Blaugust 14 - Here Again

I didn't want to talk about the Mastercard/VISA/payment processors and itchio again so soon... tbh I wanted to wait another few weeks until it had all died down a bit more. But if you're on socmedia and were any way effected... lads it's gotten so mental. I can't keep up anymore...! I rt an article to read later, then discover we are all attacking random trans employees??? T__T what is going on...

What I thought would happened, happened. Itchio's poor response would blow up in their face even more. In the early days, there was plenty of pushback posts telling devs that we can talk about it later, we gotta focus on mastercard, lets use this energy and I agree!! BUT!!!!

You can't tell people to get over something. You can't tell people to stop being frustrated, we can talk about your dumb stupid problems in a few weeks. People can see how badly itchio is doing. You have to... show... some compassion... People are quick to get angry online, and getting people to swallow their annoyance and wait? Only a very select, charming few people with the right public speaking skills can do that.

I know socmedia is designed this way, and if we were able to talk to each other wed probably all agree... it's so annoying how this has just turned into a bloodbath... and no one is paying attention to the people who's income has been effected... "boycott itchio" girl there isn't going to be a itchio to boycott if you don't cop on. Or throw some money a devs way lol

My issues with itchio have been:

• Poor communication. On all fronts.
• No future planning. This is what got me a lot of flack when I posted about the issue on bsky. Yes. They should have a plan. It's basic business.
• Long wait for payouts. My EU people know this, but I think a lot of Americans had their payouts set to instant so this is the first time they've had to wait for itch to process their payment for them. This usually takes up to 20 days. And they might have jumped the gun and gotten panicked, I don't blame them.
• Shovelware/AI.
• DDos attacks. Honestly, this is what I thought would take itchio down before it got hit with the payment processors demands. I was getting worried about the stability of the site, how it was planning to protect itself from malicious actors and AI bots gone rouge (remember how they were flagged by the funkopop copyright ai bot?)

BUT THIS IS STUFF THAT CAN BE SORTED!! I BELIEVE IN ITCHIO...!! I don't think any company is perfect, and I wish devs could have the space to talk without getting bombarded --

Whole things a mess, frankly. I don't know what to say. It's killing me that this has turned into us vs them infighting @@ People are using this to attack others, to get clout, to be angry at someone they can just @ online... UGH!!

Pick your poison: the scolding posts that tell you you're a fucking stupid idiot for even daring to say anything negative about itchio vs the randoms who've never ever bought an indie game because paying a fiver is a scandal who are now "boycotting" itch... because a worker who posts on the community discord wasn't 100% nice or maybe didn't have the info... lol...

I have sent off my letters (Mastercard, paypal and stripe) today, and will send an email and do my calls tomorrow ^^ We can have a moment to chat about itchio, and get off some steam. But let's keep the pressure on! Shout to to my other devs and artists who've been effected but had to swallow their words because randoms would just use their conversations to fuel their own fantasies --

If you're sending a letter here's a template! I've been handwriting them and changing the text. It comes naturally after the first one. If you've trouble writing and have a library nearby, I reccomend leaving a big blank space where you'd put the payment processors name and then print out copies at the library, so you still have a nice "handwritten" letter ready to go.

CONGRATS SOLDIER, we've hit 2 weeks of solid #SaveSpeech pressure! Youre doing a great job! Reward yourself!

And keep on calling/mailing!

stop-paypros.neocities.org yellat.money

www.congress.gov/members/find...

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— Dieselbrain (@dieselbrain.bsky.social) 7 August 2025 at 18:12

Aside

I probably will end up having another blog about this situation in future, but for the next few blaugust posts I wanna focus on artists I like, mystery games, webdev, my doujins, my anime figs, finally making some hndr line posts, maybe a post about how to structure and backup files for archiving... generally being a bit more positive o7

The yuri evn webring will come back soon, I'm hoping to move to Linux this month so @w@ fingers crossed!!

--xoxo becky