Itch is by no means a small time player. Doing some very fast statistics off of the game price breakdowns available and the counts of games available vs. the number they rate as best sellers, if 20% of their best sellers make a sale each day and 7.5% of their non-best sellers make a sale each day, assuming an average price for the three pricing filters of (under $5, $2.5), ($5 to $15, $10), (over $15, $20), then Itch sells approximately $20k/day. Half a day is $10k. If those averages are actually much higher in their respective areas, as in just below the maximum then the daily total jumps to over $35k/day. There is wiggle room in my assumptions, but it is safe to say that Itch sees about $25k±7k/day.
As mentioned in other suits, there are nonmonetary damages as well which are harder to quantify without access to their analytics such as reputation damage, lost traffic, maintenance and repair from the forced outage at the domain level, etc. I could see a suit for $50k in actual damages and another $500k-$1M in punitive damages to send the message that this behavior is intolerable in general.
This is the central myth of “free speech” under the 1st Amendment.
The 1st Amendment only protects individuals exercising speech and expression from laws being passed or used to silence said speech or expression and from agents of the government abridging the rights. That is a lot, but it is also all. Private citizens are allowed to abridge each other’s speech as much as we like. Private companies can censor whatever they want. This is why the guy wrote a letter to Steam, because literally ANY larger action would have crossed the line.
I have a bunch of honorable mentions in the several hundred hours ranges that are only not 1k+ because I have severe ADHD and something else became a hyperfocus before they hit that point:
This. I was so pissed when I saw the EULA for KSP2. I love KSP more than probably any game that has ever been released, due in no small part to the vibrant modding community. The fact that they decided to abuse the very people who made KSP great is disgusting and short slighted.
Gabe heads a company which is successful because it respects its employees, customers, and suppliers instead of constantly trying to marginalize and abuse them. They are not perfect by any means, but they do fit into the definition of ethical capitalism, which should not be understated. They don’t employ anticompetitive tactics like bribing/coercing developers into exclusivity contracts. They don’t operate with a bunch of 1099 contractors so they can avoid providing benefits. Etc.
This raises a rather sticky situation for the coming years. I have been seeing more and more posts about developers using GPT generated code in various projects. If a game is made and it is found that GPT was used for some parts of the core code, does the whole project lose its copyright?
Your idea is one of the specific reasons many companies try to label everyone as an “independent contractor”. Especially people like voice actors are not “employees”, and thus do not count as such for your idea.