Last week, Itch.io delisted all adult NSFW content due to pressure from payment processors and Collective Shout, causing outrage towards the store as creators lost a source of income and consumers lost the ability to purchase content. Now, Itch.io has partially walked back the delisting with the company announcing that it has reindexed all free adult NSFW content. However, any adult NSFW content that costs money has not been put back on the store.
In a blog post, admin Leafo wrote, “Today, we are re-indexing free adult NSFW content. We are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be re-introducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term. Note: I’ve limited the display of replies to prevent off topic discussion. If you have issues or concerns you can contact support or if you want to have a more public discourse then I recommend creating a topic in General Discussion. If you’d like to be eligible for today’s re-indexing, your page must have the following option checked: (The “No Payments” option under the “Pricing” section of your project’s Edit Page in your Dashboard)
Important: If your page uses “individually priced files,” changing this option will convert those files to be freely available. We currently do not support a page configuration that combines “owners only” content with a page configured to be fully free with payments disabled. Given the circumstances, we are exploring new ownership options in the dashboard that may address this. At the moment, though, Only enable this option if you intend for all files on your project to be available for free.
We are also implementing a new “content warnings” system for pages tagged as NSFW. To be eligible for indexing, all page owners will be required to complete this. This feature is not yet ready, but we will post an update when it is. If your page was previously indexed, you will have a time window to complete this requirement to avoid going in and out of indexing.
For those who aren’t aware, Stripe is one of the payment processors we’ve used since our early days. They have provided the “Pay with card” option on our checkout page for over 10 years. We spoke with Stripe yesterday about their content policies. They confirmed that they will not be able to support adult content that fits the following definition: “content designed for sexual gratification.” Stripe asked us to pass along the following message to our users:
Stripe is currently unable to support sexually explicit content due to restrictions placed on them by their banking partners, despite card networks generally supporting adult content (with the appropriate registrations). Stripe has indicated that they hope to be able to support adult content in the future.
We are in the process of talking with other payment partners to accept card payments that Stripe is unable to process. We disabled Stripe payments last week on pages identified as having “adult NSFW content.” Now that we have a more specific definition from Stripe, we may review that initial list for potential re-introduction. However, our long-term plan is to implement one or more new processors to avoid putting the platform at risk.
There has been a wider backlash against payment processors including Visa and Mastercard, with complaints being sent to both companies for blocking people’s options to buy adult NSFW content. Pressure group Collective Shout claimed success for this ban, but in a statement claimed it did not demand all NSFW content be removed. The group said, “In response to false claims and misinformation about our campaign, we’re setting the record straight. Some have asked why we involved payment processors, and others have claimed we are responsible for Itch.io removing all NSFW content. We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months. We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us. We called on Itch.io to remove rape and incest games that we argued normalised violence and abuse of women. Itch.io made the decision to remove all NSFW content. Our objections were to content that involved sexualised violence and torture of women.”
Source: Itch
