ebi (@ebihimes.bsky.social)
bsky.app
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 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

  • jherazob@beehaw.orgEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    Been hearing rumors that the stuff didn’t just get delisted, some got removed entirely from the site, including from customer libraries that had paid for it with no refunds

    And of course, there’s LGBTQ+ stuff getting flagged as porn because that’s the ultimate goal of each and every one of these attacks…

    Itch.io had been very good for many, many years, and with their handling of this, in a single day they’re killing any good will they had accumulated all this time…

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
    21·
    3 months ago

    As someone with no interest in predominantly NSFW games, it does bother me a bit that that is the most common type of game that show up for me unless I disable NSFW completely.

    But my problem is exclusively with the algorithm and not with those games. I’m surprised that in 2025 a 200+ hour rpg with one implied sex scene may get tagged with the same ‘NSFW’ category as a Sex Simulator type of game, with no way to hide one without also hiding the other.

    All itch.io had to do was create a “monetization-unfriendly” tag and aplly it to those games and hide them behind an opt-in toggle (with some proper notification for current users). They could even target their ads based on that toggle and get even happier advertisers with it.

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
    13·
    3 months ago

    Tbh it took longer than I expect for the new owners to start ducking itch.io

    Sorry I think I hallucinated some events.