This isn’t a post I wanted to make but a word of caution for folks who post their games to itch.io – there is a site called Citron Games that is downloading and re-uploading IF from itch and claiming they published the game and they hold the copyright for said game.
If your games are affected, I recommend filing a DMCA takedown.
There seems to be a lot of search interference with Citron, a nintendo Switch emulation project. This might be it? (Note singular “game”)
It’s not this one. The one that the conversation is all about is this Citron Games.
Looks like they’re not even downloading/re-uploading but just straight up linking to itch’s hosting in a frame? And itch is apparently detecting it and warning people? So that’s… something.
That block/redirect feature has been around for a few years but it seems like it only applies to HTML5 games:
https://itch.io/t/614172/sitelock-update
So Another World (PICO-8) and Bone Appetite (Unity) work on the third party site, for example.
Presumably the vast majority of IF games are HTML5 games, so they’d be protected by this if they were reuploaded/hotlinked.
Edit: in practice, it looks like the redirect fails for Twine games since they attempted to link to or reupload those in a different way. I just looked at a top ranking Twine game, “A Tale of Crowns,” and it just directs you to broken HTML file.
DMCA takedown
This might not be too effective if the site is based outside the US, which it seems to be.
It also seems like the block is based on the referring site, not from any site.
How have y’all found your games on that site? Since they don’t give the authors’ names, are you searching by title, or is there an easier way to check?
The only way I’ve been able to find games is by manually going through and searching for titles. Unfortunately the organization system can be inconsistent in some places and I’m still looking through categories myself to find games I recognize and can assist in taking down.
Sorry I’ve been MIA from the thread, I spent most of the afternoon messaging authors and game developers not on the forums whose games showed up on the site.
