Five of a Kind De-Listed / Shadow Banned from Itch.IO

• Itch.IO has temporarily(?) de-listed all NSFW games from its site until it can conduct an "audit" of the games on its site and has said it will revise its Acceptable Use policy.
• Five of a Kind was not targeted because of the "family" content specifically, but was caught up in a wholesale deactivation of Itch.IO's NSFW content.
• It appears this decision from Itch.IO was caused by an advocacy group called CollectiveShout griping at "payment processors" defined as Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal, who then yanked on the leash and Itch.IO folded.

• Itch.IO was a MAJOR source of routing traffic to the game and this development is a major kick in the nuts. Five of a Kind was averaging 200 views a day and 50 downloads a day over the past 30 days.
• Itch.IO was never a source of direct revenue, but it will undeniably impact the ability for the game to grow if for no other reason than the traffic it generated. For now, I will have to rely on F95 and SubscribeStar to draw eyeballs to the game.
• Over the past several months, I suspected something like this might be coming. It wouldn't surprise me if SubscribeStar is targeted down the road.
• This event is not going to shut the update or the game down. I'm already accustomed to the game being barely monetizable at all because of my work schedule. The people I feel the most sorry for are the game devs who RELY on income from Itch.IO and have taken a substantial hit from it. I would make this game for free if I could and I have never been in a position where my livelihood was threatened by the game's paltry revenue.
• I think it's a coin flip whether Five of a Kind is reinstated on Itch.IO. On one hand, not only do I go out of my way to say the characters are 18+ but that they are drawn "unmistakably grown." On the other hand, the game may just get caught up in a blanket removal of the *ncest tag, despite the game passing MY personal Venn Diagram of acceptability: Adult + Human + Consenting.
• I know that this issue has a lot of space for culture war "narratives" to creep in and depending on what media you consume, this is the fault of Visa & Mastercard ONLY (but not PayPal, for some reason), radical feminists, or the fulfilling of Project 2025. You guys can engage in that all stuff on your own. I'm not gonna touch it because part of the reason I make this game is to ESCAPE partisan politics.
• If I were more of a businessman, I would be monetizing the shadowbanning itself an extra gravelly voice "They're trying to shut us down, Folks! We need to get the word out to stick it to the lizard people, Bill Gates, and the Illuminati group and the best way to do that is to buy our new Extra Johnson Force+ Pro-- apowerful, non-GMO herbal supplement from the Five of a Kind store. This is a fantastic product, Folks!"