Late to the thread, but I thought I'd write up a bit more of a concise timeline of events:
October 2017: Patreon announces new community guidelines: No sexual content whatsoever on anything public-facing, restricted to Patron-only posts.
-Lots of warnings, some suspended accounts, but most of everyone that I follow got everything sorted out under the new rules and resume business.
-Obviously hard running a sexual-themed Patreon without being able to directly advertise any explicit content, especially in attracting new Patrons as some in this very thread have mentioned.
March 2018: Patreon outright bans incest & beastiality.
-Creators like Summertime Saga group edit out any explicit familial relations, but mostly stay intact.
-Some games move their content completely off-site, you support the creator and just access their stuff from their personal website.
June 2018: Patreon starts cracking down on minor stuff from the same community guidelines.
-Even after the big cleanup, Patreon still finds some seemingly minor infractions here and there, do another round of account suspensions. Everyone seems to comply and have their accounts reinstated.
But also: Prior to June 2016, sexual content creators could not accept credit card payments, since most cc processors refused to deal with any of that (due to excessive fraud), and most adult content creators had to use obscure work-arounds with other companies. This was fixed through Paypal’s subsidiary company Braintree according to their wiki, making it way easier to accept payments.
So really, 3 big shakeups in the past year, but it seemed way more exacerbated by Steam’s recent shenanigans, where a non-affiliated group was able to suspend some adult Steam games by abusing their flagging system. The lack of communication on Steam’s part through all this shook a lot of the community’s faith in Steam as a stable, viable platform for adult games, although a few weeks later Valve announced a more open content policy in response to some other shit they were facing.
So really, imho, I think Patreon is just reaffirming that these are the rules going forward, get used to them so we can all make our money without any other issues. If you look at the
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Patreons, 11 of those are marked NSFW (even if some aren’t for sexual content) or 20%, so it’s not like Patreon is purposely sabotaging that revenue steam.
Anyways, as far as competitors go, I hear talk about enty.jp, which caters to adult creators although it is entirely in Japanese. Aside from hearing some creators mentioning it, I haven’t heard any updates on new Enty accounts though. Hard to say how worthwhile this will be, since there is a history of non-Japanese devs getting screwed on Japanese platforms like DLSite.
