Apparently devs also have to pay higher fees.
Devs don't pay fees directly. Their patrons pay a proportional surcharge on their payment.
That'll change sooner or later. Patreon's been burning venture capitalist money to keep their rates low, but they can't keep this up forever. As soon as they've secured themselves as a fixture in the market, they'll jack up their rates and a lot of devs will be feeling very sad that they defended them.
How does that exactly relate to NSFW content? All content on Patreon will be affected. The best they can manage is to have enough users (creators and supporters) to convince Paypal to lower their fees.
Patreon comes after devs one by one with their obscure rules, they don't blanket bans hundred of devs in one day; they move slowly--I suppose they are a small team. Don't you see that they are a bit invasive, asking access to personal Google drives? banning devs from giving links to Patreon on other platforms?
I've been supporting devs on Patreon for four years now and I've seen Patreon restricting what's allowed more and more; first it was incest, then rape or anything that could be non-consensual sex, then bestiality, then furry and anthro; now it's characters drawn in Japanese style with big eyes. What's next?
How dare they come against incest, rape or **********!? People will twist and bend the rules to their benefit all the time. They're forcing Patreon's hand by trying to exploit loopholes.
- It's not **********, the character is an immortal vampire and is 500 years old, she only looks like a 7 year old.
- It's not rape, this is actually consensual acting out, I'll put an explanation in an update two or three years from now.
- It's not bestiality, the character is a shapeshifting werewolf that enjoys sex more when he's in his wolf form.
And so on. By the way, this opens up other gray areas, like "She's 25 and looks like she's a 25 year old human, only she comes from an alien race that lives to 700 years and you have to be 60 to be considered mature. Childish behavior and language optional."
Is a protest against this mysterious south that most people understand to mean USA's south (but you think means your country) having slavery so yes I made a mistake in assuming that you understood that south in this context meant USA and I again misunderstood you saying that you know American history as saying that you actually knew all along that USA's south was what was meant.
Sure they know. And they are not accepting that. It's called appropriating and nobody will stand for this. I happen to live in the south of my country, too, and unless I'm reading a book about US history or visiting USA, I expect "The South" to be clarified. You can't even claim this forum is based in USA, even if it is, since it's in the Tongan .to TLD.
As to what can be done, not much. Paypal is Patreon's single largest payment processor and they have a say over what is and isn't allowed (and what can or cannot be funded through Paypal).
While Paypal is notorious for their attitude towards adult content, it's not entirely their fault. The primary reason for refusing to deal with adult content creators is that it has a much higher than average fraud rate. This is especially prevalent when dealing with borderline illegal content (barely legal or legal by a loophole).
Additionally, adult media has a much higher dissatisfaction and requests for reimbursement compared to other media. Even if Paypal won't fulfill these requests, it still means high overhead for them, so if they could shed all adult media, they'd be fine with it.
Note that even CCBill, which was set up specifically for online adult content, strictly regulates websites that use its services.
I personally know two examples, stated in support tickets I requested.
One was Karup's PC which was forced to retire a lot of content posted before 2009 which didn't have complete 18 USC 2257 paperwork (Karup media complied, while ATK either had complete paperwork or they weaseled out of it for their early content).
Another was Met-art. Other than obviously illegal content from unscrupulous Russian photographers submitting underage model pictures, they were also forced to take down model pages for some models who
looked too young, e.g., Josephine photographed by Peter Dominic -- even though she was 21 when photographed and even though she was their public face on the cover of two issues of their web magazine (with an interview and a cover story).
Patreon polices adult media creators with a lot of scrutiny and institute additional rules and clarifications because creators find and exploit loopholes all the time. Cue Charles Bronson's quote: "I remember when legal meant lawful—now it means some kind of loophole".
At some point, Patreon will begin to see adult content as a burden and a liability. The bulk of Patreon's revenue is generated by non-adult content creators. If you look at graphtreon, there are single examples of adult content that breaks into their top 10, but most adult content is bottom feeding, while a lot of safe for work content is pushing several thousand a month. This is their long tail, there are literally tens of thousands of such creators.
In their top 50 adult game developers (by number of patrons), if you assume all in the top 15 make over $10,000 (though amount per patron varies wildly, so it could be as low as five), and if you add those who are known to make over $10,000, this adds up to 23. Then there's a group that makes $1,000-$10,000, but it's not large by any measure and there are also-rans and has-beens who make less than $100 a month (and the bulk of them makes less than $5 per month).
If Paypal one day says that Patreon needs to ban all adult/NSFW media on their platform, they will do so with no warning whatsoever and the only grace period they might provide is to give creators a month or two to migrate off of Patreon but without all the income via Paypal.
Patreon can stand to lose adult media creators. Creators can't stand to lose the only platform where Paypal is accepted payment for adult media.
And as to this thread, it's stirring the pot by creators who want to continue publishing veiled illegal content. Those are the ones that would say the character is 18, wink wink, or that it's 2D art, it's not an actual person, so I can claim she's 18, even though it's obvious I drew her to look 10 years old.
