Entirely seriously:
While this is far from some kind of total victory, that a conversation is happening at all is much better than that not being the case.
I am guessing payprocs did not have any fucking clue the extent of backlash they would receive from just being extremely vauge / heavy handed.
Hopefully this can at least result in some more concrete and specific definitions of what they will and will not allow, so that existing platforms at least have an idea of what the actual rules are, and then from there, potentially a more targeted public pressure campaign could manifest.
hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Honestly I’m really happy with how itch.io is handling it. Making sure they still get their money, but quickly reintroducing the games, and telling us the exact reason why they had to disable those games in the first place. Great management.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Agreed, I am genuinely impressed by this, this is unironically a better run, better organized response to a situation like this than most billion dollar + companies that trade on the stock market would pull off.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Ehhhhhh. Happy is a strong word.
I think itch is doing a much better job now. I think they still completely removed things from people’s accounts (sort of. It is still there, we just can’t access it. Maybe) and cut off a LOT of developers’ entire income source with absolutely zero warning outside of some whinging in a discord.
They are course correcting and hopefully this goes somewhere. But the trust thermocline is breached and no developers are there by choice anymore. Similarly, as (primarily) a consumer, I genuinely don’t feel comfortable buying games on itch that I am not planning to fully back up myself.
pishadoot@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I empathize with the developers because unannounced interruptions to their revenue streams are not good. I don’t know why itch made the initial decision to implement their changes the way they did, but my guess is they got a series of strongly worded letters out of the blue from payment processors and were given a timeline of “IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE” and had to shut off the tap and adjust or risk their own ability to receive ANY payments.
Even if they handled it badly, which maybe they did, it’s a better measure of a company/person in how they address mistakes or bad moves. They aren’t perfect but they seem to be trying to address concerns and be transparent, at least as transparent as they feel they can be in an uncertain situation where they have to protect themselves legally and operate from a position where every official statement they make will be blown up by media. So they need to be very, very careful how they communicate to risk further damage.
Remember, itch IS NOT the bad guy here, it’s the payment processors. Do not lose sight of that.
I can absolutely understand why people who have had their livelihoods disrupted are unhappy but I empathize with the position that itch is in and I care a lot more about how they course correct and manage fallout, even if they make bad decisions when faced with requirement to take immediate action (and I can’t even say whether they did or not, nobody can, because nobody but them has the facts), than I care about whether they made a bad decision in the moment.
People, good people, fuck up all the time. How they manage the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.
If they keep doing the same shit over and over it’s a different story.
PS: I have no dog in this fight except I think what the payment processors are doing is wrong, but it doesn’t explicitly affect me at all. I’m also not particularly educated on this except for what I read in the news, I’ve never used itch at all. I just don’t think payment processors should be in the business of casting moral judgments on legal transactions. IMO it should be ILLEGAL for them to deny services for LEGAL goods and services.
rustyfish@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Pretty much this. Back when this went down the good people of Bluesky, who are totally not like Twitter users, called for itch.ios blood. Calling them sellouts, betrayers and whatnot. Big brain move right there.