My previous posts have grown very large and rambling, so I thought I'd make one as a brief update and a condensed summary of what's happened so far.

Summary: (You can skip this if you've read the previous posts/been keeping up. But if you just walked in, or want a refresher:)

At/around midnight July 24th, Itch.io delisted all NSFW games without notice or announcement, removing them from search but keeping the individual pages up. A few hours later they confirmed via announcement that this was due to pressure from payment processors, which was in turn due to pressure from Collective Shout, a deeply conservative Australian activist group superficially using feminist language. In April, the same group had gone after Steam, especially targeting a game called No Mercy. This resulted in a tightening of Steams' policies, the removal of many NSFW games on Steam, and a number of people buying No Mercy on Itch in protest. Collective Shout became aware of this, and targeted Itch as well. A few days later, No Mercy was completely purged from the site by Itch without explanation, including from the libraries of people who had purchased it. This seemed to be the end of the issue, until Itch enacted their July delisting, seemingly out of nowhere. It is unclear why there was a four month gap in-between.

Itch detailed this in their announcement, and said they would be manually reviewing the delisted games, restoring or permanently banning depending on adherence to new payment processor (credit card) standards. Some full bans, such as Max the Elf, came almost immediately.
Despite all of this happening in the middle of the night, the response was loud and unified. Itch's discord, forums, and twitter/x were all promptly set on fire by people rightly complaining about the incredibly damaging nature of the action (possibly an existential one for Itch), and very poor handling of it. Collective Shout's twitter accounts all went into "protected mode" fairly quickly.

Gradually, it became clear via shared screenshots that 1. Fully banned games were being removed from people's libraries, as was the case with No Mercy 2. Creators with banned games were judged "not in compliance" with the new rules, and thus not allowed to withdraw money paid for their games from Itch. Taken together, this meant Itch was stealing from both its customers, and its creators. Itch denied this repeatedly on X, and was repeatedly community noted into oblivion. A new day dawned, and with it the drama/news youtubers. Cr1tikal, Muda, and a whole host of smaller channels all jumped on the news, and the coverage was incredibly fair. Nearly everyone covering the news understood the slippery slope implied by it, and said as much. Today weird porn games, tomorrow everything disliked by extremely conservative wack jobs.

The community of creators and fans meanwhile scrambled to figure out how they were going to deal with this massive disruption. A change.org petition, a similar one (more focused on sex work) at the ACLU, and references to a current bill, H.R.987 - Fair Access to Banking Act, were heavily circulated, though all felt like fairly dim possibilities. And thus we arrive at now.

Now:
I am doing everything I can to get those who can onto my SubscribeStar. Losing Itch meant losing half my income, and far worse in the longterm due to no more big "release" days. When all this started, I was at 154 subscribers on SS. I need to hit at least an additional 100 to make up the immediate monthly financial hole. I am currently at 73 out of 100 new subs, so there's a good chance we'll at least get there.

In general though, I am currently in somewhat of a holding pattern. As of now, my games still haven't been banned, and in fact quite a few other large titles haven't been either. I have been considering a number of additional steps: setting up a no-speak, no-chat discord as an additional news and distribution hub (perhaps a replacement for the itch library for those who already own the game, since I could potentially gate access to certain sections). Potentially even starting a Patreon for those who can't get their cards to working on Substar, as Patreon...doesn't seem interested in enforcing their own rules? And a number of patreons with banned content are still happily chugging along. 

But all of that's on hold as I wait to actually find out what's happening with Itch, both on my games and in general. Despite everything, it's still an irreplaceable platform, and if I am somehow allowed to continue using it, I will. But there's no way of knowing how long their "review" will take. I won't wait indefinitely of course, but for the next few days, perhaps up to a week, I'm just going to wait to see what actually happens with Itch, and this situation more broadly.

That said, I'd still say the chances of the games ending up being banned is high. So again:

Support on SubcribeStar if you can: https://subscribestar.adult/bitshift. If you already have, thank you.

Follow on FurAffinity if you haven't already, in case this place gets nuked: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/bitshift/ If you already have, thank you.

If you have TRIED to support on SS, but been unable to, a question: are you able to use your card successfully on Patreon?

And keep an eye out. I'll share more news when I have it. A progress update on Chapter 3 was planned for the end of the month. I'll probably wait until the VERY end of the month, and then potentially give that depending on how things are sitting. And for those worrying, no, I won't be making a new post every day/multiple times a day now. Things will probably slow a bit after this, unless something else crazy happens.