The Steam & Itch Situation

Hey everyone, you've probably heard about what's going on with Steam and Itch right now and we wanted to give you an idea of how it's going to impact our project. In case you haven't, there's a small activist group in Australia that figured out that they can email complaints to payment processors like visa and mastercard to have them strongarm companies like Valve into removing adult content that they don't like. The payment processors threaten fees or in some cases the full removal of the ability to use them as a payment service on the platform. The same group successfully went after Patreon a few years back using these tactics, and this time around they have more platforms in their crosshairs.

Steam updated their rules and took down a few hundred games in response to the pressure, but I've heard from some sources that the payment processors aren't very happy with what they see as too small of a response and are pushing for more serious measures. So far the changes don't really impact our game, but it's an evolving situation with more developments expected next week.

What did impact us this week though is what happened on itch. Here's their statement with the full info: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

Itch is a smaller platform with less leverage and resources so their action was way more drastic. They unindexed all NSFW content from the website, including Refuge of Embers, and began systematically reviewing and removing the 20,000 NSFW pages in a frenzy using very broad strokes. A lot of games that meet the guidelines have been getting removed in the crossfire. In theory our game meets the guidelines and should be good, but given how panicked their response has been there's a chance we could also be accidentally removed.

Yes it sucks but I don't really blame itch too much since they really had no choice. They were apparently just hours away from having all payment processing removed from their site when they did this, and I've heard that this still may not be enough for Visa and Mastercard. Our game is still up for now but all of our traffic and early access sales went to zero when they deindexed it. It's a huge immediate financial hit for us.

The outlook isn't too good to be honest, and I suspect that other platforms will be next in the coming weeks. Our entire plan was to get by on a shoestring budget until we do a full game release on Steam to live off of as we build our next game, but now both of those possibilities aren't really reliable. Depending on how things shake out in the coming weeks we may also need to pick up some more work hours outside of the game to keep the bills paid which would slow us down a bit.

That said we're going to continue working on this and nothing is really going to change that. We massively appreciate all of the support we've had from everyone on Patreon, SubscribeStar and Itch, it has honestly made all of this possible. Thanks again to everyone who has supported our project, and know that no matter what we won't let you down.