Even if you manage to sidestep the issues with payment processors mentioned elsewhere, you don’t end up as a “popular platform that just happens to take a principled stance and also hosts some controversial material.”
Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.
Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
One thing that might be a possibility for attracting developers of non-banned games is focusing on having lower fees than Steam's 30% or Epic's 12%, but Itch.io already does that (you can choose the split from 0 to 100%).
>Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
when you start talking about a business for serving “the few”, you’ve already removed the incentive for most entrepreneurs (unless those “few” are the extremely wealthy and you can charge them exorbitantly).
I've watched hikaru on kick and the only offensive thing about his stream is how he repeats himself. I don't really like how he says the same thing over and over. Chat, it's kinda starting to bother me how he repeats himself. Yeah I'm starting to think he repeats himself a bit too much for my taste.
I guess from the down votes I'm getting that people don't have the full context here and won't seek it out on their own - something I should have foreseen.
I'm speaking of Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best chess players in the world. He is also a streamer on kick, and actually talks in the way I demonstrated. It's not an exaggeration, he actually repeats the same thought ~5 times in the regular.
He is the only kick streamer I know, so that's what I think of when I hear kick.
Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.
Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.