Here's another contender for cryptocurrency payments, and other web3 technology.
Itch hasn't been shy about making its position plain, Steam has banned games with NFTs or cryptocurrency, it's natural that developers desperate to incorporate the blockchain into games want an alternative. It seems unlikely w3itch.io will be that alternative for long, as the site looks suspiciously similar to itch.io and its owner has itted to using itch.io's CSS files.
"You have stolen the UI of itch.io," said itch's founder Leaf Corcoran, "blatantly ripping it off, in addition to using our name directly in your project. As far as I'm concerned, this is [a] scam to trick people by using @itchio's established brand on an unrelated project for your own profit."
Corcoran reported the issue as a bug on w3itch.io's Github page, which is the most developer way of handling the situation I can imagine. The problem goes further than ripping off webpage design, however, as Corcoran noted. "Additionally, upon going through the content on your platform, it appears you have stolen many games (see rpgmaker.net) for re without the consent of the creators of the games. For the sake of respecting creators and their work, I request that you remove stolen content from your platform."
An official response from w3itch.io came via Twitter. It says, "If you find that your content has been stolen, please leave a comment under this tweet or give me a DM and we'll its er to coordinate with him/her to remove these contents. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the community for the offense we caused."
A browse through the games on w3itch.io brings up quite a few RPG Maker projects that are available elsewhere. Rather than link to them there, here are the official homes of a couple of notable examples: the secret history of the underdog game engine and how it got its bad reputation.
