I'm sure you've seen a couple of these devlogs around, so to keep things brief: due to pressure from the anti-porn, anti-trans group Collective Shout & payment processors, itch.io has delisted many adult and queer games, hiding them from the platform (read their statement here).

As far as I understand, the wide sweep is a temporary move; our game was presumably affected because it was marked as 18+ for its gore/horror content, and will hopefully be restored eventually. But the situation is still obviously bad for indie devs publishing their work on itch & beyond, as well as troubling as a part of the larger puritan censorship campaign targeting adult art, public queerness, sex workers, and more.

How to fight this

• You can find petitions to sign and numbers to call to file a complaint to payment processors here.
• For anyone in Australia: register your concern with Collective Shout misusing their charity status
• EU citizens: keep on watch for citizens' initiatives or other campaigns that would address payment processors abusing their monopoly to take the role of censors.

How to support us & other developers in the meantime

• While itch is hiding many furry visual novels, use alternate indices like fvn.li to discover stuff to read. If you're looking for something a bit more curated, I have a list of personal recommendations on my website (most notably including reviews for all entries in many game jams!)
• Make sure you're following authors and artists whose work you want to keep up with on multiple platforms. I have a website here, and you can find all of us on Bluesky: purkka, PinkNarcissus, Drake, Kachayet.
• Support artists financially through means like commissions, Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. Of particular note: you can purchase our game's soundtrack here.
• Being delisted is a big penalty for affected pages, but you can offset it by leaving a rating or a review, which will be visible for your followers. For reference, you can rate our game here. The situation is particularly bad for serially released works, which rely on the visibility from updates to grow their audience; if you've got an FVN you like but haven't rated yet, this would be a great time to do so.

As for what this means for this project specifically: as mentioned, I wanted to do a polish update to improve the translation and implement some requested features for the engine soon, but I don't know if that makes sense while our VN remains unlisted. It will happen at some point on some platform in any case.

In general, I am only going to interpret this as a case for redoubling my efforts towards making transgressive queer art and supporting other developers whose work I like. I was just editing and translating the script for a medium-length VN project that I'm very excited about; I look forward to bringing that to you all through whatever means and websites are viable when it's done.

– purkka