Reply To: Mutual aid, crowdfunding

[Kim Crawley]

Let’s discuss what to do with the Itch.io game bundle I was planning.

We had a lot of great contributions but I needed technical support. I wanted to launch the bundle on June 30th, but Itch never responded to my emails and that’s the only way to contact them for tech support as a vendor!

https://itch.io/jam/stop-gen-ai-mutual-aid-charity-bundle-1

https://itch.io/b/3129/stop-gen-ai-mutual-aid-charity-bundle

Later on, I learned that Itch.io has a long, dark history of totally ignoring emails from vendors when they need help, and also of sitting on money raised by charity bundles, delaying money needed to help people going into the right hands.

Completely ignoring people when they beg for help is horrific behavior for a platform. And your typical Itch.io vendor is a poor/working class/disabled person struggling to make ends meet to survive. For shame, Itch.io!

Then the whole fascist payment processing thing hit. Many Itch.io creators are LGBTQ+, furries, and other marginalized minorities. And sometimes their games, novels, and so on feature sex between consenting adults and stuff like that.

See:

the people scolding folks for being mad at itch are being so fucking annoying like sorry that I saw my game and many others get taken down with no warning and zero communication for hours and hours

— JILLIAN F. KILLS (@killjill.itch.io) 2025-07-24T12:26:32.229Z

https://www.rascal.news/itch-io-delists-bans-games-under-pressure-from-payment-processors-and-an-australian-anti-porn-group/

Itch.io is kowtowing to fascists who are cracking down on the ability of marginalized people to survive.

So my idea is to launch our bundle on our website without Itch.io, 50% of revenue shared evenly amongst creators and 50% of revenue going to our mutual aid fund.

Cory also suggested starting a new platform as an Itch.io alternative.

What do you folks think?

Let’s discuss here and in our July 26th  meeting. I want to move forward soon.