Patreon is taking away Adult Creators creative freedom with there new guidelines.
- Thread starter StargazerAsh
- Start date
US law does not forbid fictionally Insect and other things but Most companies don't want to be associated with things considered perverse by the masses.
Its not association with perversity, its the financial risk of perversity. @ASLPro3D made a pretty detailed post about this in the stickied thread about the same topic. Essentially the problem with all adult content is high risk, lots of problems with bounced and reversed charges because people deny that they spent their money on it. The more perverse the content the higher the risk. The board of directors at paypal are most likely libertarians, they don't give a shit about your kinks, but they do care about the money.
- May 4, 2017
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Indeed, Animopron's case is mind-boggling. It doesn't get more extreme than his work, yet he seems untroubled.
Same thing with Studio FOW, their work is pretty much exclusively hardcore rape.
My guess is that they just look at the cases few at a time and haven't arrived there yet. Which is actually a good thing, because it means they are examining each project, instead of just cutting heads based on user reports and complains.
Don't know whether to laugh or cringe at people throwing around loaded terms like censorship and stripping creative freedom. Might as well call getting a splinter "impalement". Reading these threads, you'd think the Nazis were reviled for their stance against incest, and the wartime collectivism necessary for their defeat warping postwar reconstruction inspired Orwell to pen 1984 in defense of fetishists everywhere...
There is no taking away of creative freedom; on the contrary, Patreon is exercising its freedom as a private entity to choose the types of people and businesses it would like to serve--last I checked, not wanting to host certain fetish enthusiasts isn't discriminatory. Don't like it? Go elsewhere or just start your own.
There is no taking away of creative freedom; on the contrary, Patreon is exercising its freedom as a private entity to choose the types of people and businesses it would like to serve--last I checked, not wanting to host certain fetish enthusiasts isn't discriminatory. Don't like it? Go elsewhere or just start your own.
Sure, if we lived in a perfect society in which the financial system didn't run the world. But we don't. For the same reason that a cakemaker shouldn't be allowed to tell me no because I'm gay, Patreon shouldn't be allowed to tell me what I can and can't sell. Yes, it's their platform, but no, they aren't responsible for my content. Leave it to consumers to decide what they want or don't. If they don't want incest, then fine, they don't have to buy it. Patreon isn't losing business because they have the content. Your argument makes no sense and simply continues to support the status quo of big business having all the power and we little people being voiceless.
Not wanting to carry products catering to certain tastes and preferences is not discrimination, nor is it some nefarious plot by "big business". If your point about Patreon having no power over what I can or can't sell were true, I'd be empowered to force Toys“R”Us to sell sex toys and the local mom-and-pop children's bookstore to carry erotica.
It is perfectly examplified by the "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" signs you see in restaurants. It is perfectly within my rights to not serve anyone wearing a Hawaiian shirt, just as it is your right as a lover of Hawaiian shirts to find a more accomondating venue or create a new one.
Actually, if you had any clue whatsoever what you were talking about, you'd know that it is a problem not with patreon directly but with financial institutions, like PayPal. PayPal is not alone in this. Major adult content payment platforms like ccbill also have policies against the same taboo content.
Is it a conspiracy to keep down the guys with the kinks? No but if every possible funding platform denies you the access to a specific set of otherwise legal content, you're left with nothing to do and no where to go.
To your next point, toys r us and Patreon aren't the same thing. If patreon decided to shut down all adult content because they wanted to be family friendly, it wouldn't be censorship, it would be about providing a safe environment for kids. Kids, objectively should not be exposed to hardcore adult content too young.
Patreon however wouldn't even need to do that. Adult content is hidden by default, you won't stumble on it browsing their site. They aren't taking down all content either, they're targeting a very specific subset of kinks within adult content. This is censorship. To tell me that I can only create within a set of platform approved parameters.
Again, I stress, patreon didn't get a wild hair up it's ass. They are doing this because their third party, completely uninvolved payment provider doesn't want them to provide the content. That is, the people who manage my money are telling a company I frequent what content they want me to be allowed to purchase with my money. That is, the company who manages my money telling me what I can and can't do to earn that money.
Again I stress, this isn't unique to PayPal. CCbill is the largest adult content provider affiliated payment platform. They have the same guidelines. Go to any porn site. 9/10 the incest content is step or clarified in the title as "my NOT brother fucks my tight ass". You'll be hard pressed to find bestiality content hosted that wasn't amateur. The same goes for rape content.
So, in effect, unless we as consumers take a stand and fight against the censorship of the large companies with all the power, there is no platform for taboo content. Right now people are getting away with it on Maker Support, but their payment provider Stripe actually has a strict no adult content clause. It's only a matter of time until maker support falls too.
So next time you want to come around and lick the boots of the wealthy elites who decide what I can and can't consume or create, at least come armed with the knowledge that you're wrong, and that you like it when they shove their moral dick down your throat.
@darthseduction I'm curious.
Do you believe that you have the right to control who gets to use the things that you own, and to control what they can do with/to those things?
Because if you do then why is it that the owners of Patreon aren't allowed to control who uses their web-service, and to control what is done with it?
Do you believe that you have the right to control who gets to use the things that you own, and to control what they can do with/to those things?
Because if you do then why is it that the owners of Patreon aren't allowed to control who uses their web-service, and to control what is done with it?
The things that I own are personal property, it is not much at all, and wouldn't ever be offered to the public. A business is not the same. They are offering their service to the public, they are allowing other adjacent content, but they are denying a specific group because they don't agree with their specific thing. We as a culture have mostly decided that what people want to do in the privacy of their own homes is their business, so long as they aren't hurting people. We aren't all the way there yet, as here we are in one of the many discussions about similar issues around the world, but we keep landing on the side of individual rights to their private happiness over the rights of those who seek to rob them of that right.
Patreon, paypal, or CCbill telling me that I can't publish and sell my particular brand of smut on their platform is exactly the same as Joe's Cake Shop telling me that I cannot order a wedding cake from him for my gay wedding. Joe isn't getting hurt by baking me a cake, in fact, if Joe is doing it for religious reasons, by not baking a cake for me he is sinning, as god has said it is not Joe's place to pass judgement for my sins, so Joe can't even argue that I'm harming him, because I'm not.
People are going to argue, "But what about the increased risk of adult content."
So here's Joe, he runs a cake shop, he has a lot of cake orders fall through because the people keep breaking up just before the wedding. So Joe decides to make a non refundable deposit for wedding cakes. Now, Joe decides that because of the social stigma behind gay weddings that he is no longer going to offer cakes to gay weddings because they are a little riskier. Joe is still discriminating, only he's hiding that discrimination behind bullshit economic claims. Incest has never hurt a companies bottom line, they simply don't want to be associated with it. Gay marriage isn't going to hurt Joe's bottom line, he simply doesn't want to be associated with it.
Again, if either Patreon, Paypal, CCbill, or Joe were to completely close their services to all people, all adult content, or all wedding cakes, then that would be a perfectly valid choice that wasn't discriminatory in any way. But singling out a group of people because you aren't comfortable with a social stigma is wrong. It is censorship, and we as a people should stand against it.
I can't stress enough how dangerous it is to talk about companies as if they are people, to compare us and our rights to that of a company is exactly why america is in the shitter. We give the companies too much power. They are there to serve the consumers, but they are so powerful, large, and non competitive as a result, that they can censor content they don't like, put down any dissent with law on their side, because their lobbyists write it then invite "sympathetic" congressmen to their fancy party to talk them into introducing it, and make their bullshit legal. If that doesn't work they buy the FCC or the Supreme Court Justices. This is why its not ok to give companies the right to censor content creators. It doesn't matter if its smut or guns or left wing or right wing. Giving companies the power to trample on our freedom of speech is the same problem as giving it to the government.
@darthseduction
It seems to me that you believe that a member of the public has the right to do as they please when it comes to the goods & services owned by a company, yet I know of no legislation or legal equivalent that bestows such a right.
Freedom of Speech is a legal agreement between you and your Government, not between you and a business, nor between you and every other member of the public for that matter. So it has little bearing in the case of Patreon (or any other company) not letting you use their services as you see fit.
In many ways a company is considered the legal equivalent of a person, it is what allows the company to own the building it resides in and the equipment it uses produce it's goods & services, it's also what allows the company to be held liable for the mistakes done by it's employees. If a company wasn't legally considered a 'person' then all of it's asserts would have to be owned by individuals and each employee would be directly legally liable for any mistake they made.
Your statement "They are there to serve the consumers" is interesting in that it infers that the 'consumer' (the public) have some all encompassing legal right to do as they will with the goods & services produced by the efforts of others. I wonder if people who once kept slaves or in-dentured servants thought the same way.
It seems to me that you believe that a member of the public has the right to do as they please when it comes to the goods & services owned by a company, yet I know of no legislation or legal equivalent that bestows such a right.
Freedom of Speech is a legal agreement between you and your Government, not between you and a business, nor between you and every other member of the public for that matter. So it has little bearing in the case of Patreon (or any other company) not letting you use their services as you see fit.
In many ways a company is considered the legal equivalent of a person, it is what allows the company to own the building it resides in and the equipment it uses produce it's goods & services, it's also what allows the company to be held liable for the mistakes done by it's employees. If a company wasn't legally considered a 'person' then all of it's asserts would have to be owned by individuals and each employee would be directly legally liable for any mistake they made.
Your statement "They are there to serve the consumers" is interesting in that it infers that the 'consumer' (the public) have some all encompassing legal right to do as they will with the goods & services produced by the efforts of others. I wonder if people who once kept slaves or in-dentured servants thought the same way.
Evil businesses, corrupt politicians, sinister bankers... just waiting on the Illuminati and their Martians partners in crime...
No need to go down your rabbit hole since the case is pretty clear: Patreon did not engage in censorship but merely excerised their legal business discretion, and not wanting to associate with incest fetishists does not constitue discrimination.
At the risk of repeating myself, Patreon, a private non-media entity, choosing whom to serve or not serve is simply not censorship. Furthermore, whether and why it decided against incest and other fetish content on its own or at the behest of others are completely irrelevant. As an experiment, I'd encourage you to try selling incest-fetish-related paraphilia at your local grocery or farmer's market, then take them to court charging them with censorship when they inevitably refuse.
Anti-discrimination laws applies to only specific categories--namely gender, age, disability, ethnicity/race, religion, sexual orientation, and military status--in the contexts of speech, employment, and housing. To use your example, Joe would indeed be discriminating in refusing to make wedding cakes for gay couples, however, he is perfectly free to not make any specific type of cake. If a customer insist on having a specific type of cake that Joe refuses to make, they'd simply have to look elsewhere.
@greyelf @spambot
So, I don't know about you guys, but I'm an American. Recently, the protections that keep the internet service providers from interfering with our internet access have been removed. Now, if an ISP wants, there is no law preventing them from throttling or even completely blocking access to whatever content they feel like. If they do something anticompetitive they might run afoul of the FTC, but that's all. So, for instance, tomorrow my ISP could decide that it doesn't want me to be able to access any adult content.
According to the two of you, that would be completely ok. There's nothing wrong with that, Pornhub would be the content provider but because my local isp doesn't want to be associated with porn they can block it. Do you not see how stupid that is? You guys think you can justify it because its a taboo, but so is sex. Our western culture glorifies violence but treats sex like it is something to be hidden, we can't even let our kids learn about it in school in parts of the US.
For some reason you guys think that it's ok for a company to censor us, like, because they have no legal authority, they can't really censor us because we will just sell our product elsewhere. But the reality is, we won't. The crowdfunding platforms are the only reason such indie development is possible on this scale. Sure, we might have a few developers who can weather the storm and make something without the platform to support them, but if that's our fate then we are in the same boat. Mr. Dots and Dark Silver aren't even half as good as some of the other indie devs out there. They just got lucky and had a large following. So if the only content we get are the DS and MR.D passable fare, we lose the community, we lose the interest and soon we lose the industry itself.
You might say, well you can still make games on patreon, but just not taboo content. Sure, until Patreon decides that they don't want to be associated with adult content at all. What? You think you're safe because you don't represent some taboo kink? Think again. The entire online porn industry is constantly having to sanitize, change providers, and otherwise get dicked around by financial institutions as they try to clean up their profile to hide the porn.
This isn't right, this isn't a free market economy. This is a controlled market, wherein those with the power enforce their wills on the rest of us.
The entire financial sector, the banks, are corrupt. I can't believe I have to spell this out for you. You know it wasn't john and jane doe who bought a house they couldn't afford who was responsible for the 08 crash. It was the financial institutions that allowed John and Jane to buy their house without the means to pay for it in the first place, something they allowed because they were just shuffling those shitty loans into big portfolios with a lot of better loans and selling them off, keeping them from liability. Ofc after years of this those portfolios got shittier and shittier until suddenly the banks themselves were feeling the pressure. The money was dissapearing the houses were worth less than they were being paid for, and John and Jane were fucked.
But even then that's not the entire picture. According to the data it wasn't John and Jane with their one house they could barely afford. It was the upper 10% who bought and flipped multiple homes. John and Jane did all they could to keep their home, the upper 10 just let them foreclose. It was better for them to foreclose than it would be to try and flip them. So when things started to crumble it wasn't because John and Jane bought a house, it was because the big greedy banks let millions of john and janes buy houses and didn't pay attention to the warnings. Then when things started to crumble the upper crust just cut their losses, screwing the rest of us to survive.
Do I think a cabal of bankers politicians and businessmen are sitting in a dark room smoking cigars and plotting our downfall? No, I just think the greed machine of unchecked capitalism has run amok and is through no ill intent, hurting the rest of us. They don't try to keep us under their boot, we are just in the way.
So, I don't know about you guys, but I'm an American. Recently, the protections that keep the internet service providers from interfering with our internet access have been removed. Now, if an ISP wants, there is no law preventing them from throttling or even completely blocking access to whatever content they feel like. If they do something anticompetitive they might run afoul of the FTC, but that's all. So, for instance, tomorrow my ISP could decide that it doesn't want me to be able to access any adult content.
According to the two of you, that would be completely ok. There's nothing wrong with that, Pornhub would be the content provider but because my local isp doesn't want to be associated with porn they can block it. Do you not see how stupid that is? You guys think you can justify it because its a taboo, but so is sex. Our western culture glorifies violence but treats sex like it is something to be hidden, we can't even let our kids learn about it in school in parts of the US.
For some reason you guys think that it's ok for a company to censor us, like, because they have no legal authority, they can't really censor us because we will just sell our product elsewhere. But the reality is, we won't. The crowdfunding platforms are the only reason such indie development is possible on this scale. Sure, we might have a few developers who can weather the storm and make something without the platform to support them, but if that's our fate then we are in the same boat. Mr. Dots and Dark Silver aren't even half as good as some of the other indie devs out there. They just got lucky and had a large following. So if the only content we get are the DS and MR.D passable fare, we lose the community, we lose the interest and soon we lose the industry itself.
You might say, well you can still make games on patreon, but just not taboo content. Sure, until Patreon decides that they don't want to be associated with adult content at all. What? You think you're safe because you don't represent some taboo kink? Think again. The entire online porn industry is constantly having to sanitize, change providers, and otherwise get dicked around by financial institutions as they try to clean up their profile to hide the porn.
This isn't right, this isn't a free market economy. This is a controlled market, wherein those with the power enforce their wills on the rest of us.
Again, I don't know where you're from, but in America, the type of corruption I've laid out is not only happening, its perfectly legal. I don't think the businesses are evil, they just do what businesses are designed to do, make money, reduce cost, make more money, repeat. So, in a system where it is perfectly legal for a lobbyist to invite a politician to a dinner party where they will shake hands with a bunch of billionaire board members all so that the politician can ask them for donations, you're bound to have those donations tied up behind strings. Yes sure, Mr. Ryan, I'll donate 500 million to your PAC, first I just need you to work on lowering my taxes. *By the way, the Koch brothers totally just did donate that money to his campaign.
The entire financial sector, the banks, are corrupt. I can't believe I have to spell this out for you. You know it wasn't john and jane doe who bought a house they couldn't afford who was responsible for the 08 crash. It was the financial institutions that allowed John and Jane to buy their house without the means to pay for it in the first place, something they allowed because they were just shuffling those shitty loans into big portfolios with a lot of better loans and selling them off, keeping them from liability. Ofc after years of this those portfolios got shittier and shittier until suddenly the banks themselves were feeling the pressure. The money was dissapearing the houses were worth less than they were being paid for, and John and Jane were fucked.
But even then that's not the entire picture. According to the data it wasn't John and Jane with their one house they could barely afford. It was the upper 10% who bought and flipped multiple homes. John and Jane did all they could to keep their home, the upper 10 just let them foreclose. It was better for them to foreclose than it would be to try and flip them. So when things started to crumble it wasn't because John and Jane bought a house, it was because the big greedy banks let millions of john and janes buy houses and didn't pay attention to the warnings. Then when things started to crumble the upper crust just cut their losses, screwing the rest of us to survive.
Do I think a cabal of bankers politicians and businessmen are sitting in a dark room smoking cigars and plotting our downfall? No, I just think the greed machine of unchecked capitalism has run amok and is through no ill intent, hurting the rest of us. They don't try to keep us under their boot, we are just in the way.
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You know both sides have a valid point? There's a common area there between the two perspectives.
Darthseduction is right in describing the situation with real estate here in America. The rich got cash handouts, large corporations were bailed out and the middle class got shafted so badly by that that we literally don't even have a middle class anymore. The middle class in America has been declining since the late 1970s and the reason for that is in the decisions made by large corporations and the beginning of the lobbying industry in the mid 1970s.
Also, we are still dealing with the glorification of guns by by the NRA lobby while the suppression of sexual liberation is carried out by numerous "foundations" and lobbying firms all lead by the religious right.
What I just described is literally the common area with both your views. Think of this as a coin....
One side is - A business is and should be free to exercise who they focus their business on to maximize their profits.
The flip side - Depending on the type of business, this can and does cause harm to those people not served by this company.
For example, I decide to build a bakery and start buying the bulk of the wheat sold in the area to make my delicious muffins. I do that to force the other businesses to either buy my bread or raise their prices. For the sake of making maximum dough, I decide sell my bread at a higher price point aimed at the local wealthy individuals to ensure maximum cash flow. The other local stores lose their business to me plus wheat is now scarce and expensive so they are also forced to raise their prices to make up for it. As I'm rolling in the cash, the poor are seeing the prices of breads, wheat products, and dough skyrocket to the point where they can no longer afford to buy bread and are facing malnutrition and even starvation.
Another common ground both sides don't recognize is that it's really up the businesses and the corporations to be ethical and conscientious. I could have just done a few simple things.. created a collective with other buyers to level the price of wheat and make it fair for both us and the farmer, allow myself to lower the profit margin a bit to make affordable bread, and to donate the excess bread to the soup kitchens or failing that, make my soup kitchen for the poor and homeless. Now.. that's like what?? Less than .01 percent of businesses even do half of that?
Darthseduction is right in describing the situation with real estate here in America. The rich got cash handouts, large corporations were bailed out and the middle class got shafted so badly by that that we literally don't even have a middle class anymore. The middle class in America has been declining since the late 1970s and the reason for that is in the decisions made by large corporations and the beginning of the lobbying industry in the mid 1970s.
Also, we are still dealing with the glorification of guns by by the NRA lobby while the suppression of sexual liberation is carried out by numerous "foundations" and lobbying firms all lead by the religious right.
What I just described is literally the common area with both your views. Think of this as a coin....
One side is - A business is and should be free to exercise who they focus their business on to maximize their profits.
The flip side - Depending on the type of business, this can and does cause harm to those people not served by this company.
For example, I decide to build a bakery and start buying the bulk of the wheat sold in the area to make my delicious muffins. I do that to force the other businesses to either buy my bread or raise their prices. For the sake of making maximum dough, I decide sell my bread at a higher price point aimed at the local wealthy individuals to ensure maximum cash flow. The other local stores lose their business to me plus wheat is now scarce and expensive so they are also forced to raise their prices to make up for it. As I'm rolling in the cash, the poor are seeing the prices of breads, wheat products, and dough skyrocket to the point where they can no longer afford to buy bread and are facing malnutrition and even starvation.
Another common ground both sides don't recognize is that it's really up the businesses and the corporations to be ethical and conscientious. I could have just done a few simple things.. created a collective with other buyers to level the price of wheat and make it fair for both us and the farmer, allow myself to lower the profit margin a bit to make affordable bread, and to donate the excess bread to the soup kitchens or failing that, make my soup kitchen for the poor and homeless. Now.. that's like what?? Less than .01 percent of businesses even do half of that?
I don't understand how you can offer these two contraditory statements in the same argument. I've always thought a free market is a necessary condition for capitalism, especially the "unchecked" variant. That said, I think this argument has gone horribly off track and shifted from whether censorship took place to a broad critique of capitalism and corporate rights/responsibilities. As a lawyer who majored in econ and worked with investment funds during the Great Recession, I think we stand on opposite spectrums regarding the merits of free markets and capitalism, and I doubt either of us--two strangers on a porn forum--can convince the other to switch sides.
However, I see the absence of censorship--and by extension discrimination--as pretty clear-cut, regardless of your political persuasion. Censorship and discrimination both refer to relatively clear and generally agreed upon sets of circumstances that simply don't apply here as explained in my previous posts. I understand the frustration at having your fetish banned from Patreon but to throw around terms like censorship and discrimination is not only needless but cheapens the historical struggles and grievances they inspired.
@darthseduction @muttdoggy
I also live in a western country with a society (based on capitalism and consumerism) which has similar issues as described by both of you, and I believe that it is the unlimited growth / free market core principals of those two frameworks that is a major cause of our problems.
These two frameworks "work best" (for a limited definition of the term) when there are new untapped market to buy the goods & services, and this was the case for a long while because the producers were able to sell into the newly created markets of countries like China, India, Africa, etc... but unfortunately (for the historical producers) those new markets have learnt to create their own products.
This caused an issue because there were no real undiscovered untapped markets to grow so the producers had to concentrate on competing for market share of the existing markets, then along came the internet and there were undiscovered untapped markets again (or at least there was for a little while until those pesky others learnt to also tap it as well and then we were back to competing for market share again.)
The other main issue with both of the frameworks is that they are built on "competition" (eg. be better than everyone else) which is currently generally measured in either the "greatest wealth" or the "greatest market share" and neither of those things generally play well with the concepts like "fairness", "co-operation", "the greater good", etc.
I also live in a western country with a society (based on capitalism and consumerism) which has similar issues as described by both of you, and I believe that it is the unlimited growth / free market core principals of those two frameworks that is a major cause of our problems.
These two frameworks "work best" (for a limited definition of the term) when there are new untapped market to buy the goods & services, and this was the case for a long while because the producers were able to sell into the newly created markets of countries like China, India, Africa, etc... but unfortunately (for the historical producers) those new markets have learnt to create their own products.
This caused an issue because there were no real undiscovered untapped markets to grow so the producers had to concentrate on competing for market share of the existing markets, then along came the internet and there were undiscovered untapped markets again (or at least there was for a little while until those pesky others learnt to also tap it as well and then we were back to competing for market share again.)
The other main issue with both of the frameworks is that they are built on "competition" (eg. be better than everyone else) which is currently generally measured in either the "greatest wealth" or the "greatest market share" and neither of those things generally play well with the concepts like "fairness", "co-operation", "the greater good", etc.
Businesses & corporations of themselves don't have ethics or morals as they are only legal entities, it is the people within them that can have these things. The issue is that currently to be very successful in either of the above frameworks it generally helps to be neither ethical or conscientious to any great degree, because if you are then generally those that aren't will be able to get further ahead. (the old dog eat dog world principle)
You've actually got it backwards. You're right that the economy thrives when there's a new market, but how you're relating that to competition is false. The larger companies, banks, etc no longer compete. They take their own share of the market and maintain it, but they aren't fighting one another for scraps anymore. Instead they make sure that they maintain their status quo. This is what I was talking about when I said we don't really have a free market anymore. All of the power is concentrated in a handful of individual interests. Each of these interests have no reason to compete, the market isn't growing, there's nowhere for it to grow and they are comfortable where they are.
Lets look at a pretty obvious example. Coke, and Pepsi. Now, we all have our preferences, but when push comes to shove, if a good product is available for half the price of a great product, we'll probably buy the good one. Soda doesn't cost much to manufacture, in fact the packaging likely costs more than the contents. Despite that, both companies charge the exact same price for their product. Why? If Pepsi wanted to compete with coke then why doesn't pepsi slash their prices?
You see, that's the thing. These companies realised that there is no benefit in competing with one another. The moment pepsi slashes, coke will follow, then it simple becomes a game of limbo where the one who bottoms out goes out of business. It is in the best interest of both companies to not risk competing. The same goes for any two similar products that can be valued and compared on that scale. Look at your local pizza places. Almost all of mine have the exact same price scale, even the ones that suck. Look at the big pizza chains as well. They all have pretty much the same deal. Medium pizzas for 5 or 6 bucks, usually when you purchase at least 2. There's no competition in our market, and that is bad for consumers.
I can't put it any better than @muttdoggy did. These corporations aren't choosing to be ethical. These corporations are choosing to do what nets them the safest profits. As a result we the consumers are being screwed.
I have done work for a number of financial institutes over the years and I guess none of them have gotten the memo that explained that they no longer need to compete, because they are still spending money & time working out strategies on how to seduce someone else's customers to use their services instead. Anything from new advertising campaigns and convincing companies to switch their payroll provider, to contacts with shopping centres to influence the placement of other's ATMs. If only they knew they could save all that effect, and that they could be richer for it.
Because, as you yourself stated, history has shown that price wars don't work and that in the mid-to-long terms end up hurting both the companies involved (and their consumers). It is more cost effective to use advertising to increase your market share than it is to use a price war.
There is this concept called price-point, which is basically the (maximum) price(s) that consumers are willing to pay for a particular product range. It is generally discovered by the leaders within the product range, and quickly followed by the others because they don't want to undersell their product (even if their product is inferior)
I have noticed that you keep equating lower prices with competition, is that the only means you consider companies can compete in? Because there are a number of issues with only using that as a means:
a. It is rare that two companies that produce the same good or service have exactly the same costs doing so.
b. If the price of an item is too close to it's cost then the company making it becomes vulnerable to market swings.
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If I recall correctly, in some areas, Patreon has even said that they were going to be a platform for unbridled creativity. Patreon could have made the decision to remain as a spotlight on artistic freedom. But, it seems they have firmly decided to move towards more investments and better profit margins. As a result of that decision and their interactions with financial entities and corporate investors, it now looks like that they are restricting certain content from being allowed the site.
At first glance, my earlier post could be taken as being off-topic. Nope. It's not. Remember my analogy about the baker? Patreon is the baker. They have literally cornered the the market in subscription-based crowdfunding. For the last year, they have decided to cater to their investors and the payment handlers. That decision is what is causing the headaches for many developers of adult games. Patreon wasn't forced into this. They made that choice on their own. If they really cared for "artistic freedom", they could have leveraged their market share into more lenient terms with payment handlers. Or even done direct card to bank transfers like they had before.
The point is that both the developer and patreon are at fault for this. The developer decided to make adult content with incest and/or other fetishes, knowing it is considered taboo. Patreon could have been more clear with its policies and/or enforcement in the very beginning but they were lax because they wanted the funds. They could have also remained firm in their previous stance.. BUT... Now that they have a sustainable business, those developers really don't matter anymore. They can leave.
Patreon went from being the baker who helps the community thrive to the baker who now hoards all the resources and is willing to screw over a minority for the sake of continued investments and much greater cash flow.
At first glance, my earlier post could be taken as being off-topic. Nope. It's not. Remember my analogy about the baker? Patreon is the baker. They have literally cornered the the market in subscription-based crowdfunding. For the last year, they have decided to cater to their investors and the payment handlers. That decision is what is causing the headaches for many developers of adult games. Patreon wasn't forced into this. They made that choice on their own. If they really cared for "artistic freedom", they could have leveraged their market share into more lenient terms with payment handlers. Or even done direct card to bank transfers like they had before.
The point is that both the developer and patreon are at fault for this. The developer decided to make adult content with incest and/or other fetishes, knowing it is considered taboo. Patreon could have been more clear with its policies and/or enforcement in the very beginning but they were lax because they wanted the funds. They could have also remained firm in their previous stance.. BUT... Now that they have a sustainable business, those developers really don't matter anymore. They can leave.
Patreon went from being the baker who helps the community thrive to the baker who now hoards all the resources and is willing to screw over a minority for the sake of continued investments and much greater cash flow.