- Activism group lobbies banks/card companies/payment processors to ban content
- itch.io takes immediate action to prevent them from losing access to payment processing
- Mass outrage, lots of confusion, various conflicting claims such as “I've had games vanish from my account”
- The developers of “Mouthwashing”, in particular, complain about having had their game delisted on itch.io
- itch.io responds saying “Mouthwashing” was delisted a long time ago, because their “Download” button was a link to their Steam page. Also says they're looking into resolving things with Paypal and Stripe (their payment processors)
- itch.io responds again saying free NSFW content will be reindexed, and that hopefully soon paid NSFW content will be reindexed and made available soon once talks with payment processors resolve issues
- Now, Mastercard says none of this is their fault, they've had the same policies as always, e.g. anything's fine as long as it's not illegal
It's hard to figure out what's actually going on here. Is it Stripe and Paypal that are preventing itch.io to resume operations as normal, because they think the card companies like Mastercard are going to impose new restrictions as a result of activist lobbying? Or what?
Regardless, the beating itch.io has been taking on social media has been incredibly disheartening to see. It's obvious that they don't want to have to deal with this problem any more than anyone else, and that it's been thrust upon them—yet, there's been a lot of incredibly histrionic overreaction from users on social media, directed at itch.io, for their defensive actions.
There is definitely a lot of links in this chain. Maybe leafo [1] can chime-in and say exactly what happened. But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated that the payment card processors would not permit the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and they shut it off preemptively.
But it's hard to say. Mastercard is now saying that they never said or did anything. So where did the outrage come from? Someone must have done something.
- Activism group lobbies banks/card companies/payment processors to ban content
- itch.io takes immediate action to prevent them from losing access to payment processing
- Mass outrage, lots of confusion, various conflicting claims such as “I've had games vanish from my account”
- The developers of “Mouthwashing”, in particular, complain about having had their game delisted on itch.io
- itch.io responds saying “Mouthwashing” was delisted a long time ago, because their “Download” button was a link to their Steam page. Also says they're looking into resolving things with Paypal and Stripe (their payment processors)
- itch.io responds again saying free NSFW content will be reindexed, and that hopefully soon paid NSFW content will be reindexed and made available soon once talks with payment processors resolve issues
- Now, Mastercard says none of this is their fault, they've had the same policies as always, e.g. anything's fine as long as it's not illegal
It's hard to figure out what's actually going on here. Is it Stripe and Paypal that are preventing itch.io to resume operations as normal, because they think the card companies like Mastercard are going to impose new restrictions as a result of activist lobbying? Or what?
Regardless, the beating itch.io has been taking on social media has been incredibly disheartening to see. It's obvious that they don't want to have to deal with this problem any more than anyone else, and that it's been thrust upon them—yet, there's been a lot of incredibly histrionic overreaction from users on social media, directed at itch.io, for their defensive actions.