Hey guys,

As I’m sure you’ve all already seen by now, there’s been a lot of things happening on the Internet lately. Between itch,io delisting us (and then relisting us back a few days later), multiple countries approving pro-Internet censorship bills and payment processors making moves against anything puritan organizations would consider to be “distasteful”, things have never been as uncertain as they are right now for NSFW creators.

We’ve been keeping an eye on the situation and monitoring it actively ever since itch.io delisted us but we did not want to rush to make a comment. It’s easy to pinpoint and blame the wrong people, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t target any anger at the wrong people. This proved somewhat fruitful, as while Mastercard and Visa were blamed early on, itch.io recently released a statement confirming they acted under pressure from PayPal and Stripe, two other payment processors that often work closely with Mastercard and Visa. Functionally, for us, this changes very little: these are still giant corporations trying to force their views on the entire world, and screwing over anyone that doesn’t fit that specific narrow perspective.

So, what can we do about it?

For us, it means we’ll have to consider “decentralizing” our reach. It’s highly possible that these same organizations will come for Patreon, or attack itch.io and Steam once more in the future. The more ways we have of distributing our games, the better our chances of surviving are. As such, we’ll probably have to start considering different ways of offering our games to our player base. We aren’t quite sure exactly what we’ll do next, but we’ve been thinking about it alongside other FVN developers.

What you guys can do, however, is support your favorite creators. Whether that’s by talking about their games with your friends or on social media, or sharing links, creating fan art, or even financial support if you can, it all matters and even more so now. The act of creating anything is hard, as anyone who’s ever tried will tell you, and it’s even harder when you’re up against megacorporations and religious groups trying to suppress you for expressing yourself in a way they disapprove. I know myself, I would keep creating, whether it was approved by PayPal, or Stripe, or Collective Shout or whatever, and that’s how a lot of us are. But that doesn’t mean every strike against us isn’t felt.

If you can, reach out to representatives and make a stand against censorship. Reach out to Paypal, Stripe, Mastercard or Visa, make your voices heard. This isn’t a fight we have to lose, but if we roll over and let it happen, there won’t be anything left to fight for. They won’t stop with “porn” and “distasteful content”. They’ll keep going, pretending to stand with abuse survivors and other victims. We’ve already seen it happen with horror-focused media being targeted for tackling traumatic issues that those groups deem “disrespectful and objectifying”, despite said media often being very important for survivors to communicate and illustrate, and even sometimes heal, the trauma they’ve suffered.

On a more personal note.

Santa Lucia is a game that features many darker topics that we strive to tackle with all the respect they deserve. Even without the more NSFW sections of the game, under itch.io’s new extremely broad guidelines and policies, it’s highly plausible that Santa Lucia would not be sellable on their platform because we’ve chosen to include those issues. The idea that every single piece of media should be bland and featureless, and only contain content that is pre-approved by puritan organizations in Australia is unconscionable to us.

That about wraps this up. If you were around during the 90s, you know this isn’t the first time religious groups have tried censoring every piece of media under the sun. This time, they’re going for the throat by targeting the financial security of anyone who opposes them. However, I doubt this will be sufficient for any of us to back down now.

We’ll see you guys around,

Take care of yourselves,

Stormsinger Studios