The Itch.io Situation
Added 2025-07-28 06:48:56 +0000 UTCLate last week, the website I host my games at: itch.io, delisted all adult games from it's search index. Wet Dream Diary and Mindi's Mansion were reinstated shortly after it happened, but the rest of my games have effectively vanished from the site. Direct links and going through my creator page will still work, but you can no longer naturally find them anymore. As you can imagine, this is pretty scary for me.
All of this occurred because an Australian NGO called Collective Shout lobbied Visa and Mastercard until they went after itch. Itch didn't want to lose payment access for all the games on their site, so they were forced to adopt this slash and burn solution.
I'm not here to be level headed and impartial, I'm an artist, not a journalist. This is a threat to my freedom of expression, plain and simple. I don't need itch to make ends meet, but if Collective Shout decide to target crowdfunding sites next, that could mean lights out for us here. I don't want that. So, here are some things I did this week that I'd suggest you do too.
Sign the ACLU petition calling on Visa and Mastercard to end this practice:
https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy
If you live in the US, email or call your congressman about this act which would outlaw this behavior by payment processors:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401
We've had weird things happen in the past, but this is the first time I've truly felt like my work is in danger, so I wanted to make a special post about it. Thanks for reading.
