Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)
I've spent the last 6 months finding out the specific legality of "hentai" vs. "pornography" (among other things needed to try and sell hentai online);
Essentially, when "pornography" is used to reference things, almost universally, it's referencing real, live people. Hentai is in its own area, and there are multiple websites that will insta-ban you for pornography, and yet those same sites are perfectly accepting of hentai, just so long as it's not blatantly out in the public.
I've talked to Patreon's owner and the zendesk help guys, and they've outright said basically, to keep a hentai site on Patreon, you need to;
-Make sure the page is private. This means it can't be searched for on Patreon, you need to have the direct link.
-Make sure that the language you use on the site is kept to simple terms, this is the easiest way to get nailed. Things like "sexy", "18+", "NSFW" are fine, but things like "pussy", "fucking", "cumming", etc. are insta-ban regardless of it being private or not.
-No NSFW content can be hosted directly on the site, but you CAN link to NSFW content that's off-site, as long as it's within a Patron-Only post. So if your banner or graphics for the Patreon page have nudity, and it's in any way arguably sexual, that's a massive risk.
Those are the three biggest ones, but yes, I have talked to them, hentai is perfectly fine on the site.
All this stuff though isn't because Patreon is a stuck up site, it's due to the credit card and PayPal processors on the site.
Essentially, PayPal, as we all know, is completely insane about pornography of any sort and will freeze or wipe your account, with all the funds in it, if you deal in anything pornographic.
Mastercard and Visa are even more insane; if you want to open up a pornographic site, you need to pay them $1000 each just to get access to using them on your website for payment processors, and then another $500 yearly to keep this up... but they don't allow "furries" on any site using them. Now, this may seem like not a big deal, furry hentai is just a subset of hentai, right? Well, Mastercard and Visa, being companies headed by old men who have no idea what they're doing or internet culture, have decided that ANYTHING non-human = furry.
This means that the following things, as confirmed on the phone with multiple people who have access to the full TOS for companies working with Mastercard and Visa, as well as talking to people at those companies, are banned for any site using those companies as payment processors;
-Tentacles
-Robots
-Monsters
-Catgirls (girls with just cat ears and cat tail, otherwise fully human, no fur on body)
-Aliens
-Giants (not human)
-Elves (not human)
and so forth. Basically, anything not 100% human.
Get ready to get even more mind-fucked though; these companies ARE ok though, with characters that are FULLY animals, participating in sex.
So you can't make a game with say, two catgirls getting fucked...
...but you CAN make a game with two fully canine dogs fucking each other.
Seriously. /salutes backwards outdated ignorant laws