Patreon Is Hardening Their 'Adult Content' Guidelines. Discussion Thread

RedStar

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Jun 9, 2017
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I havent read the whole thread but in case no one mentionned it yet, I read about 2 alternatives to Patreon :





I don't really know how good they are but hey it exists.
 

anne O'nymous

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Don't know enough about internal US politic, so I can't say. But I have a tendency to feel suspicious when the first thing a site tell you is that they guarantee you an "absolute free speech".
Anyway it's a crow funding site, so there's already better for game creators.


This one is weird.
If I understood it correctly, you win points each time you make an action, and you can change these points against some US dollars. As good as it can seem as an opportunity for creators to earn more, it also look like the said creators must probably flood their page and spam around the world to earn these points.

How to generate revenue, according to them :
  • "Set a monthly price for your fans to pay for your exclusive content and services."
    Alright, this is good, it's like Patreon.
  • "Receive offers from other channels to share their content in exchange for points or dollars."
    Er... It start to be weird.
  • Receive tips from your audience for content they enjoy in points, dollars or Bitcoin.
    Not a bad idea, but I fear the "attention whore" effect. Some creators will focus more on pleasing the audience than finishing their game.
  • Monetize your blog with ads.
    Er... Weird again. I have nothing against ads, but why use their services (and so only earn a small part of the revenues) instead of directly working with an ads agency (not sure of my translation here) ?


    This said, thanks for sharing your discoveries.
 

Socratic

Newbie
Nov 13, 2017
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Just dont post the content directly on Patreon. People can still support your work. It just means thinking outside the box a little as to how you get those premium rewards to your patrons. Off the top of my head a password protected gallery which only your patrons can access, and if they cancel their sub you simply freeze their access to the gallery
 

Studio Errilhl

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Oct 16, 2017
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Just dont post the content directly on Patreon. People can still support your work. It just means thinking outside the box a little as to how you get those premium rewards to your patrons. Off the top of my head a password protected gallery which only your patrons can access, and if they cancel their sub you simply freeze their access to the gallery
Problem with that is that (if you have something in your game that Patreon doesn't approve of) you cannot mention that at all on your Patreon page, and you cannot link to a version of the game on an external site that has said content. Which might be fine if you already have a lot of followers, and getting income, and word of mouth, but if you're newly started, that doesn't really help.
 
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anne O'nymous

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Which might be fine if you already have a lot of followers, and getting income, and word of mouth, but if you're newly started, that doesn't really help.
Yeah, "I have a game, somewhere... But because of Patreon's rules, I can't tell you where, neither I can tell you what's my game about. But please still give me some money", don't really works.

They really did their best to eradicate the content they don't want anymore. Well, at least eradicate it from their site. @Lewdlab seem cautious but still confident that we'll still have our monthly dose of games, so I keep hope in the future.
Whatever if Patreon win. As long as our beloved creators can still live and make games, and as long as new creators can join the scene, Patreon can burn or become the first society in the world, I'll not care. This said, the first option have my preference :closedtongue:
 

Dr.izzt

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Oct 12, 2017
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I am continuing to work on my game. I will be sure that it has a "patch" available to unlock my desired end product but i think even without that the patreon version in itself should be solid as well.
 

xslayermkdx

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Jun 4, 2017
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That's why Perv2k16 the game name Lovely Guests its not active on patreon? But can't find him on any other web site on internet anyone knows something? They not forbidded incest and there was not minors in that game only incest so no violence also, anyone knows what happened with that developer pls let me know if anyone learn something tnx!
 

kzk0987

Active Member
Sep 6, 2017
605
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Is it out of question to set up a blog/website for all things related to the game, and leave Patreon just as the tipjar for donations, and some polls and stuff? I doubt they'll go out of their way to check people's sites and the content made avaliable there with as much attention as they do to stuff on the Patreon site itself. Could at least buy you guys some time. The main issue would be that you can't make posts on a site for patrons only. For the early access of builds you can just do a mailing list, get your patron's emails and send them the link directly. That is an option for doing early access outside of Patreon.

I think that is a far more sensible solution/buying time strategy while you guys search for other venues than just gutting your own games. I'd say it's worth a try and, if it doesn't work, then you take measures to change content but make patches and stuff avaliable.
 

anne O'nymous

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Is it out of question to set up a blog/website for all things related to the game, and leave Patreon just as the tipjar for donations, and some polls and stuff?
It's, alas, out of question.


I doubt they'll go out of their way to check people's sites and the content made avaliable there with as much attention as they do to stuff on the Patreon site itself.
It's not that they will do it, it's that they actually do it. It will take time, but in few month, creators who'll not be hit like will be fortunate. They said that they'll go against the games and play them before their definitive statement, they clearly do it.
You can't fund a game with a banned content through Patreon, whatever the way you make the game available.
 

Delmach

Member
Oct 3, 2017
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It's not that they will do it, it's that they actually do it. It will take time, but in few month, creators who'll not be hit like will be fortunate. They said that they'll go against the games and play them before their definitive statement, they clearly do it.
You can't fund a game with a banned content through Patreon, whatever the way you make the game available.
I still wouldnt say thats completly true (yet), the few cases so far havent been enough proof that they actually play the game, or to what extent. And with a few hundred of them in varying versions with updates coming in varying cycles, I dont see how they can keep up with that.

Because maybe an early 20 minute version of a game doesnt have that unwanted content yet, and the next version does, thats a mammoth project of checking games every now and then. But I do agree its a gamble, and also am strongly the opinion its a deterrent for new people, as they will probably censor themself a bit right away. And that would make Patreon kinda run dry, bleed out the creators anyway.

Maybe thats what you meant with "but in a few months", as the creator/projects number might decrease on its own, depending how many people get hit with censorship. And if/how fast they widen their approach to their other unwanted content. Thats still to be seen, as even in the latest case they only went for one fetish to be banned.
 

kzk0987

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Sep 6, 2017
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Yeah, while they are enforcing the rules it's hard to say exactly to what extent, especially to medium and smaller earners.

I think people are underestimating the time and effort needed to check everything, doubt Patreon has the personell avaliable to accomplish that. It is a risk, which is why I called it buying time. Patreon seems to contact people first and demand changes. So you probably won't get your channel deleted at once, unless of course you're already in talks with them. The blog idea would work best for people who haven't been told to change game content (just front page content) yet, as they didn't receive any warnings refering to the game. People like Lewdlab who have been explicitly told to change the game don't really have any choice, other than complying or leaving Patreon. But people ho haven't still have that option to at least extend their time (as there's still a possibility the enforcement of the rules will get more lenient over time, not more hard. As I said Patreon may not have the personnel to test everything in the long run like that, and they may just have other priorities in a few months. If not, well gives them time for planning out what to do when Patreon catches up. If they've never told you to change your game they can't just delete your page for not abiding to their requests).

It's not an ideal thing, but I thought it was worth considering.
 
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anne O'nymous

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he few cases so far havent been enough proof that they actually play the game
They clearly played Dreams of Desire.
The game have had a release between their first review of the project page, and the letter I linked to. The page is clear of all the banned words (otherwise it shouldn't have been turned back online), so the only way to know that there's still incest in the game is by playing it (or at least reviewing it, see below).


Because maybe an early 20 minute version of a game doesnt have that unwanted content yet, and the next version does, thats a mammoth project of checking games every now and then.
They are supposed to have some admins in their teams, guys who are taught how to do things in the lazy way and to use a ton shit of automation. And like most of the adult games on Patreon are made with Ren'py, it's not a big deal to review them.
You can use the auto forward feature. For an average game with an average number of choice to make, 30 minutes is way enough to reach the end. And you'll find the incest/rape/bestiality scene way before you reach the end.
Changing a value, the game will automatically save each two/three seconds, so you'll never restart far from the end when you'll review the next release.
They also can browse the pictures. It will not works every time, but if there's "mom" in the name of the picture and she's naked spreading her legs, there's few doubt to have.
The code of a Ren'py game come with the game. It's not difficult use whatever text editor and search for some keywords. With the help of any average coder, you can have a parser which will do it automatically for you. Just read the sentences in its digest and 3 minutes is enough to know if there's incest in the game.

I don't say that they (will) do one or the other. Just that reviewing a Ren'py game isn't a mammoth project, not even a cow one. More or less the same apply for games made with RPGMaker.


Maybe thats what you meant with "but in a few months",
No, what I meant is that they are stupids. Despite the fact that I just demonstrated that reviewing a Ren'py games is easy and can be done almost automatically, they'll do it manually.
So, something like five or six creators will be warned each week that their game is still wrong. The next month they'll review the same games and ban or not depending of what they'll see. Then you loop for two more month and 20/24 other creators.
During this time, the fear will spread and creators will resign, migrate to another service, or comply. I'm sure that it's part of their project. In their mind, the time they'll pass reviewing the games isn't lost since it will force the other to comply to their rules.

I think people are underestimating the time and effort needed to check everything, doubt Patreon has the personell avaliable to accomplish that.
If they do it correctly (see above), a week is enough for one person to review all the games made with Ren'py in Patreon. Personally, my own broken tools give me a good view of a Ren'py game in less than 20 minutes, and I'm not payed for this. I do it by pleasure and what I look for in the games are more complex things than what they search. The human just need to read the digest, and the tools can works all night long.
It can be more complicated for games made with other game engines, but unless the said engine compress it's data with a proprietary algorithm, you still can decompress them, then at least read every sentences with an hexa editor, or parse the raw content. Unity and Unreal games are the only one they'll have a hard time to review and would perhaps have to really play to know their content.
One week to search the existing tools and create the missing ones, and if they spend more than 10 minutes to know if there's incest in the game, they are the one who should resign.
 
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User_215882

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Patreon has a small staff of less than 100 people. I doubt they have that many employees playing every game on their site. Until devs move to another site they are going to either comply incase one employees takes a look at the game or depend on modds that can restore the taboo content. Devs just have to be sure not give the modds out themselves. Either way if you plan on starting on Patreon, up until they just outright ban porn games, youre going to have to be sneaky.
 

kzk0987

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Sep 6, 2017
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They clearly played Dreams of Desire.
The game have had a release between their first review of the project page, and the letter I linked to. The page is clear of all the banned words (otherwise it shouldn't have been turned back online), so the only way to know that there's still incest in the game is by playing it (or at least reviewing it, see below).




They are supposed to have some admins in their teams, guys who are taught how to do things in the lazy way and to use a ton shit of automation. And like most of the adult games on Patreon are made with Ren'py, it's not a big deal to review them.
You can use the auto forward feature. For an average game with an average number of choice to make, 30 minutes is way enough to reach the end. And you'll find the incest/rape/bestiality scene way before you reach the end.
Changing a value, the game will automatically save each two/three seconds, so you'll never restart far from the end when you'll review the next release.
They also can browse the pictures. It will not works every time, but if there's "mom" in the name of the picture and she's naked spreading her legs, there's few doubt to have.
The code of a Ren'py game come with the game. It's not difficult use whatever text editor and search for some keywords. With the help of any average coder, you can have a parser which will do it automatically for you. Just read the sentences in its digest and 3 minutes is enough to know if there's incest in the game.

I don't say that they (will) do one or the other. Just that reviewing a Ren'py game isn't a mammoth project, not even a cow one. More or less the same apply for games made with RPGMaker.




No, what I meant is that they are stupids. Despite the fact that I just demonstrated that reviewing a Ren'py games is easy and can be done almost automatically, they'll do it manually.
So, something like five or six creators will be warned each week that their game is still wrong. The next month they'll review the same games and ban or not depending of what they'll see. Then you loop for two more month and 20/24 other creators.
During this time, the fear will spread and creators will resign, migrate to another service, or comply. I'm sure that it's part of their project. In their mind, the time they'll pass reviewing the games isn't lost since it will force the other to comply to their rules.



If they do it correctly (see above), a week is enough for one person to review all the games made with Ren'py in Patreon. Personally, my own broken tools give me a good view of a Ren'py game in less than 20 minutes, and I'm not payed for this. I do it by pleasure and what I look for in the games are more complex things than what they search. The human just need to read the digest, and the tools can works all night long.
It can be more complicated for games made with other game engines, but unless the said engine compress it's data with a proprietary algorithm, you still can decompress them, then at least read every sentences with an hexa editor, or parse the raw content. Unity and Unreal games are the only one they'll have a hard time to review and would perhaps have to really play to know their content.
One week to search the existing tools and create the missing ones, and if they spend more than 10 minutes to know if there's incest in the game, they are the one who should resign.
But the new rules apply to patreon content at large, not just to games. There's more porn art patreons than porn game ones, I think. That would add a lot more time to these estimatives.
Also there's the fact that, as observed, some people are enforcing the rules in a more hard way than others. That means, unless specific Patreon pages are assigned to a specific person or group, it could also take a lot of time until one of the more hardline staff members find your game.

Either way, unless the enforcing gets more lax with time (which isn't likely, but could happen if more urgent matters arise to take Patreon's employee's time), it's better people who work with incest or non consensual themes take any time they can bid to find some other venue to keep doing their work. Either doing a clean version for Patreon and offering a patch after, having the actual games somewhere else and hoping the Patreon staff has more to do than scrub their personal sites, or trying to leave the platform altogether (which is the biggest problem now as there isn't anywhere to really leave to). But I think the truth is, given enough time and assuming they don't drop the fiscalization, even offering patches and other methods won't work anymore and they'll just have to leave. That, or change their content and just bleed subscribers who are there because of incest/corruption/mind control/whatever.

Worst case scenario is, this is just a beginning and Patreon will keep adding more and more things to their "not okay list", minimizing and eventually removing pornographic content from their platform. For now that's just what it is, a worst case scenario, but I don't think it's wise writing it off as an impossbility.
 

anne O'nymous

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But the new rules apply to patreon content at large, not just to games. There's more porn art patreons than porn game ones, I think. That would add a lot more time to these estimatives.
:
"We have zero tolerance when it comes to the glorification of sexual violence which includes bestiality, rape, and child exploitation [...]
We also do not allow other fringe sexual fetish content, such as incest, necrophilia, or fetish content that is hard to distinguish from non-consensual sex.
[...]
Lastly, you cannot sell pornographic material or arrange sexual service(s) as a reward for your patrons. We define pornographic material as real people engaging in sexual acts such as masturbation or sexual intercourse on camera. [...]"

Games and literature are clearly their first target here. Except people who are stupid enough to publicly display pictures/videos of his illegal actions.


This said, it's their site, they can do a lot of amazing things with it. A picture, video or link is added to a page flagged "adult content", unless there's a captcha, it can be automatically downloaded and added to the reviewing team's feed.
Seeing if a picture is "pornographic" or not don't take a lot of time. Tweak an open source image browser, and pictures will change every 3 seconds ; it's not really difficult to do and they are supposed to have good coders. Three seconds, iIt's enough to know if one picture need that you stop and look closely. For an 8 hours day of works, it's 9600 pictures that are reviewed by a single person.
For the videos, tweak an open source media player to automatically play 2 seconds then skip a whole minute , once again, not a difficult thing to do. Unless it's a really fast quicky, you'll not miss the action. One minute to see a whole 30 minutes video.
For the games, I already said it, 10 minutes is way enough for most of them. And for literature, the same, "parse it to find keywords, then review the digest", apply, so I'll go for 10 minutes.

Obviously, someone doing this will end crazy in no time. So you review pictures for an hour, then one hour sending warning and answering emails, one hour of video reviewing, followed by one hour of automated games reviewing. Again one hour of pictures reviewing, and you end the day with one hour of literature reviewing, followed by one hour of emails.
Put just four persons at this, and you still have your 9600 pictures/day, plus 120 hours of videos, 24 games and 24 "books" reviewed. They have a high number of creators, but honestly I have no clue of the average amount of daily updates.
Still I don't think that they have really more than this every days. To have 9600 pictures, you need 960 creators putting 10 in one go. Even with one update/week, as long as they have less than 6720 creators doing this, four people is enough to review all the pictures before the end of the week. As for the games, usually they are updated each month, so they need more than 720 creators to not finish at the end of the month ; it's more or less twice the number of living games available here.
Anyway, it doesn't matter if the process add a little delay each day. Even if at the end of a month they still have two/three days to see, it's not a problem. They don't plane to do this for their whole life. They purge the site and, once everyone comply or is banned, and the word is widely spread, they can go back to a simple random control.

All this said, still you aren't wrong. Like I said before, what I describe is the efficient way to do things, not the way they'll do it. They've probably chosen an alternate way, something between real automation and full manual reviewing.
And the more times they'll spend on it, the harder they'll want to enforce their rules, because, "when will they understand that we don't want this !!! We have other things to do than looking at those... 'things'."


Also there's the fact that, as observed, some people are enforcing the rules in a more hard way than others.
Are they ? And it's a real question.
I know that at first there were creators who've been hit way harder than other. Now that we are at the second step of their control, I still haven't seen someone being treated more gentle than the others. It doesn't mean that it haven't happened, I can have missed it, reason why I ask.
 

Delmach

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Oct 3, 2017
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They clearly played Dreams of Desire.
Yeah thats the latest case I meant, but even there I know for a fact that not even 2 minutes in the game there is/was mentioned interest in a mother character (could mention the names but does not matter), which to me does not show any deep review, or at least lets the reviewers alert go off too easy to not check a bit further. So if they go by checking it manually as you said they can easily spend a lot of time, depending how games are made.

Granted, most games do set the atmosphere pretty quickly, well you want to make players have a taste of whats coming off course. So lets say they reviewed it manually, a bit more thorough even. Then I wonder why only the incest was the problem, or well I would probably be pretty happy if thats the only problem for them. As then the mods made would fix the situation, the content on Patreon would be clean then, nothing against the guidelines.

So I generally agree but its still weird when they have other clearly mentioned not wanted content and just let it slide when they are already reviewing a game thats on the list for other things. Which is the next point, you might mod a few things back in the game, and also have it make sense, as in prepare the game and writing for the mods, but there are just some things that are really hard to mod back in. Or things that require different renders, or if your game has many unwanted things, its basically a swiss cheese in the base variant then.

Nothing undoable for sure, seen enough games that have adult switches, even for certain fetishes, but I guess thats a whole different case of mods required then, basically need different versions of the game, as the "clean" variant cant have that hidden content, as said before by Patreon, cant have any option to make characters related.

All in all, as said though, I agree, if they continue and more games get flagged then they basically let the creators do their work for them, as in censor themself right away or just vanish/find other sites.
 
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User_215882

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Yeah thats the latest case I meant, but even there I know for a fact that not even 2 minutes in the game there is/was mentioned interest in a mother character (could mention the names but does not matter), which to me does not show any deep review, or at least lets the reviewers alert go off too easy to not check a bit further. So if they go by checking it manually as you said they can easily spend a lot of time, depending how games are made.

Granted, most games do set the atmosphere pretty quickly, well you want to make players have a taste of whats coming off course. So lets say they reviewed it manually, a bit more thorough even. Then I wonder why only the incest was the problem, or well I would probably be pretty happy if thats the only problem for them. As then the mods made would fix the situation, the content on Patreon would be clean then, nothing against the guidelines.

So I generally agree but its still weird when they have other clearly mentioned not wanted content and just let it slide when they are already reviewing a game thats on the list for other things. Which is the next point, you might mod a few things back in the game, and also have it make sense, as in prepare the game and writing for the mods, but there are just some things that are really hard to mod back in. Or things that require different renders, or if your game has many unwanted things, its basically a swiss cheese in the base variant then.

Nothing undoable for sure, seen enough games that have adult switches, even for certain fetishes, but I guess thats a whole different case of mods required then, basically need different versions of the game, as the "clean" variant cant have that hidden content, as said before by Patreon, cant have any option to make characters related.

All in all, as said though, I agree, if they continue and more games get flagged then they basically let the creators do their work for them, as in censor themself right away or just vanish/find other sites.
I feel like that's what they want. Take DoD. It was the only one that I know of that was asked personally to change the game to get rid of incest entirely. I feel like that was suppose to resonate with other creators because Sin is one of the big devs and it sends a message that they are going to actively play games to see if ban content is in there. Now if they do that or not is up in the air. I personally don't think they are going to be as active as some might seem at the moment and are just playing hard ball with some devs to ensure that the community knows that they will not tolerate banned content on their site. It really is a matter of time till patreon gets enough revenue from SFW creators that they can then outright ban all pornographic creators from their site.
 
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9thCrux

--Waifu maker--
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Oct 22, 2017
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I was checking out some popular porn sites and I notice that the incest tag was removed, or censored.

By the same time that Patreon started to censor incest I remember I went to many popular porn sites and searched content by just typing incest in the search bar but now such search yield no results...

You can still find incest themed content if you search using different terms related to incest tho.

So seems like someone or some group is trying to censor and/or criminalize incest and maybe some more fetishes.

Did porn sites and the porn industry got hit by that censorship push?
 

smnb

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Sep 5, 2017
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863
I don't search specifically for incest on porn sites, but I'm a fan of "sister" category, simply because it tends to have more pretty girls than others (it's of course subjective), and it's been plagued by "not sister" for at least a year now. When there was only a few, I thought it was a typo and they meant "hot". But now it's "not sisters" all around. It really looks like there might be something bigger behind it. Time for conspiracies. ;)
 

9thCrux

--Waifu maker--
Game Developer
Oct 22, 2017
844
3,215
I don't search specifically for incest on porn sites, but I'm a fan of "sister" category, simply because it tends to have more pretty girls than others (it's of course subjective), and it's been plagued by "not sister" for at least a year now. When there was only a few, I thought it was a typo and they meant "hot". But now it's "not sisters" all around. It really looks like there might be something bigger behind it. Time for conspiracies. ;)
I'm ready!
tinfoilcat.gif