Itch.io, if you don't already know it, is a wonderland of game ideas, rough sketches, works in progress and little indie surprises. You can't exist in game development, or love indie games, without having come into contact with it at some point.
The weird thing about Itch, though, is that the site isn't just known as Itch. You'll usually see it written about in full, domain extension and all, as Itch.io, in ways people would never do for, say, github.com. Even weirder is that, as Game Developer report, the .io part of that name is now under threat for the most unlikely of reasons.
I'll be honest and say that, until this week, I had no idea what the .io even meant. Aftermath.site, that makes sense, we're a site! Ebay.com.au also makes sense, we all know .com is a business, and .au is Australia. But .io? I've just taken it for granted all these years, figuring it was some tech thing or coder thing or something I just didn't understand and had never bothered to learn.But no! Turns out .io is a place! And that place is the Chagos Islands, a tiny series of atolls in the Indian Ocean whose history is, well...
The Chagos Islands had been home to the Chagossians from the 1700s brought as slaves by the French from Africa and India, a Bourbonnais Creole-speaking people, until the United Kingdom expelled them from the archipelago at the request of the United States between 1967 and 1973 to allow the United States to build Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, a military base on Diego Garcia, on land leased from the UK military in the British Indian Ocean Territories. Since 1971, only the atoll of Diego Garcia has been inhabited, and only by employees of the US military, including American civilian contracted personnel. Since being expelled, Chagossians, like all others not permitted by the UK or US governments, have been prevented from entering the islands.
It's essentially some rocks, with very nice beaches, that are outposts for the US military, built on land leased from the United Kingdom, which acquired the islands in 1814 as part of the treaty governing Napoleon's original surrender. Not the kind of scenario you associate with experimental indie game development, but it is what it is. It's .io specifically because, at the time of the creation of international domain extensions, the islands were listed as the British Indian Ocean Territory.
Those islands, despite being presently leased to the US, are actually one of the few remaining overseas possessions of the United Kingdom, and that's about to change because they're about to be handed over to Mauritius as part of an overdrawn (and overdue) exchange. And with that handover comes the risk of the .io domain extension no longer existing, since the Chagos will be folded into Mauritius (whose own extension is .mu, if you were wondering).
Itch's Leaf Corcoran tells Game Developer that the site itself is obviously not going anywhere, but that they might in a worst-case scenario have to change domain extension, which sounds like an enormous pain both in terms of branding but also in policing external links and backlinks. Hopefully the internet's authorities can just leave .io up. If not, Ireland's domain extension (.ie) is probably the closest replacement, and would also be much funnier to read out loud.
