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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8678512" data-attributes="member: 19857">Free speech is about the government not restricting your political speech, which has no relevance to this discussion.  Your freedom to speak is not violated here.  You can still gin up a Twitter mob against DriveThru if they ban your white supremacist game for violating their content rules and nobody is going to arrest you or even fine you - you just can't expect DriveThru to keep supporting you financially by selling your other games if you choose to do so.  Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences from that speech except to prevent the government from imposing consequences on you over it.The analogy is close but not quite right because these are publisher conduct guidelines, not customer guidelines.  As a customer you can badmouth DTRPG all you want online and they'll continue to take your money happily.  As a publisher if you choose to gin up a social media outrage against the company instead of working through their channels when they delist one of your products, they are saying they might decide to delist all of your other products and cease to have a business relationship with you.  This is more like a publisher posting on their feed  "Bob's Comics and Games sucks" and getting people mad about it and then Bob deciding that he doesn't need to carry that publisher's books anymore.You're still free to move your sales to another storefront - I'm not sure but I don't believe that itch.io delists anything ever unless it's copyright infringement.  You're also free to complain about DriveThru's policies as much as you want so long as you understand that they might choose to cease doing business with you because of it.  Though if they're delisting your product for content reasons - which is what this policy seems to be about, people complaining about their products being delisted due to content guideline violations - you might want to be exploring other options for selling your products anyway because DriveThru has indicated that as a retailer they don't want to carry them. Is this a problem?  Yes it certainly is but it isn't a "free speech" problem, it's a corporate power problem in general.  Balancing the right of businesses to sell what they want to sell and not sell what they don't want to sell against potential monopoly power in a space is a difficult needle to thread.  I'm normally right in the face against corporate power but this one is such a minor example of it that I just can't get outraged over it. DriveThru isn't even close to being a monopoly yet for one thing.  If you're acting in good faith as a publisher you're either not going to trigger this clause because your product has been delisted by mistake or due to some malicious actor outside of DriveThru and you're working through channels to get it fixed (and there's nothing in this policy that says you can't post something like "our product has been delisted due to some customer complaint about content and we're working to get it back into the store", it specifically says "derogatory or defamatory" for a reason). Or DriveThru has indicated that they don't want to sell your product and you should probably take your books to a store that wants to sell it.</blockquote>

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