Weekly update #33 - Home stretch before early access, concerning news in the adult gamedev world

Hey all,

Really quick update to tell you guys that I'm still trying to ship the early access build for the next blogspot, and to talk about the concerning news regarding NSFW games especially for indie devs like me.

As you may or may not now, Steam has recently banned a bunch of NSFW games from its store to comply with some newly thought of policies from the payment processors. Basically, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc. have decided that they do not want their services to be used to buy products featuring questionable content. For now, this mainly concerns games featuring some more "extreme" fetishes which means I'm not too worried for my own game, but it's still very concerning and worth debating and contesting.

First off, this means that these third-party companies which have no real ties to the gaming world and arguably a flawed vision of the industry have a decisive censoring power in what kind of games can be sold. If they decide tomorrow that they want to ban all kinds of explicit content, the precedent that was set probably means that the selling platforms will comply, and that's incredibly concerning.

Now unfortunately, despite my game not being among the targeted content of these bans, I've been affected by this whole thing : itch.io, the main platform for indie game devs to promote their content (which you guys probably now, a lot of NSFW games are on there) have followed suit and decided to deindex ALL their adult games pending some kind of audit, about which they have been awfully vague. They also have frozen the revenue streams of the adult game devs, and that indeed includes Dirty Chatting which was on that site. It's not the main platform I use to promote my content but it's still a bummer and I'm very uncertain about what's going to happen next.

I'm very concerned that Patreon might be the next one to strike against adult games, as the platform uses the same payment processors. If that were to happen, it would be a very grim omen for the future of adult games, Dirty Chatting included.

I've been in contact with the platform to ensure that I don't get everything blocked like it has been on itch but I didn't have satisfying answers yet.

Let's stay hopeful, keep a watchful eye on all this, and be ready to make our voices heard should the need arise.

In the meantime, it's gonna be a very busy week for me as I try to cook up a build that I can ship by the next blogspot. Stay tuned, and thanks for the support. You guys are the reason games such as mine can exist!