Key Takeaways
- Funko and BrandShield claim they were not responsible for causing itch.io to go offline.
- The companies say they only targeted a page imitating Funko Fusion, and that the platform’s service providers are likely to blame for the outage.
- Access to thousands of games on itch.io was cut off during this time, highlighting the impact on indie developers.
Funko and BrandShield recently shared statements claiming they were not responsible for itch.io going offline earlier this week. Funko is a toy maker company focused on designing pop culture-inspired collectibles such as Funko Pops, and it recently released the Funko Fusion game. Itch.io, on the other hand, is a prominent indie PC gaming platform started in 2013.
Between December 8 and 9, itch.io went offline for several hours, prompting its founder, Leaf Corcoran, to address the situation. On social media, Corcoran used itch.io’s official profile to accuse Funko of using an AI-powered service called BrandShield to create a fake phishing report against the platform. The alleged claim was accepted and enforced by itch.io’s registrar automatically, which caused the problem.
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Now, Funko and BrandShield have told their sides of the story. Funko claimed that BrandShield identified a page on itch.io that imitated Funko Fusion’s development website and issued a takedown specifically for the page, not the entire platform. Funko also stated that the company has already reached out to itch.io to talk about the problem after the incident. The statement on BrandShield’s page mirrors Funko’s, with the platform claiming that it uses an AI-driven platform to detect “potential threats” and that the decision to take down the entire website was likely made by the service providers. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that more details about what happened will ever be made public, considering that access to games on itch.io is already available again.
Funko Responds to Itch.io’s Accusations
In any case, it’s concerning to see access to so many games being cut off so quickly, despite the efforts of the company hosting these titles. Itch.io hosts over 200,000 games, as well as several game assets, comics, music, and non-gaming software. Aside from being the only marketplace where some developers sell their games, itch.io also offers many free games, and all of them were temporarily unavailable even to the creators.
The game that sparked the controversy, Funko Fusion, was released back in September. Funko Fusion received negative reviews from most critics, and it currently has an average score of 53 on OpenCritic. Some critics praised the clear appreciation of the developers for the IP but disliked essentially everything else, including the game’s level design, boss fights, and all the technical issues it had at launch. Despite the rocky launch, Funko Fusion continues to release DLC, with two Wicked packs being the latest one to be offered.