Itch.io has announced that it's deindexing all of its adult-oriented NSFW pages from search engines and browsing due to "scrutiny from [its] payment processors".
In a news post on the Itch.io website, Itch.io says it understands this is a "sudden and disruptive" action, and that creators weren't provided with advance notice beforehand, which it acknowledges is "not ideal".
However, the site says it recently came under "scrutiny" from its payment processor partners regarding "some content hosted on Itch.io", pointing specifically to a campaign started by Collective Shout earlier this month that drew payment processors' attention to a game by the name of No Mercy.
Collective Shout released an open letter to payment processors like PayPal, Mastercard, and Discover, outlining the (admittedly rather disturbing) ways in which No Mercy "fl[ies] in the face of efforts to address violence against women".
In the letter, the group says the fact that Itch.io and Steam hosted the game effectively means payment processors are "facilitating and profiting from rape, incest and child sexual abuse game sales", which led to Itch.io's decision to deindex adult pages.
Itch.io says it's in the process of "conducting a comprehensive audit of content" to ensure it meets payment processors' requirements, and that pages will stay deindexed while the review is conducted.
Once the review is complete, new compliance measures will be introduced, including a checkbox creators must tick in order to "confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account". Some pages may also be permanently removed.
Itch.io isn't the only platform taking these steps, either. Last week, Valve began the process of pulling dozens of sexually explicit games from Steam, citing concerns from its payment processors regarding the nature of said games.
It's been a weird twelve months for Itch.io; back in December, the site was taken offline for several hours following a phishing claim from the toy brand Funko, which site founder Leaf Corcoran called "bogus" (the claim, not Funko itself). Funko and its partner BrandShield denied causing the shutdown.
It doesn't seem like this situation is going to be resolved quite as quickly as that one was, unfortunately. Stay tuned for more.
