Indie game marketplace itch.io was seemingly torpedoed over the weekend by collectible maker Funko.
According to an X post from the official itch.io account, the platform was taken down by Funko (maker of the immensely popular Funko Pop! figurines) and its AI-powered brand protection software, Brand Shield.
“[Brand Shield] created some bogus phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain,” said itch on social media, but not before taking a moment to brand the software as “trash.”
“Also, for transparency, we did take the disputed page down as soon as we got the notice because it’s not worth fighting stuff like that. Regardless, our registrar’s automated system likely kicked to disable the domain since no one read our confirmation of removal.”
Itch.io appears to be back online at the time of writing. The company noted its servers weren’t impacted by the situation and said it reached out to iwantmyname to ask “WTF is going on.”
Itch decided to hold tight before taking any drastic measures, such as putting up a new domain, but did offer a workaround. “There are implications with third party services that make [switching domains] not a trivial swap. In the meantime, if you know how to tweak your hosts file use: 45.33.107.166,” the company added in a follow-up post.
“If you do edit your hosts file, please remember to remove all the lines after domain is restored. Although we typically hold an IP for a while, it can change if we update our back-end infrastructure. If the downtime exceeds 8 hours then we’ll likely prioritize deploying a new domain. Hopefully things are able to get sorted out before then.”
Game Developer has reached out to Brand Shield, Funko, and Itch.io for more information.
