Report: Itch.io taken down by collectible maker Funko and AI tool Brand Shield

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 co-founder Leaf Corcoran offered more context in a post on Hacker News and said the phishing reported filed by Funko and Brand Shield related to a fan page for a video game called Funko Fusion, which is based on the Funko Pop! toy line.

"From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game," wrote Corcoran.

"The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all 'unauthorized' use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this."

Despite removing the fan page and disabling the associated account after being contacted by itch.io host Linode and registrar iwantmyname, Corcoran said the latter never indicated the case had been closed. He then received a downtime alert.

"I noticed that the domain status had been set to 'serverHold' on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end 'closed' the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days," Cocoran added.

"I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media."

Itch.io appears to be back online at the time of writing, although it did offer a workaround for those impacted by the situation. "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.