Hello Mobians! 

I'm still working on Twisted. It's on the backburner right now while I do another game for a Game Jam, which will be posted here within a week or so. That game's gonna be tame or maybe PG13, and well, that brings us to our current topic.

It's possible that I may be forced to remove Twisted Mobius from itch in the future.

You may have heard that Itch.io has been disqualifying certain NSFW developers from their Collected by Itch option.

What is Collected by Itch?

Collected by Itch, or bulk payout, means that Itch is the one who initially receives all payments. They take their cut if applicable, they handle security checks and VAT, they assume liability for chargebacks, the works.

Itch then regularly sends a convenient, single payment to the developer for whatever portion of the money isn't in question.

Why do developers need Collected by Itch?

Without Collected by Itch, small indie developers can't reasonably handle the complexity of e-commerce. You can't expect, say, some random guy from Canada to process VAT, check credit cards, handle chargebacks, and all that.

Also, since Itch's name is attached, it mitigates the paranoia financial institutions have about fraud. (Porn is the most fraud-laden of all commercial industries.)

Without help like this, there is no e-commerce outside of Big Business, especially NSFW e-commerce. And that means there is no commerce outside of Big Business.

Who's being disqualified from Collected by Itch?

Itch has disqualified specific NSFW developers from using Collected by Itch. They can technically still sell things through Itch.io - but, as detailed above, they'd have to handle everything themselves and most developers aren't capable of doing that.

We presume that Itch has no intention of disqualifying all NSFW developers, but we have no clue what the actual criteria are. Anecdotes cite that NSFW developers have been disqualified regardless of how well-known they are and regardless of how vanilla or extreme their sexual content is.

Leafo insists that revenue share is not a factor in disqualification, and it appears to be based on a complex risk calculation. (Risk in terms of "is this fraud we'll lose a lot of money or have a court battle over", not in terms of "will society think we're gross and bully us.")

Where does this leave Twisted?

I have no idea, since we have no clue what Itch's goal or direction is, or what the criteria are for being disqualified.

Twisted Mobius is a free fangame; you don't have to purchase it to play it. With this in mind, I'm hoping that Itch doesn't disqualify me from Collected by Itch for all of my games, including the SFW ones, just because of the one free-to-play NSFW game.

If they force me to turn off optional donations, then I'll do that. (But since revenue share is supposedly not a factor, I should think the optional donations aren't a factor either.)

If they disqualify me even if it's 100% free with no donations, then I'll have to delist Twisted on Itch and find somewhere else to host it. Unfortunately, this means I probably won't be able to provide old versions, since I rely on butler to do that. (Butler creates and applies diff patches so that, to change from one version to another, you only need to download the part of the game that is different.)

Twisted Mobius is currently planned to have a Lite version, which excises all sexual content related to certain characters the public might presume to be underage (e.g. Tails, Cream), as well as a Full version, which doesn't do that but still treats the respective characters as young adults. I may be forced to only provide the Lite version on Itch - again, I have no clue what their criteria and rules are.