News at XI: Pro Evolution Gossip

[jujotech]

Truly couldn’t agree more, thank you.

Relating it to my experience, I think it can be funny (ha-ha) sometimes to have a thing you made on one of the storefront websites, I like the idea that one could stumble upon a thing I’ve made by accident, etc, and it’s funny to attach a price to it like it was a real product (and I’m not too comfortable anymore letting the for profit website exploit my work for no money), and there’s something nice about someone caring about something you’ve made enough to give you money for it. So I’ve got music on bandcamp, but you can also download it for free on my much cooler personal website where I’m not going to link you to any place on the forprofit web.

[LaurelSoup]

Smash the PMRC

[Cerium]

Seven word rebuke to anyone who called bleeding edge lesser pynchon

[daphaknee]

wow this put into words so much stuff I’ve been thinking the past few years thank you

[isfet]

new homebrew Virtual Boy game, FPS puzzle game

Trailer: Test Chamber (Virtual Boy homebrew)

[ellaguro]

@thecatamites

the wonderful power of friendship doesn’t replace money

this kind of gets to what i was talking about on social media late last night/today that’s been bothering me.

the biggest thing that has pissed me off about the discourse that’s developed out of this whole event is the notion that itch’s hand was forced and there was absolutely nothing they could do and that any ire directed towards them is like, misdirected rage. but there’s no doubt itch fucked this up because they knew this situation might be coming down the pipeline and they allowed it to happen anyway by kicking the can down the road and fucking over a pretty substantial portion of their userbase that depends on their platform. that seems to me, to be a pretty big mistake. they also have apparently held onto money for some people for charges that happened before this policy went into effect and there’s been no communication there at all. and the way people have rushed to defend them with hypotheticals and assume the best intentions in all situations when they haven’t demonstrated that they deserve that in this situation is really bothersome to me.

i think it’s very strange how we’re always supposed to consider all the tough decisions the poor people who had to work there had to go through instead of the people who were sacrificial lambs and got thrown under the bus here. and as always it’s those angry queers, it’s those sex workers, it’s those smut merchants - it’s always their fault for not seeing how hard it was to make the decision to throw them under the bus. and it’s seen as a horrible affront if those people don’t immediately say “i understand why you crushed me”. i’ve seen so much attempts to make fun of and go after people who are really upset at itch about this as like emotional lashing out instead of a pretty reasonable response to a fucked up thing they did. it’s like people identifying more with owners of sports teams than the players who actually play on them.

if you own a relatively large content platform that a lot of people depend on, you are actively making decisions with what you choose to do and not do with that platform every single day. the idea that you are blameless for those decisions is absurd. one thing i HATE about indie game world in particular is how people will completely throw away any kind of analysis of power once they know one person somewhere they kinda like. you’re an adult who is responsible for the decisions you make, so are the people who run itch io. the infantalization that exists here is ridiculous. they’re not smol beans, and like you said above - you can’t run a business on friendship.

if itch has been one of the best platforms of this era, i feel like we should consider what that says about the bleakness of the online cultural landscape right now. it is absolutely absurd to think about the amount of value we provide to these platforms every day. the fact that itch hasn’t been as predatory as other platforms in many ways should be like - the default baseline. we should absolutely expect better given that we are the ones providing these platforms with the actual value and not scapegoat blameless people for supposedly jeopardizing that. because, again, we are the ones who are providing any of these content platforms with any kind of value or purose. they are businesses and they are certainly not doing some sort of sainted wonderful thing no one thought of before. the fact that so many people’s sympathy goes with them first is disturbing to me.

Tumblr became a shell of itself when the ban on nudity went through. these platforms build cultures and these kind of decisions have pretty serious impacts on those cultures. we frequently act as if we aren’t providing these platforms with value and purpose every single day by using them and they are just like totally unaccountable to us - and it’s just really disturbing cop mindset to me. platform holders are not your friends, and that much should be obvious. they depend on you even more than you depend on them.

[physical]

this whole saga has destroyed any bit of credibility this “left” games journo newsletter subscription bullshit has to me

we don’t really have a functional press in many ways but the absolute lack of solidarity between people in this field rivals only the tech industry?? and i can kind of understand why techies have the blinders on because they’re getting paid but the only thing keeping Gita from that $30 rate is their status & connections in the industry (ie they took a check from the NYTransphobes to write about meaningless disney culture war bullshit last month lol)

burying the most important story in the industry by vaguepost crybullying Valens about rates she took to make rent instead of idk offering her a better rate to write about it!! what good is this charade of Leftist Woke Journalism even doing except siphoning a monthly fee from people

[ellaguro]

not that i’m in the tank for these pubs and don’t have serious misgivings about them but to be fair, Aftermath did cover the story around Valens and Waypoint and (via other writers there) had much more measured critiques of the whole situations - it just seems like Gita Jackson was the primary one going off about that on social media, which was obviously wrong (and not surprising tbh).

that said i totally agree that the bitchy condescension and like “fuck you i got mine” attitude displayed by those posts is absolute a major part of the problem in the space

[Tegiminis]

I think when it comes to itch.io there was an ideological precept - that anybody should be able to use the service to allow other people to download or buy their work - that necessarily required allowing “NSFW” (putting this in quotes here but not later; to be clear these activist groups consider anything queer regardless of sexual content to be “NSFW”, so I’m using this as shorthand for “everything the reactionary puritans dislike”) content on the platform. They were always under the threat of being summarily executed by the payment networks, but their approach was to basically be so obscure and irrelevant to e-commerce and broad culture that they would never fall under the puritan’s baleful gaze.

The main way to circumvent this would’ve been crypto, but that section of e-commerce has been captured by speculators and is incredibly wasteful in terms of climate, so it is functionally useless as a consistent currency. Paypal and other processors are already captured by the Visa/Mastercard payment networks as well.

Was it a mistake to allow NSFW on the platform and thus open themselves to this sort of bad faith attack? I dunno. The main driver of revenue to itch is normie games, from what I understand, and the people running it have day jobs as far as I know; it’s not like running itch is lining their pockets like Steam lines GabeN’s. NSFW content has always been subsidized on the platform by other content, even as it has developed a steady following. This is also a universal issue across every sector of people selling things on the internet. You used to be able to buy h-games off DLsite super easily apparently, and now it’s a nightmare. Conservatives correctly identified the weak point in the infrastructure of sending money to people through the internet and are thoroughly exploiting it.

I think itch.io messaged this badly - delisting without a press release first sent everyone into a panic, and now people are left in limbo about content moderation decisions and leftover payments as they struggle to comply with the payment networks’ requirements - but besides better messaging I’m not sure what else they could’ve done. It was either not allow NSFW on the site from the beginning (violating the ideological precept of its founding), delist/demonetize NSFW when requested as they did so now (angering the NSFW creators), or refuse to comply and see the whole site demonetized and stigmatized (angering literally everyone who uses it).

And I do mean stigmatized. Here’s a quote from a furry friend of mine about it:

The threat on the table isn’t just that they’ll cut off transactions, they also move you and everyone in your organization to a special “Illegal activity - highest risk” credit category that makes you effectively less than human

It shows up on housing applications, it stops you from ever financing anything, it’s effectively total societal exclusion forever, there is basically no way to get off that list

It’s an unenviable position because there’s no real way to win. Itch tried to thread the needle and failed and are now suffering the consequence, just like Gumroad and Patreon and so on before them. This isn’t to downplay the anger of all those people who now can’t sell their NSFW work; I think it’s justified to be angry about it. But I also think that if itch hadn’t allowed NSFW on the platform at all, we would just be having this conversation about another broad platform who stepped into the void and got squashed by the trillion-dollar juggernauts. At least itch cares enough to raise a stink about it.

The entire internet is undergoing a sex-negative puritanical backlash and even the small fry are getting caught in the blast radius.

---

For those who want to do something about it, there’s a campaign to call the networks as well as leverage government pressure to get these companies to reverse their censorship. I’ve quoted the relevant details below behind the dropdown.

Contact details for payment networks and governmental agencies

Visa Inc.
https://investor.visa.com/corporate-governance/contact-the-board/default.aspx#emailForm
Phone: 1-800-847-2911 OR +1-303-967-1096 (international)
Mail: c/o the Chairman, CEO, General Counsel or Corporate Secretary, P.O. Box 8999, San Francisco, CA 94128
businessconduct@visa.com
globalmedia@visa.com

Mastercard Inc.
https://b2b.mastercard.com/contact-us/
Corporate Office: 914-249-2000
Operations Center in Missouri: 636-722-6100
investor.relations@mastercard.com

PayPal Holdings, Inc.
AskPayPal on X
Phone: 1-888-221-1161
Mail: PayPal Headquarters, 2211 North First Street, San Jose, California 95131
EEOMALegalSpecialist@paypal.com <—HERE!!
executiveescalations@paypal.com

I think those in the USA should contact the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and file a complaint. Doing this next is good, as its the most consumer focused of the organizations:
Submit a complaint about a financial product or service
Phone: 1-855-411-2372
Mail: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 1700 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20552

Lastly, you submit a complaint detailing the issues to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division or FTC:
Department of Justice – Antitrust Division
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/
Phone: 1-855-411-2372
Mail: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 1700 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20552
Federal Trade Commission
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
Phone: 1-877-382-4357
Mail: Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Response Center, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20580

If you are not in the USA, you can still e-mail or contact payment processors and let them know your intent to engage against them in your countries both legally and politically.

There’s also a call to piggyback this GOP bill that aims to prevent banks from discriminating against lawful payments based on content censorship. I think this is maybe not the best approach - the bill was explicitly drafted to shield oil and gas companies - but I’m including it here in case anyone would like to contact their representatives / senators and discuss it.

GOP bank censorship bill

Those in the USA should consider contacting their Congressmen (phone or email) and tell them you want to support these bills:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987
I would urge them to support it, and even urge them to strengthen the wording of it to put more restrictions on credit card companies, not just banks. ( Find Your Congressmen )

[dimes]

I remember feeling similarly inspired to come to bat for itchio back when there were major holdups with the palestinian aid bundles, where the months that took to sort out likely did cost lives. like between these two events its feeling increasingly clear that itch just does not have an organizational structure to support the kind of role it’s taken up. at the time hearing the criticism for the platform irked me because it was worded in this way that made it out to be just as faceless as like, steam, but for indies, as opposed to something that was actually pretty homespun by indies. i do feel like leafo has been around long enough to warrant a bit more trust than that, but gah, like, that is what this is by now huh.

i think if you take at face value that itch largely was meant to help abstract away the need to develop and add your own little payment page to your site, the problems its gone on to face would only feel out of scope if it hadnt continued to have scaled over the last like decade.

remember these things?

i definitely remember at the time this sort of thing were more prominent, feeling pretty deterred from the random individual sites you could pick up games/software from through a paypal widget etc. so ultimately itch did solve a sort of ‘legitimacy’ problem that was gatekeeping creators from being able to sell in the first place. it is still probably commendable that itch hasnt forked into building out rentseeking models, or becoming any sort of social media platform itself, or, whatever gamejolt ended up doing instead.

but at this point it has been several years where itch has cemented itself as a primary income source for a lot of creators and the ‘lets hope leafo and co implements this correctly’ method is repeatedly proving not to match the level of responsibility/honus that the platform now has. its never struck me that itch really does want to champion itself as a ‘business’, though obviously it is, so hopefully there ends up being more opportunity to start organizing in a different way

---

i think what i have been struggling with personally for the platform, and how ubiquitous it all is having the only real reliable platform for hosting the games function as a type of market at all. functionally its a really good CDN, but it changes so much about the way you are asked to browse the site, and as a creator the way you are meant to curate content. overall its left me with this really apathetic feeling about finishing any sort of longer-term work, because it feels so listless to try and consider “okay, so what do i do with this” when reaching the end of a project because the only real answer is “just throw it on itch and link it around to people”. it feels wrong to me seeing game comment sections filled with links to lets plays or random funny quips because i dont know how to define the relationship you should have with those things as an author. its become pretty disillusioning for me; ive been toying around with the idea of sticking to including text files linking to game downloads on something like bandcamp, just to try and re-phrase the conversation a player interested would be having with the game in order to try it. it sucks that it feels so much like a pointless endeavor to try and create something outside of the terms set by the literally only functioning indie games site left

the fact that today the only real options are between itch and steam has probably damaged a lot, because it seems to have solidified this relationship that the player has with games and ‘economizing their time’. its hard to combat the ‘sea of options’ stuff that has happened because ultimately its good to encourage more developers to get into it. but the whole storefront aspect imparts this ‘oh, did i select the right thing to play’ mindset that i have to keep training myself away from. the whole format itself of the site is distorting the lens a lot of folks have, and anyone entering indie since like 2018 has never got the chance to see alternative types of spaces

i love that the technology for distribution has been made so simple, but i really wish there were a way for me to interact with it that didnt force me to engage with a little ‘storefront’ and that we had better ways to build things out more curatorially, or distribution models that lend themselves more to the types of work little art collectives do, like current day domino club or maybe older arcane kids etc

[ellaguro]

@dimes

its feeling increasingly clear that itch just does not have an organizational structure to support the kind of role it’s taken up.

@dimes

but at this point it has been several years where itch has cemented itself as a primary income source for a lot of creators and the ‘lets hope leafo and co implements this correctly’ method is repeatedly proving not to match the level of responsibility/honus that the platform now has.

100% agreed with both of these. the problem comes down to them not really being suited to taking on the role they’ve took on and them not dealing with that appropriately. reminds me of indie record labels like SST or K Records becoming bigger and more well known and gradually fucking people around them over because they made a bunch of promises they could never keep.

@dimes

anyone entering indie since like 2018 has never got the chance to see alternative types of spaces

yeah this really bums me out. kinda wish we could go back to a space where people hang out in these communities and make small free stuff for awhile and build up recognition before they try to take on doing a bigger commercial product. everything and everyone feels so scarily disposable at this point.

[dimes]

putting it all into perspective, like, the apple vs. epic stuff, funko pops and zelda DMCAs, itch has pretty much been stuck putting out fires since 2022 so i think the message is starting to get heard. im optimistic there can be movement on it for this site, but im really feeling the pangs of there just… not being any other tools with different ethos behind them

[a_new_duck]

there was some talk on bsky a few months back about, damn, it’s kinda shaky that the entire indie game world relies on this one fairly small website

especially the ‘nsfw’ content of it all (term problematic, i note)

and here we are. problem is, with the narrowing of the internet, there isn’t currently ‘room’ for a second itch. but now it’s looking like we need one. that would almost inevitably hit the same problem once it attracts enough attention (may need to look for a safe non-american country to host from but also… it’s all fraught)

i am not directly impacted by this as a creator or all that much as a player/reader/etc., so i need to recognize that with my cooler reaction this is just not as urgent for me, even though it upsets and distresses me

i do think leaf has earned some benefit of the doubt. i don’t know the internals at itch, but it seems this remains a labor of love for him and his small team (no idea how big it is, actually), and that includes hosting queer and erotic content.

i see a ton of people lashing out, promising to boycott itch forever. accusations that itch has always just been in this for fat profits. that if they’d just cared to “fight back” they’d have somehow prevailed and nothing would be changed

a better contingency plan maybe should have been in place, sure, but it sounds like this was a gun-to-the-head act-before-communicating action that may have been necessary to keep the site alive in any form. i don’t know. shit’s fucked, man.

anyway, i don’t know, it’s a mess. i’d love to see a proliferation of more community spaces and sites where people can be paid or not paid for whatever content, though preferably without having to turn to crypto (christ)

been on itch for over a decade, always happy with the platofrm, and i’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for at least 72 hours before determining that this is ‘who they are’ and ‘who they have always been’ (sinister)

[LaurelSoup]

I promise not to well actually anyone about VHS beating Beta because of porn anymore if it contributes to people realizing that’s a plus for a thing rather than a liability.

[LaurelSoup]

But we all know the truth

[dimes]

@a_new_duck

problem is, with the narrowing of the internet, there isn’t currently ‘room’ for a second itch.

i kind of feel like the precedent for this, which does feel like something people commonly accept, is totally manufactured. i mean in what ways does the scale of the platform really benefit it? in general such a big issue with indie games world is the underlying feeling that releasing any one thing is at odds or competing against everything else. i think a lot of players would be really happy with any kind of platform that works well and feels safe to use

---

unrelated re:

@dimes

but i really wish there were a way for me to interact with it that didnt force me to engage with a little ‘storefront’

like really i guess what im feeling about itch being a storefront is that it sucks that all the little freeware titles feel like they have to vy for attention against each other and that the primary games list page is this really hierarchical views-based thing. i assume its whats really responsible for the engagement-centric streamerbait kind of stuff thats become such a norm

in a lot of ways this is making me really miss the whole ‘indie games arent real games’ arguments era because at least being able to generate pushback against that was a lot more creatively liberating, and when the platforms/resources didnt exist yet it gave a lot more cause to people to try and band together to collectivize more around their art. and the idea that there wasnt any expectation of success or notoriety beyond maybe your own peers was responsible for far more of that experimentation that we’ve come to associate indies with. the populist design philosophy, which definitely did still exist, still wasnt really formalized because you couldnt be guaranteed anything by subscribing to it

conversely now that the narrative has largely accepted the legitimacy of indie, dealing with the whole ‘indies will save us’ mindset is forcing a role of having to fill some gap in ‘the market’. and folks who feel compelled to capitulate to that, or worse yet, the ‘indies will make us what nintendo refuses to’ types are opting in to this kind of cynically restrictive position [‘look at me dad, im Filling a Category’] that almost always ends in harrassment when they fly too close to the sun or make something too personal. or the folks who truly believe this is now The Way, who are usually just the most… uninteresting dudes in any room.

[a_new_duck]

@dimes

i mean in what ways does the scale of the platform really benefit it?

on the one hand, yeah, but on the other, getting anyone to go anywhere on the internet has become a chore, and i have personally found many cool games and game designers thanks to the discoverability, as lacking as it may be, from being on such a big platform. it does kinda suck that it’s just indie steam, but also it’s kinda nice? idk

[dimes]

yeah, i definitely cant blame you because its a habit that is just built out of what we have available. but i think what im hoping for is more opportunity out there to seperate the tasks of discoverability and curation from the retailer side, because reliance on those being one and the same seems to be causing a lot of trouble. i think those habits that were formed around it all could be kicked if there were a bit more opportunity for those looking to talk more about what they like and amplify each other from outside the storefronts

i mean heck, even within itch i feel like i remember them doing a lot more 1-on-1 interviews you could read from the blog, or stuff like the old tigs frontpage. obviously that stuff still has a lot of favoritism problems and its not likely to end up being someone at itchs job to keep that going, but it was something that felt more useful than just scrolling through the weeks top downloads

[geist]

@Tegiminis

The main way to circumvent this would’ve been crypto, but that section of e-commerce has been captured by speculators and is incredibly wasteful in terms of climate, so it is functionally useless as a consistent currency.

kind of sucks, because this is literally the use case for crypto. circumventing carte blanche moralizing by monopolistic payment companies is a dream scenario for people arguing for crypto uptake, but the space is so utterly poisoned that it’s hard to even consider. I’m sure there is some way to find a useful stable coin of some sort to be used here, and I think it’s worth exploring that possibility, but I don’t even know how you would get to that point. not a lot of overlap between crypto bros and queer indie game developers.

[Tulpa]

@thecatamites

but i do feel like it’s increasingly important to be specific in the ways we engage with the official economy, and to wind back the kind of indiscriminate blurring of personal, artistic, financial that was the twitter-era mode, the idea that you should expose as much of your life as possible to payment mechanisms to maximise the chance that you might get the golden ticket.

I remember when itch.io finally started including tabletop rpgs and how quickly that space became dominated by twitter-mode hustle culture where your entire identity is turned into marketing in an effort to hawk product. It was dispiriting, to say the least. The people involved weren’t to blame for the most part, it was just an effect of trying to form community on a marketplace.

TTRPG people, ironically for such a social hobby, have a real trouble maintaining viable communities on the internet (the last big ttrpg community was on google+ lmao) and there was something heartbreaking about seeing a whole bunch of people congregate on itch only for the community to devolve into this within a week: