One of the best websites for hosting indie games has been shut down by AI-powered brand protection software. Funko has removed itch.io.
Funko’s open indie game marketplace itch.io has been removed. The company’s AI-powered Brandshield IP protection software creates what itch.io describes as “Report fake phishing to our registrar iwantmyname,” the company announced the outage on social media platforms, including X.
I’m kidding, you’re not. @Itcio has been removed by @OriginalFunko Because they use so-called “AI Powered” anti-brand spam software. @BrandShieldltd that creates fake phishing reports to our registrar @iwantmynamewhich ignored our answer and just disabled the domain.
— itch.io (@itchio) December 9, 2024
Here’s the full text of the tweet thread:
I’m just kidding. @itchio was removed by @OriginalFunko. Because they use anti-brand spam software “Powered by AI” called @BrandShieldltd This generated a fake phishing report to our registrar @iwantmyname, which ignored our response and just disabled the domain.
I hope you all have a great Sunday night.
Additionally, in the interest of transparency, we *are* removing disputed pages as soon as we receive them. Because it’s not worth fighting that way, however, our registrar’s automated system tends to disable domains. Because no one reads our deletion confirmation.
We’ll probably wait for this to happen. We considered setting up a new domain, but this affects third-party services, which makes switching domains non-trivial. In the meantime, if you know how to customize your hosts file, use: 45.33.107.166 https://t.co/yZR3sKo1NJ
— itch.io (@itchio) December 9, 2024
itchy.io Confirm in reply on X that the server is still there But the website is still offline. And we hope that the team there will be able to return to normal operations. They seem to be doing everything that is expected from such a large platform. And it will hopefully become clearer if and when humans consider this. In the latest update itch.io Post “If the downtime exceeds 8 hours, we will likely prioritize deploying new domains. Hope things It will be resolved before then.” For now, you can follow along. itch.io on X For further updates
