@Ruin Explorer You have said several times that Collective Shout has openly stated things, could you link their statements, for the record at least?
So I get you're new here, but this isn't a court, and you're very definitely not a lawyer - there is no "record". It's been my personal policy for a few years (as some people here may recall) not to "Google it for you" for people unless they've clearly made a real effort to find the info themselves and failed (this is in part because I used to be paid researcher and doing research I know is worth like $50/hour or much, much more for free rankles with me a bit).
You very clearly haven't even Googled this yet. When you have, then we can talk. Also, amusingly it seems like Collective Shout and many of their members have hidden/follower-limited their Twitter/X accounts (just try this
https://x.com/CollectiveShout/- for me it showing "These posts are protected" now), but here's a screenshot of one of their previous posts:
Obviously that's straightforward dishonesty from them. That's like saying "Roots depicts slavery, ban this filth now!", removing the context that it's literally about how slavery is evil.
I don't know how they do so, whether that's true at all
It seems very unlikely to be broadly true, and I note they are careful legally for once and say "may" violate classification rules, because they could have been sued if they said "do".
Further they've campaigned against unremarkable games with clear, official Australian age classifications (see example above). They tried to get
Detroit: Become Human banned but the actual people doing the classification classified it MA 15+ for violence, themes and drug use, and "moderate impact" (a lower category) for language, nudity and sex (which doesn't fit at all with their depiction of the game, and suggests they may have a rather twisted mindset). See here:
I think your interpretation is not the only one supported by the evidence. We don't actually know what MC/Visa presented Itch with. Itch claims that MC/Visa say "the list of prohibited themes in card networks includes X, Y, and Z, so we cannot sell works containing X, Y, and Z". We know works containing X, Y, and Z are sold widely elsewhere and do not raise any issues with MC/Visa.
So, let's be clear, you are, with no apparent basis, claiming that Itch.io, an actual company, with no history of dishonesty, have suddenly decided to lie and exaggerate in the exact way Collective Shout have been shown to? Do I misunderstand?
And the "sold widely elsewhere" is pretty funny because you're illustrating how, if their own written policies are actually enforced, Visa/MC can potentially shut down virtually every media site.
That's exactly the problem.
Their own current TOS bans tons of mainstream content, but we can see that they don't enforce that TOS unless yelled at. And now people know what, more people are going to yell at them. Do you disagree?
But reading it as "MC/Visa all of a sudden created much more restrictive guidelines and applied them only to Steam/Itch because of third party pressure" doesn't strike me as the simplest reading. Especially because, as you note, Steam has not presented the same list of restrictions.
The simplest reading, frankly, is that Itch.io are telling the truth.
So you're not going with the simplest reading. You're creating a complex reading where Itch.io are lying and exaggerating, not proven liars and exaggerators Collective Shout. As I pointed out, Steam are a tough bunch, and Gabe is an old-fashioned libertarian. The odds are very good they simply told MC/Visa to get stuffed on all but specific games that they agreed violated certain rules.
And don't give me "they made up a restrictive set of guidelines", these guidelines already existed, as you yourself have admitted, so why make that up? What's actually happening is that they have existing ridiculous guidelines but only enforce them selectively, only when they're bullied sufficiently.
This is a classic problem - in criminal law you see it all the time - ridiculous and unfair laws that should be off the books and which are selectively enforced. Jaywalking in the US being a classic example, another being "resisting arrest" (neither of which are crimes in the UK, or rather, resisting arrest is but the components of the crime are quite different and mean you have to engage the crime of assault in order to qualify for it). In the US these laws have been used to excuse racial and social-class-based arrests, but society lets them continue to exist because they're rarely deployed against the majority.
It appears the "rules" here are similar. They're so broad that in theory, Visa/MC should for example immediately cut off HBO from payments, because no-one has demanded that they do, they don't.
For now.
It seems more likely to me that CS alerted MC/Visa of content violating some of their policies. MC/Visa agreed and presented itch/steam with those policies. Because there was some ambiguity and there was a high level of risk, itch interpreted them as strictly as possible to make sure they weren't in violation.
Frankly this
reads like an almost propagandistic attempt to defend an organisation who have repeatedly engaged in open dishonesty (c.f. the Tweet above). Surely that is not your intention? I don't for one second believe CS "alerted" MC/Visa, nor that that MC/Visa somehow talked to them and agreed with them in some formal and sensible way. That's not how CS acts nor how they describe themselves as acting, at least until they got pushback. They send threatening/emotive letters/emails and make threatening/emotive phone calls, and encourage members to make dramatic unsubstantiated sob-story-ish claims (your own link shows them doing that). They've done this for well over a decade. They make exaggerated claims and individual members, including the founder, call people names that would, if they lived in the UK, end up with them losing libel cases (c.f. the Twitter of their founder, who is doing that right now).
There's a difference between a generous interpretation and intentionally trying to push the boundaries of interpretation in order to excuse the behaviour of extremist group, and frankly, this crosses the line into the latter
in my view.
EDIT - Just to be clear, if CS had been serious in their claim that they only wanted to ban certain games with certain themes, they'd have provided a list of those games. It would have been trivial to do so. But there's no evidence that they did that, and clear evidence that they didn't. As your links shows, they ordered their members to email (not phone, interestingly, even though in practice they did phone, and even said the number of phone calls at one point - 1060-something, so they clearly organised the phone calls too, just not via their main site) Visa/MC and make non-specific and generalized claims about games on about Itch and Steam, rather than naming actual offenders.
As they are not total morons, they knew what effect this would have, they knew perfectly well that it would cause much larger problems. But they're okay with that. I'm not going to link it's because it's vile and defamatory, and definitely not Eric Noah's grandma-friendly but go look up their founder's Twitter (it's not protected, unlike many of the rest, at least at time of writing), and see the attitudes of their founder and other members on display there.
Then come back and tell me they didn't know this would happen, that they didn't want this to happen, that they care at all about the damage they've done.
