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

Lykanz

Engaged Member
Game Developer
May 2, 2017
2,706
7,276
I'd like to end it with a rhetorical question, If I may: Who is at the the helm of most of financial/credit card processing companies in the U.S.?
I honestly don't really now...
 
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Bloo

The Angry Person
Former Staff
Aug 18, 2016
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Below you'll see our messages to developers on our Discord.

According to the new Patreon guideline for adult content ( ), some of you might get your accounts suspended pending review for it's content. It's already happened to Mr.Dots and Lewdlabs, the creators of Dating My Daughter and Dreams of Desire. Since then Mr.Dots has been re-instated but his overview page is completely different from before. We advise you to try and minimize damage to your Patreon by trying to abide to their guidelines by changing mention of content they deem bad, (just remove direct mentions of incest, rape... not the content itself). Alternatively you can wait and get flagged by Patreon in the future (or not who knows). In the end we don't know where this will lead, it started early today and by tomorrow a lot of you could be suspended or not. In 5 months maybe it'll all be ok. EDIT: Others took the initiative and cleaned their overview pages, including Dark Silver, Icstor...

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So far, what seems to trigger Patreon is the following:

  • Banner with nudity (speculation) or banned keywords in the title and other pornographic words.
  • Banned keywords (incest, rape, bestiality...) in the Patreon overview page, (unsure if private messages trigger it).
  • Adult sample images, specially nudity and other sensible content. (unsure if private messages trigger it).
  • Just general descriptions/mentions of hardcore content in a crude fashion.
What to do:
  • Remove any of the banned keywords from your titles, overview.
  • Re-phrase your overview to a more professional dry text of what you offer.
  • Remove any samples/banner that contain hardcore nudity and banned keywords captions.
  • Branch, don't put all your eggs in one basket (more on this below).
Branching out from Patreon:

You shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, it's fine to use the Patreon platform but you should expand your reach. Start by creating your own website where you can control the message and content, you can then simply link to Patreon and from it (Know that they don't allow linking to material they are banning in the first place, so be smart about how you link your content). Social media is important and it's also a good way to retain user interest in your products. This is your livelihood at stake and it's on the hands of a companies whim, protect yourself by being smart.

You can find Patreon guideline here: take what i said above with a grain of salt, inform yourself, try to get ahead of this whole mess.
 

Baka plays

Engaged Member
Game Developer
Aug 31, 2017
2,506
5,334
Seeing this whole hassle about adult games and the only outcome of it, is the deleting of tags from the devs Patreon pages.
They know what games they sell, and Patreon knows that as well. They don´t want to lose the money, so they fence with words, making it more mainstream friendly, so the offended can sleep on "righteous pillow".

Much ado about nothing
 

Bloo

The Angry Person
Former Staff
Aug 18, 2016
2,969
28,976
Seeing this whole hassle about adult games and the only outcome of it, is the deleting of tags from the devs Patreon pages.
They know what games they sell, and Patreon knows that as well. They don´t want to lose the money, so they fence with words, making it more mainstream friendly, so the offended can sleep on "righteous pillow".

Much ado about nothing
For now yes, we don't know what impact this will have on the small developers or the ones just starting has we've only seen it happen to big ones. For now it's words because it's large audiances but it might be easier to ban outright accounts making 100$, 200$, 50$... It doesn't matter. The future will tell and any conversation here is pointless.
 

Buffalo Fred

Active Member
Aug 5, 2016
848
903
I'm not sure if it is a platform that'll work for gamedevs, but Minds.com recently set up a tiered payment system. Might be worth checking out for people?
 

Baka plays

Engaged Member
Game Developer
Aug 31, 2017
2,506
5,334
For now yes, we don't know what impact this will have on the small developers or the ones just starting has we've only seen it happen to big ones. For now it's words because it's large audiances but it might be easier to ban outright accounts making 100$, 200$, 50$... It doesn't matter. The future will tell and any conversation here is pointless.
yeah, thing is, first they come for the words, then they come for the meaning of the words and then, they twist and coin them in their own meaning ...
 
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Bloo

The Angry Person
Former Staff
Aug 18, 2016
2,969
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yeah, thing is, first they come for the words, then they come for the meaning of the words and then, they twist and coin them in their own meaning ...
The old guideline was far worse they just didn't enforce it. The new one leaves some wiggle room.

OLD:
"Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies... but not porn. In keeping with our strong commitment to safety, we have zero tolerance for content that sexualizes children in any way. The glorification of rape and sexual violence is also not ok, Patreon reserves the right to review and remove accounts that may violate this guideline."
 
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Baka plays

Engaged Member
Game Developer
Aug 31, 2017
2,506
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The old guideline was far worse they just didn't enforce it. The new one leaves some wiggle room.

OLD:
"Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies... but not porn. In keeping with our strong commitment to safety, we have zero tolerance for content that sexualizes children in any way. The glorification of rape and sexual violence is also not ok, Patreon reserves the right to review and remove accounts that may violate this guideline."
funny, when patreon has an adult game section, it´s a totally hypocritical TOS, just to please lawyers and government officials and such.
 

Ignazzio

Engaged Member
Donor
May 8, 2017
2,884
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It was funny when they weren't enforcing it. Now it's kinda problematic to say at least
 

King Monkey Mon

The Perverted King of The Harem Masters
May 16, 2017
5,198
17,614
The old guideline was far worse they just didn't enforce it. The new one leaves some wiggle room.

OLD:
"Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies... but not porn. In keeping with our strong commitment to safety, we have zero tolerance for content that sexualizes children in any way. The glorification of rape and sexual violence is also not ok, Patreon reserves the right to review and remove accounts that may violate this guideline."
its strange that they allow 3d video makers to around though like studiofow
 

Bloo

The Angry Person
Former Staff
Aug 18, 2016
2,969
28,976
Edited title, Sticked. Please direct people talking about this issue on game threads to this thread, thank you.

Report anyone who comments after a warning asking them to move the conversation here.
 

Crusoe

Member
Donor
Apr 27, 2017
273
410
I`ve been reading the last two days about this Patreon thing and i`ve been amused.
People complaining about politics, religion, free speech etc.

Patreon is there for business not for politics or religion. The adult game community is a very small one compared to other communities. And a lot of people use Patreon at work, at home, maybe with their children or at public places. So a furry/bestiality/incest page on your screen might be a little uncomfortable for some people. Would you go shopping with your family in a mall who has furries being fucked by tentacles images all over the place? I know i wouldn`t.

Same case here, it seems. They just don`t want those perv tags/pictures/titles exposed because of their other customers. That`s all. What will happen with dev`s pledges it`s something that only time will tell. But i doubt it will make any difference.

So you can calm down and keep playing till the next conspiracy theory.
 

Bloo

The Angry Person
Former Staff
Aug 18, 2016
2,969
28,976
Excuse me. What is this you mentioned?
He's talking about Studio FOW who create animation shorts with SFM and Big Brother Game. It's a pointless comment seeing has there's plenty bigger Patreons that haven't been hit and Big Brother Overview has been edited already.

EDIT: and it doesn't matter who is hit first. Tribalism and favoritism has no place in this conversation. E.g "I dislike this game, why is the game i like suspended but not this boohoo".
 
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Volta

Well-Known Member
Apr 27, 2017
1,003
1,135
Lets for a moment consider patreon to be dead for adult games, it's not obviously but lets just imagine that it was, what alternatives do we know to be out there and what would we like to see as alternatives to patreon?.

back in the days of AIF and flash most people didn't make money, that or they used sites like new-grounds to generate ad income while hosting games however since most if not all games are on the user end now, that is less likely to be applicable, of course money per hit/download is possible but is far less lucrative than patreon. Will games go to online market places as in japan? will this mean that the "pay as you dev" model will die out? will this force quility up or just discourage the little indie devs?
 

Ignazzio

Engaged Member
Donor
May 8, 2017
2,884
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He's talking about Studio FOW who create animation shorts with SFM and Big Brother Game. It's a pointless comment seeing has there's plenty bigger Patreons that haven't been hit and Big Brother Overview has been edited already.

EDIT: and it doesn't matter who is hit first. Tribalism and favoritism has no place in this conversation. E.g "I dislike this game, why is the game i like suspended but not this boohoo".
In fact BB is a great observation subject as even tho it blurred incest in fetish list it still has sentences like: "Interesting story full of incest, voyeurism, punishments and different family joys of life.". If BB won't be banned it means they don't really care about those rules so much
 

CrazyChris83

Member
Sep 23, 2017
165
245
i think patreon went overboard with this stuff, they get a lot of money from the game dev´s and i cant find any law that says its forbidden, it realy looks like patreaon want to clean up so they can be mainstream, maybe they want to throw some patreon ads on severeal webpages so they are cleaning up now
 

kzk0987

Active Member
Sep 6, 2017
593
521
Why are they doing this? It makes no fucking sense to me they want to police what people fap to.
"Oh but these are bad things in real life" Have we as a society completely lost any ability to tell apart reality and fiction? What's next, forbiding shooter videogames because shooting people is a crime in real life?
 
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