If folks weren’t aware, Steam and Itch.io have been delisting adult games on their stores due to pressure from Mastercard and Visa. This has impacted many games, even games that are not porn but just have adult themes. That said, even if it just impacted erotica it would still be bad, because I think people should have access to that too. Fortunately, it seems like there is a way to fight back and help out game developers. People have been calling Mastercard, VISA, and Stripe to complain and it seems like it’s starting to work. It will take days of doing this to make a change though, so here are places you can call to complain and take up their phonelines and costing them time and money in the process until they ease off Itch.io and Steam.

If you’re able to help out, here is a page listing phone numbers you can call and petitions to sign. It sounds like some folks at Mastercard and VISA are telling people to email instead but please keep calling. Emails just allow them to filter out things they don’t want and phone calls clog up the phone lines.

No indie game roundup today. Was caught off guard by all the Itch adult games stuff (and also just schoolwork tbh) and will probably talk about that later if I have anything interesting to say about it about than it sucks and makes me sad. Blaugust is coming up, the month long challenge where folks try to do a blog post every day (even short ones are fine), and I had been thinking quite a while about how I was going to have posts about FMV games every day. Even scheduled a few. Then all the adult games stuff happened with itch and I think the rest of the month will be me finally uploading all the games I’ve made to here and talking about them a little bit, and highlighting some adult games for visibility. That seems fine!

Outdoor Concert Summer continued last night with me seeing Yo La Tengo on the front lawn of the Detroit Institute of Arts last night. It was great! I only kinda sorta know their stuff but they played all my favorite stuff by them and I loved it, aside from the rain during the last few songs. Even aside from the whole pandemic thing, I don’t know if I can really do indoor concerts anymore. They’re just kind of a pain and I just prefer being able to move around more freely and I can hear better too. I think I’m just getting old. Here’s some things I liked reading. Use a RSS feed reader and tell your friends.

Video Games

Last week Steam started banning porn games due to pressure from Mastercard and Visa and this was stupid. No Escape has a post about it. It turns out there was also a post about it on Waypoint as well by Ana Valens. I have gigantic issues with the new Waypoint and haven’t been reading it, but it turns out it didn’t matter because Ana has said on bluesky that Vice just deleted the writing about it anyway. If you want to read the archive about it, you can do so here.

I’m glad Uppercut is back and posting articles again. Here’s one about Slay the Princess

Wraithkal keeps doing nice #ScreenshotSaturday roundups of posts on Mastodon.

Indie Hell Zone has good things to say on Puzzmo. I don’t do the NYT crossword puzzle but I keep hearing this proposed as a nice alternative to that.

Harris Powell-Smith has an advice column for writing interactive fiction.

Tech

I don’t even use Notion but I think Dante has sold me on using Obsidian. I just kinda have a jumble of Google Docs, which seems like a bad idea. I’ve already been pulling away from using Gmail and have a Fastmail account, which I really like.

Dev Logs

Andrew Plotkin wrote about Hadean Lands (great IF game) being in a Boston indies bundle on Steam and I think more people should just get involved with their local dev community and do stuff like this.

I really like Julia’s Crimson Gazette, her newsletter about the games she’s been working on and I think it’s worth subscribing to. It mentions Chance’s Lucky Escape, which I blogged about here and think it’s worth picking up if you have a Playdate.

Cyningstan has posted an update about releasing a new roguelike for DOS. I got to playtest it and while I’m bad at these types of games, I think it’s really good. It’s not a fault of the game, which I found very easy to pickup and start playing, plus it’s free.

I’ve already brought it up a few times before on social media but I’m going to do it again because it’s always been a good time for me. I think game devs should do more with their local libraries. They’re always up for having people use their spaces. Specifically I mean organizing a games showcase/expo of local games. It’s a great way to get eyes on it from people who will never see it on social media and don’t pay to go to games conventions, which is most people. They’re also free!

The Ann Arbor District Library has done a couple conventions and they’ve always been a great time for both video game devs and tabletop rpg designers. I don’t know if it’s an environment where adventure games or interactive fiction would do better but maybe? It can’t be worse than trying to demo your game at a loud convention. I also just think that people should collaborate with libraries more because they rock and always deserve more love.

Two sites I follow in my RSS feed reader are Jefklak’s Codex and The Good Old Days. Both are websites where one person or a couple people just review games as they play them. It’s usually older stuff but with the occasional new game or tabletop game sprinkled in there. I just really like the idea of having your own personal database of game reviews, instead of using something like Backloggd, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’ve been leaning on posting my reviews and thoughts here more instead of a social media site where it gets compiled with reviews by other folks I don’t know. Maybe it’s something I’ll build out someday as I keep doing more posts. Just for myself, because I think it’s fun looking at stuff I previously played and seeing what I was thinking at the time.