way.
While this is far from some kind of total victory, that a conversation is happening at all is much better than that not being the case.
I am guessing payprocs did not have any fucking clue the extent of backlash they would receive from just being extremely vauge / heavy handed.
Hopefully this can at least result in some more concrete and specific definitions of what they will and will not allow, so that existing platforms at least have an idea of what the actual rules are, and then from there, potentially a more targeted public pressure campaign could manifest.
If itch.io manages to get them to actually clarify the rules, this could lead to other platforms, Steam, Nutaku, etc, also reworking their allowed/not allowed games, now having more clarity and less fear of being totally nuked for violating vague guidelines.
True, this is good news. But, it should not have come down to the entire fucking government of Japan weighting in on the global impacts of this insane decision!
Is this truly the amount of mountain-moving we have to do to counteract a single organization’s opinion? There is a clear difference in effort required between one side and the other.
The issue isn’t the amount of effort required to undo one action.
It is the complete lack of effort every other time this is done. Gamers Rise Up STILL pretend this is some watershed moment that nobody could have foreseen. And while it is always dangerous to consider The Internet to be a monolith, you can even see threads here where people didn’t care when it was just “incest and furry shit” on Steam.
Let alone when it was basically the entirety of Pornhub a couple years back.
And that is the problem. This kind of shit happens. Why should a megacorp fight it when nobody will care one way or another and this avoids any bad press? Why should news outlets report on it when the outcome will be “Ugh, fucking scammer journalists. How fucking dare they put that behind a paywall or have ads”?
So they just kind of acquiesce to the loudest voice in the room until people DO care.
The lesson to take from this isn’t that we need government intervention every single time chuds do anything.
The lesson should be to ACTUALLY support independent journalism that covers shit like this. At the very least, shut the fuck up when you see a paywall from a blog run by some of the most established and prestigious investigative journalists in the tech space. Preferably consider throwing a buck or two their way so they can pay for legal fees.
And… ACTUALLY support good smut (that aligns with your preferences, morals, etc). Everyone (except some of the aces) likes to get a bit frisky with themselves every so often. Rather than always just pirate that shit consider throwing a few bucks at creators (and games) that do it right. You’ll find you get a LOT more of the stuff you like (see: The rise of “chick porn” in the late 00s/early 10s… and the overabundance of stepsister washing machine porn in the 20s…) AND it shows stores that there is actually a market for that and it might be a bad idea to kill it.
Because first they come for the smut. Then they come for the art.
Treats only flow by the arcane and abstract machinations of those with power, and those with power are fickle, greedy, and often do not busy themselves with the minutiae of the affairs of the hordes of useless eaters.
I agree with you, the power differential is absurdly vast, the situation is plainly ‘unfair’ by most viewpoints…
… but the question that matters is what are you going to do about that?
I just check a place that I have bought adult games from and they have not had this issue. But fhey use paypal to take payments, so maybe they will be fine. At least I hope so.
The various groups trying to ban payments for NSFW products and whatever else they don’t like would just target the ECB and member states to restrict transactions they don’t like
Practically the whole world has been having an authoritarian/conservative shift. I would not expect the EU and ECB to be a progressive force for sex work. The EU has been pushing to break encryption for a solid decade now. Visa and Mastercard process 90% of transactions outside of China. They’re huge. I don’t see why ECB leadership would be particularly less conservative and risk averse than Visa and Mastercard. Bankers are usually on the conservative side of politics
@network_switch@Jackhammer_Joe even authoritarian states doesn't like dependencies which can tell them what they have to do. So those companies are a risk for their independence... my personal feeling europe's right people might not like porn but they probably would rather fight for porn then let a none european company tell them how they have to handle business ;)
To me it’s an inevitability that if the EU weans itself off Mastercard/Visa, then EU based payment processors whether credit based or something like SEPA payments for a digital EURO would be censored. The EU would be happy to handle their own business and that may just end up no different than American companies and the American government. The European right can fight against porn while fighting for independent finance infrastructure
The issue with the systems being proposed and already in place in Europe is that the money flows directly between accounts. Banks don’t have a way to know what is being payed for.
And there is even another system, where blocks of payment references can be bough from a slew of independent entities (all must be registered as financial entities at central banks) and used to transfer money that way. The issuer either charges a token value for each reference, a % on the payment value or both. Money flows directly between accounts, instantly.
The all-mighty PayPal uses a third party payment reference provider for people who want to use their service but don’t want to put their card into it.
The Nederlands, Germany, Spain, if I’m not wrong, France and Italy have prostitution as legal. My own country abstains from legislating on it, instead opting to criminalizing procuring and the facilitation of prostitution, as well as human traffic for such end.
Europe has a well established culture of sex work, with a good number of organizations lobbying - openly, through open public debate - in the way of making sex workers being recognized as any other worker and increasing their social relevance and recognition.
If you inform yourself a bit, in my country, you can legally establish yourself as an escort, under a very specific tax code, and pay taxes according to the money you make and have tax deductions and social benefits.
Currently, we already have a direct payment and transfer system, called MBWay, that through your phone number, allows for transfering, paying and collecting money, from one account to another.
No fintech, no middle agents, no shit: direct transfers from one account to another.
The Digital Euro takes this a step further. And even if the eEuro never takes place, this system is to be widened to all EU and abroad, to run against AliPay, Visa, MasterCard and others.
Bankers want money.
American bankers should spit out the “holy” book they have stuck up their arses.
At least Germany, Spain, and Italy have resurgent far right political movements. I am not about to trust government payment systems to not eventually be abused as technology makes control and surveillance easier. A holy book can be replaced with whatever new age self-help, health movement, anti-<ethnicity/sexuality/religion> movement. All it takes is some instability and desperation and people will support whatever or turn a blind eye to whatever they may think is not their problem or they may potentially benefit from. Good for the EU to run their own payment systems. When a conservative wave takes a large enough majority in governance someday, it’ll be the same problem as Visa/Mastercard/etc
The governance powers we give with results being leftist in mind will someday be in the hands of conservative who will use them with a kind of zeal that leftist don’t
Now allow me too share a conviniently forgotten fact about most far right governments of the last century: they all were very at ease with having sex workers.
My own very catholic and repressive country had a very detailed law on prostitutes, which mandatory registration, regular medical exams and visits, etc. It’s a good way too pacify populations.
The current hunt on independent adult themed art/entertainment/etc is more about good old fashioned religious zealotry than anything else. Pornography gets some flak but it’s a lot harder to successfully target.
This isabout forcing people into conventional set roles and definitions and closing minds and shutting down free independent thinking. And stopping people from being or becoming humane.
Time for Brazil’s PIX to be exported around the world. That’s likely to be hard, as here it is a direct, bank agnostic account-to-account transfer without middlemen and without any tax, so it’d need cooperation between the involved countries.
You’re describing the same system behind Wero and MBWay. We can just use cellphone numbers to move money from account to account, regardless of the banks at each end of the transaction.
Considering how long payment processing as a business has been a thing, I’m amazed its not more regulated in terms of being forced to be neutral or being unable to decline processing payments that are related to completely legal transactions.
This is becoming the norm. Don’t think there can be some new payment processor based off traditional finance and banking that can get around this. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Square, SEPA, FedNow, etc will all rather block transactions to companies that deal in NSFW or whatever is considered dangerous content than try and be some neutral payment rail.
Any in terms of cryptocurrency, any stablecoin will end up subject to the same problems where the issued stablecoin is backed by a governments currency or bonds or even like corporate bonds which are regulated by countries and those are all clear ways to regulate what is appropriate for spending money on. Stablecoins have freeze and clawback mechanisms, at least the ones that are legally compliant. Really to me the only solution is for non-stablecoin/gold/etc backed cryptocurrencies to become popular for payments
It’s gonna be a hard push for a lot of these companies to stop accepting transactions for NSFW stuff unless they can prove it’s harmful or they get legal repercussions because it’s a big part of business. In an economy where “year over year growth” is such a big deal, neutering transactions that account for (guessing generously) 7% of your revenue is a hard pill to swallow without serious force.
We already have the example of now itch and steam getting hit by payment processor restricted on content. YouTube and advertisers wanting to not be shown on categories of content and demonetized channels. I remember headlines about Pixiv and payment processors some time ago
Lose access to the major payment processors and they’ll lose far more than 7%. Until there’s a means of payment thats popular enough to replace centralized authority payment processing, it’s an easy choice for businesses to sacrifice their sex related sales to not sacrifice the larger portion of their sales that they’d lose without support of major payment processors.
The way things are going, there’s going to be the need for popular NSFW specific stores that don’t use Visa/Mastercard, private bank transfers, or national bank transfers. There’s a split in internet video where porn sites are separate from stuff like YouTube. This payment processor content moderation is in the same vein as advertisers on YouTube and other social media networks
Oh for sure, the sites are getting in trouble. But that’s because advertisers don’t want to be associated with those things.
But the payment processors, that’s literally how they make money. Can’t make money off the top if there are no transactions. Banks will still let you deposit your money if you get it from a drug deal, bit of a don’t ask don’t tell there, but it’s the government that has problems with how you got it. (hyperbole but you get my point)
I still think separating from credit card co.'s is a good idea regardless. But its pretty rare for them to turn down transactions unless they have to.
Hell Cashapp is jokingly called the “drug dealer financing app” but you don’t see them getting shut down any time soon.
It’s nice to see a more reasonable response in the comments on Fediverse. On the itch discussion board people are frothing at the mouth posting death threats and the like against itch staff.
The anger is completely misdirected. I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to just let itch drop dead after this abuse from two sides simultaneously. Mega corps and rights groups at one side, and their very own users on the other.
Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.
Itch is even willing to go for partial filtering, what more do you want. The only thing that will please these people is when itch waves their magic wand and keeps everything as is. Like folks here have said, accepting crypto payments might help, but who knows how soon that is going to get regulated.
It’s nice to see a more reasonable response in the comments on Fediverse. On the itch discussion board people are frothing at the mouth posting death threats and the like against itch staff.
Sounds like the bar is so low to be even comparing the two sites.
Like folks here have said, accepting crypto payments might help, but who knows how soon that is going to get regulated.
It’s kinda impossible to regulate technically. That’s the whole point of crypto. Or do you mean that the company itself might be legally prohibited to accept crypto by their local law? That’s possible I think. I guess we’re slowly but steadily approaching the demand to have actual darknet fully-crypto gaming platform operated by anonymous team.
Crypto goes somewhere that they don’t like? Crypto is seized when it reaches an exchange and they ask for ID and source of funds
I don’t understand. Lets say I have a normal bank card, I paid taxes for all the money I got there. Sometimes I buy crypto using p2p on some platform using this card. I trade this crypto with some other crypto on the same platform. Periodically I send crypto to my personal wallet from there. From my personal wallet I buy porn games for example. At which point someone comes in and seizes anything?
They would not, but you would not be anonymous this way. You get problems when:
The crypto you received is through a shady source (it could be any individual which pays you with dirty coins)
You engaged in pro-privacy activity, which links you with illegal activity, like coin mixers to blur the origin and destination of crypto
You received more crypto than you bought
As long as you stay with centralized exchanges and directly send crypto to some websites, you should in theory always be fine (as long as you don’t send them to criminal or pro-privacy services), but that’s not the original goal of crypto
Apart from that, some countries straight up force you to declare every transaction you make with crypto, which isn’t doable for most people and puts them in illegality
You don’t have to send crypto directly to websites. You can send it to your external wallet (outside of any platform), and spend from there. And no one’s ever going to be able to prove that wallet belongs to you.
No, they don’t know who that wallet belongs to and even though they may hypothesize its yours they don’t have any way to prove it. Moreover, anyone, including sellers can use unlimited amount of wallets and register them at rate 1000x faster than even the advanced CIA group would be able to tie even a single address to a particular person/company. So if Steam operated in crypto, it would take days/weeks of some of the most advanced feds in the world to try to prove that you bought something from Steam using your crypto. And they might even fail at that if you or Steam’s wallet are handled carefully, and they wouldn’t even know what exactly you bought.
Who is gonna ask? It is not your bank account, there are no rules where you send your crypto and you don’t have to explain to anyone. And there are no ways to enforce any of this. Also, a lot of crypto payment services and exchanges automatically generate unique intermediate wallets for every transaction. There is a technique to wallet management called “Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HD Wallet)” which seems to be golden standard nowadays, not only it makes it hard to compute your total balance, it also makes it easier to achieve “public address changes with every transaction”. So this is what most exchanges use for those intermediate addresses I assume.
Ofc KYC is everywhere. But that is only relevant to inputting fiat to crypto. Are there precedents of exchange asking its user about the address where he sent his crypto? Even then, what exactly happens if you answer them with whatever, like you donated to some guy, or it was a present? Regular money laws don’t apply to crypto -> crypto transfers, they are not subject to whatever taxes for presents, charity, etc, and even if they were, that wouldn’t be for the sending side.
Well, I don’t really know what exactly they’re doing, but there are people like Elon Musk that probably have ways of converting cosmic volumes of crypto back and forth to/from fiat. I’d just assume that crypto -> fiat is more of a problem for individuals currently but huge businesses and corps can make it work in high volumes. So maybe Steam could make it work too for games. And then crypto becomes massively backed by games. And then maybe someone else big jumps in. And then someone smaller can also jump in, and then one day crypto might be backed by so many things that you don’t even need to leave ecosystem, because you can already buy pretty much anything there. But again, this is just assumption, I don’t know how exactly this should work. Perhaps big corps can register a crypto-branch of their business somewhere crypto-friendly.
Yea crypto -> fiat is easy for businesses that declare their income. It’s still a pain to do, but they’re used to having an entire service dedicated to that already
A full crypto ecosystem is what crypto enthusiasts are wanting to achieve. It would be amazing.
Also, do you realize that even if all exchanges are taken down, this doesn’t in any way harm crypto in general or any of your independent wallets? I mean, you should only look at exchanges as places to input and forex trade crypto, but you should always output it to your external wallets in the end for long-term storage. If some day some exchange suddenly asks any of its users to explain why they did send money to a certain address, that would be the death of this exchange. You don’t need to explain, it is not bank, there are no taxes to pay (you already paid all the taxes before you converted your money to crypto), there are no laws that could make this demand legal. Move to the next exchange.
If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat
Regulation can easily kill most of the cryptocurrency market
Trading on non CEX is a massive pain as well
Storing for long time on cold wallets makes you vulnerable to volatility, which isn’t good for high amounts. It’s essentially investing on a high risk asset.
Look, when you use some platform with KYC, they indeed can tie that id information you give them to your internal addresses you use on the same platform. But the moment you send it to your external wallet that link is lost. They can see the transaction but they don’t know and can’t check if that destination address belongs to you, or it’s a person who sold you something, or it’s your friend/relative, or someone you donated to, etc.
yes, even without KYC, one opsec fail and they can get quite a info on you, things like usage patterns and eventually potentially a profile, upon which will probablycreate a “credit score” of sorts and probably sell advertising data too because why not!?
Then explain how exactly is this incorrect. If you buy and smuggle weapons for example, feds do undercover operation and pretend to sell guns, they set their own wallet, they track transactions, they co-operate with exchanges and have access to KYC data, they see you sent from exchange to wallet X, and then wallet X payed for weapons to their undercover wallet Y. What they achieve here is: they just see there is some chance that wallet X also belongs to you and maybe it’s you who are buying those weapons, but they can’t use this as proof of anything, what they can do is start spying on you from other vectors: your regular bank accounts, your social media, or even IRL to check if they can find any real evidence. That’s basically all. This is not at all a concern for people who don’t run international multibillion crime syndicates, etc. And also this all is extremely irrelevant to original topic. Because those games aren’t even illegal, it’s basically just a fkin preference of payment processors to demand Steam and Itch to take them down. If Steam operated in crypto, no amount of transaction tracking would make it possible to enforce something like this, because this is not law enforcement to begin with, it’s not illegal games and they are not taken down due to any legal concerns.
Crypto is great. As long as you stay within its ecosystem
Making crypto backed by more and more things (like games) makes staying within its ecosystem more comfortable in the long run.
Not to mention your still beholden to the traditional payment processors the moment you want to get your money out of crypto and back into an actual usable form.
the moment you need to sit on the line where you’re transferring in and out real money to crypto crypto to real money on a small scale with frequent processes. You just end up right back where you started.
Yeah, but there are already tons of widely-known legal services everybody uses like Coinbase, Binance, etc, which make it easy to P2P from card to crypto and it’s impossible to control money flows after it turns into crypto, which means controlling how people spend their money like this would be impossible. But yeah, regarding big players like Steam adopting crypto and converting into/from real money on large scale - and what payment processors can do about this if they are pissed off - this is something I have no idea about. But people like Elon Musk probably do this a lot with incredible volumes of money.
Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.
kind of a clever way to say “hey don’t give us grief, if you want to change this go complain to visa and mastercard.”
Guys hi, just looking for some support share, a Fantasy Adventure Story, for all ages and just some entertain with some storyes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mVIvQ1wsgg - maybe you are curious
How the fuck did we get to the point where a company which literally only takes your money and gives it to someone else (and also gets paid for that) can decide what kind of content people consume?
I don’t even understand how they give a shit. Seems like the perfect place for shareholders to want them to make as much money as possible, it’s a limited market.
the payment processors didn’t randomly wake up this week and decide to ban NSFW video games on a power trip.
they are being financially pressured in some way to threaten game platforms that they’ll remove their services completely. the implication of that is they’re worried about losing even more money than they make from payments on game platforms.
from the payment processors perspective, they’re thinking, “okay this is not a hill we want to die on and it’s a small percentage of our business anyway.”
It’s not just happening recently with Steam and Itch.io, it’s been happening for a while.
Some smutty art creators on Patreon have been chased off that platform because of payment processors telling patreon they’d pull the plug if Patreon kept that type of art on the platform. Those same artists have then reported being unable to set up, for instance, Stripe for their paywalls.
Porn stars have complained about being unable to set up accounts with payment processors.
Same with ad companies that are deathly afraid of being seen next to NSFW images, so for instance Imgur has cracked down on them.
The fact that they hold the keys to the kingdom. Online retailers and businesses rely on credit card processors to be able to do business, which is all the leverage they need to exert tremendous pressure on the businesses they service.
This is something that really should be getting legislated against, but good luck in the US under the current administration. Maybe the EU has a shot.
It’s not about morals. It’s purely about money. Porn sites are labeled as high risks because things like chargebacks, stolen credit cards etc happen more often at these adult websites. Not to mention the thin line between legal and illegal content. Therefore payment processors charge companies in the high risk category a higher fee since they need to audit these companies more frequently and deal with these chargebacks etc. more.
So either Itch.io goes into the high risk category and pay more for transactions or they remove porn. Maybe itch.io should just create a separate company to host these adult games.
maybe it’s because itch mostly sells non-porn games so they probably flew under the radar since they could have less fraudulent transaction or chargebacks as a porn site. Or the payment processors didn’t care too much that itch broke the compliance rules until someone reminded them of their duties. Like PornHub was showing illegal content for years and the payment processors only gave a shit about it until someone went to the news.
itch.io
Aktywne