Recently Oxenfree/Netflix made the news because they are completely taking away Oxenfree from everyone who purchased it here. On other stores like Steam when a company delists a game anyone who purchased it keeps that game and can still download it later even though it is no longer available for sale.

Allowing companies to wipe away purchases on a whim like this is a really bad look for Itch especially when their primary competitor doesn't. Historically I brought up Itch very positively when discussing game stores but that has somewhat changed and I will likely be mentioning this incident when mentioning Itch going forward. This might feel like a small issue in isolation but knowing your purchases might fade away at any moment really changes things especially when I know I can go and buy it on Steam and not have that happen.

Also to be clear I'm writing this because I'm concerned about this happening on a broader level and the Oxenfree incident is just a good example. It doesn't cause me issues specifically having this game removed from my account here. Now users are in a position where they might be asking themselves "Wait are there other games missing from my library that I might not remember?".

You can already see it damaging Itchs reputation here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1fcivq7/oxenfree_will_be_removed_for_dow...
It's one of the top comments on a trending post on one of the biggest game forums and I'm seeing similar discussion elsewhere.

Anyways sorry this comes off as such a blunt rant post, I just found this pretty concerning and it affects my likelihood to use itch going forward a ton and I like Itch so that makes me sad.
I hope everyone reading this has a lovely week :)

While I do not claim to know much about this discussion, as well as believing you have a very valid point, I just want to add an additional information:

While it is true that (normally - not always), platforms with drm (meaning they actually keep your games and you cannot play them without using their services) will keep your access as long as you have  purchased a game before it being removed from the storefront, the very fact that itch.io offers games without drm means that you 'technically' do not need such a thing. You can literally, after you downloaded the games, keep them forever - standalone - to be used, backed up, and - although you are usually not allowed to share them publicy, give them to your close neighborhood friend like in the good old days.

A combination of both would be great of course. I do not know exactly how gog handles it, but they do offer drm-free games you would at least assume can still be accessed from your library if you have already purchased them. In that regard, itch.io does have restrictions to delete projects and accounts if people have already bought your work, so to enable them to redownload the items. But I assume in very specific cases like this one might be, there is not too much the store can do if a readily available file gets removed from the platform. But that is already going into a territory I can only make assumptions, so I will leave it at that.

Also, while I do see a point discussing this (and being aware of it for the future), one does have to acknowledge the fact that this is quite a specific scenario. Not every game franchise will make some legal deals with streaming companies. But it does indeed shed some light into the questions of this being only one example of it being too easy to pull things from buyers without 'fair' reason (legal does not always have to be that), as well as the thought of some sellers/creators not caring too much about the consequences of leaving behind a certain platform/group of their users for debatably justified reasons.

I think itch.io needs to give an explanation why this can be even allowed. This is more of itch.io's problem because if Netflix can decide to be robbers and steal people's games, the problem isn't just Netflix but them being allowed to do this means others are allowed to do this too which means we can't trust this platform. This doesn't happen at all in other platforms and Netflix hasn't tried to remove the games from them neither for that reason.

On one hand, removing a game from itch should categorically require refunding everyone who ever purchased it.  (I won't say that it should be impossible to remove games from itch, because there are cases when it is unfortunately necessary, e.g. if the original contains illegal material.)

On the other hand, removing a game is de facto possible on most platforms, by replacing the downloads with broken or empty files.  The only way to protect yourself is to download the game yourself and save the download.