Usk Productions Blog

Caving to demands from Visa and Mastercard, itch.io has delisted every adult game from their search results, and has completely removed games with content which they deem objectionable. Mostly these removals have applied to games with payments enabled (since these are the ones Visa and Mastercard have say over), but some free games have been hit as well, including my game "Goblin Hive".

I believe, but cannot prove, that Goblin Hive's removal was carried out by some moderator who decided the goblins were "minor coded". I do not agree that they are, but I am not interested in trying to fight this. I am not interested in hosting my work on a site that is fine with it for 17 months before suddenly deciding it's objectionable. I am not interested in helping to build traffic for a site that will throw creators under the bus to save its own skin.

Some people are calling itch "victims" of Visa and Mastercard. A more accurate term would be "collaborators" or "scabs".

What to do

There is currently a public campaign flooding Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe's customer service lines with phone calls to try to get them to reverse their policies. I wish them well. Even if they succeed though I don't know if I'll be back on itch. Maybe some other site will fill the niche they abandoned.

In the meantime, I am evaluating my options for self-hosting games here on the blog. It's technically feasible, but I lose a lot of features like comments and analytics unless I implement them myself. I also have to worry about bandwidth and storage limits; games are a lot bigger than text and illustrations. For now, I have uploaded Maid Cafe Fashion Disaster and Underdressed at the Renfest as a test. I don't know if I'll bring over the screenshots and banners, they don't really mesh with the text-only aesthetic of the blog.

I don't make any money off my games so fortunately I'm not affected by the sudden crackdown by payment processors. A lot of other people are though, and I don't know what they can do.

I wish cryptocurrencies weren't a scam; the idea of an anonymous decentralized currency for making online purchases is very appealing. Unfortunately, no one actually uses it as a currency; they see it as an investment. They buy it with USD, sit on it until the price goes up, and then sell it to some other idiot for more USD. Plus, the damage they cause to the environment is horrific.

Anyway, yeah, things are shit right now.

What else is new

Before this whole itch debacle, I joined Dragulair's "Finish your NSFW Project" jam, and decided to try to finish the vore VN that I keep putting off. Things are going okay on that. I reworked the engine so that rather than a typical VN interface with a text box glued to the bottom of the screen, it's a flow of messages sort of like a text message conversation or an activity feed.

This design is easier on the eyes to read, and it also gives me less of an art burden. I can just insert new illustrations into the message feed whenever I feel like it, rather than always needing a background image that reflects the on-screen action.

I've pared it down to 4 endings as well, which are:

• "Broodmother", where you and Gina spend all your time keeping her as pregnant as possible
• "Harem", where you become the object of affection for Gina and dozens of her friends, and they all move in with you
• "Endo", where Gina decides to move out of her apartment and live in your stomach
• "Gourmet", where Gina discovers that all of her friends are interested in being eaten by you

All the writing is done, at least to a first-draft quality. Now I need to do art and music. I could probably get all the art done at "Maid Cafe" quality by the end of the month, but it would take much longer to do something smooth and high-res.