so itchio has shadowbanned any games tagged with ‘nsfw’, ‘adult’, or ‘erotic’ so they don’t show up in searches, and several devs have reported that their r18 games have been removed from the site with no warning

So itch.io/games/nsfw still shows a few thousand titles, but using traditional adult tags to search within there shows ‘no titles’. (src)

And @itch.io is now denying payouts to the creators affected by the takedowns with no notice

“Accounts that are in violation of our terms are not elligible for payouts” (src)

There’s quite a lot of examples of these in various threads now.

It seems to get a bit weird though with some games still appearing on steam.

Also worth noting: Jenny Jiao Hsia’s autobiographical opus Consume Me, which won the Grand Prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival along with a few other awards, is also delisted in itch search (but also has a searchable Steam listing) (src)

itch.io has been pretty open and transparent for their entire existence afaik and dropping all this without warning feels pretty bad

ETA: Here’s the official announcement

Assuming that this is due to pressure from VISA/MasterCard - like it’s been with Steam.

It’s patently bizarre how a company whose only purpose is transferring money from account A to B can then arbitrarily decide what people are allowed to buy and sell.
It’s one thing to refuse to be an acceptable payment method for NSFW games, but to forbid the store from selling them at all? That’s just megalomania, and a great pointer to why monopolies (and duopolies) are A Bad Thing