itch.io and adult content

Last updated July 28, 2025, at around 6pm Eastern time (to add a bit about Mouthwashing).

Metacontext: I’m just some guy, definitely not affilated with itch.io except I uploaded a shitty free game there when I was 15 I guess.

“Standing up”

How do you “stand up” to a payment processor:

• who does not care about you at all (I would be astonished if Itch was responsible for even 0.0001% of Mastercard’s profit),
• who has the power to instantly drop you from their platform if you do something they disagree with,
• when they already think you’re breaking their terms of service?

About denied payouts

Itch has not denied any payouts.

We have not denied any payouts to creators as part of yesterday’s review. If there are any creators in which we are unable to process a payout for then we’ll contact them directly.

We do understand that the eligibility message is confusing given the context so we’re updating the text on the notices

Additionally: payment processors are involved in both ends of the transaction. Itch pays creators using the same processors that customers pay Itch with.

“Why didn’t they do x/y/z”

For example; see the MasterCard Rules, which can be found here (PDF link), section 5.12.8 under “Additional U.S. Region and U.S. Territory Rules”.

5.12.8 Disparagement

A Merchant must not disparage the Corporation or any of the Corporation’s products, programs, services, networks, or systems.

They cannot go on their blog and write freely about how much Mastercard sucks. Mentioning activist groups like Collective Shout at all in their blog post is unprecedented.

Poor disclosure timeline

Yes, it sucks that people were not given more warning. This situation was addressed in the blog post as well.

This is a time critical moment for itch.io. The situation developed rapidly, and we had to act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure. Unfortunately, this meant it was not realistic to provide creators with advance notice before making this change. We know this is not ideal, and we apologize for the abruptness of this change.

Pattern of behavior

Itch has been nothing but supportive of independent games for over ten years. It is ran by a handful of people, not “execs”, not a “c suite”. Absolutely nothing makes me suspect they’d willingly heel-turn on this issue and intentionally burn the decade of goodwill they’ve earned among their users and authors. Why would they do that?

I heard there’s a new platform which –

You’re buying time until another activist group hears about it.

With recent developments at itch, the landscape looks quite bleak for NSFW creators.
That’s why we started Welcome Change.
We’re a new storefront platform with a focus on adult and queer comics and stories.

Seems great!

Hey folks, we’re having a hiccup with our payment processing, so we’ve temporarily disabled new purchases on Welcome Change. […] We’ll update you as soon as we’ve re-enabled purchasing!

Oh. That was a month ago, there hasn’t been an update.

There are more established players in the space, such as JAST BLUE, as well as several companies in the Japanese market. At some point, though, they can only succeed because payment processors haven’t glared at them hard enough. Is Itch at fault, or were they just the ones who happened to be targeted?

the “Fair Access to Banking Act”

You should know this bill is entirely Republican-led, and the banking in question is this:

Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them. This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers. (Kevin Cramer, North Dakota (R), 2025)

The Fair Access to Banking Act would prohibit banks from denying fair access to financial services under the standards of woke corporate cancel culture and prevent the weaponization for political purposes. This bill is endorsed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), National Rifle Association (NRA), National Mining Association (NMA), Blockchain Association, National Pawn Brokers Association, and the Kentucky Coal Association. (Andy Barr, Kentucky (R), 2023)

Just make sure you know what you’re dealing with before you call senators.

Load-bearing word here is legal industries; the angle Collective Shout is using is that selling adult media counts as child sexual exploitation, which is not a legal industry.

Mouthwashing was delisted for content reasons

Mouthwashing was delisted from Itch’s search in October 2024 because, after the conclusion of their demo, they removed all downloadable files from the page and replaced them with a single link to Steam. Per Itch documentation, projects must have at least one downloadable file to be listed in search.

Ensure you have files uploaded to the project page. Your page must be purchasable, downloadable, or playable in the browser to be indexed. Empty placeholder pages will not be indexed.

Source from the creator of “Is it on Itch” Steam curator list.

Source from Itch.

It is likely that the Mouthwashing developers did not know this action delisted their game from search. Itch’s interface does not make it clear whether a game is listed or not.

Nonsense

“Itch scrubbed their social media account”

You’re looking at @itchio.bsky.social, which is a fake. The real account is @itch.io.

They “support AI” now

They briefly had a bluesky post up along the lines of “this is a difficult time for itch, if you’re looking for something to do we like this post”, although it’s deleted now so I don’t remember the exact verbiage.

This reddit post formerly recommended using AI to help you write a letter to payment processors, although it has been edited to only include a softer mention of using AI to draft a letter at the end. The reddit poster decided to suggest AI as a middle-ground between “ok, everyone write your own well-researched letter” (which is difficult and not many will take the time to do it), and “ok, everyone cut and paste this form letter” (which is easy for processors to discard as a spam campaign):

I’m not affiliated with itch.io in any way, I don’t care about AI. I wrote the post to try to make it as easy as possible for even the laziest person to get involved (source)

Itch linked a reddit post written by a third party, which happened to say you could use AI to draft a letter if you wanted to. It is a leap to say they now “support gen AI art”. There were not other redditposts with the same collection of information in one place that they could have linked to; they could not self-publish the same information due to non-disparagement clauses.