Dixie Ball

We released our free and open source video game Dixie Ball on itch.io back in April of 2021. At first we had a good response, lots of views, some downloads, etc. 

 Sometime last year people would get warnings about our game potentially containing viruses or being part of some kind of Discord scam. We where only made aware of this when an associate of mine tried to download the game, as the staff at Itch.io made no attempt to contact us, and the warning was not displayed to our account when we tried testing downloads. After reaching out to the Itch.io support people, I was informed that we did nothing wrong, and this shadow ban was lifted. I had hoped this would be the end of our troubles here.

Later on I made the terrible mistake of promoting our game on Reddit. After lots of abuse from the “community”, Reddit threatened to terminate my account for “promoting hate”. Unfortunately the reddit brigade followed us to our itch.io page, and I suspect filed lots of reports. Almost the same time we got hundreds of views coming over from Reddit, our game was de-indexed on the Itch.io search. If you look for Dixie Ball you cannot find it there. You can find lots of other games with the name dixie, including a browser game about stopping runaway slaves. Our company page has also been de-indexed from itch’s search. I’ve sent numerous messages to their staff about this issue, and have received no communication from them. I can only conclude that both our company and project have been shadow-banned. I do not consider this to be ethical behavior on Itch Corp’s part, and as such I am pulling Dixie Ball from their platform.

If you’d like to play our game, please visit the official game page to learn where you can download it.

Sincerely,
Christopher Shilts, CEO of 33 Gamma L.L.C.