On Monday, crowdfunding platform Kickstarter announced it was walking back widely-derided changes to its mature content policy that banned adult-only or sexually explicit projects from the platform. In an official statement, COO Sean Leow says “we botched it”, and “the response from our community let us know loud and clear that we got it wrong”.
The platform has rolled back to its previous rules, which ban “pornography and illegal content”. Leow calls the policy “bare bones and not as specific as we’d like it to be”, but does make explicit that “child sexual exploitation and abuse material” is banned. Kickstarter’s guidelines now also make it explicit that “projects are also subject to our partner’s Rules and Restrictions”, and that even if Kickstarter permits a project to make a sex board game or borderline-pornographic TTRPG, a partner may be able to suspend it.
The most relevant partner here is payment processor Stripe, which handles credit card payments for Kickstarter. Stripe lists “pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) designed for the purpose of sexual gratification” among the prohibited businesses it will not provide services to. As Leow explains it, “at any point, whether that’s before launch, while a campaign is live, or after it ends, while a creator is still collecting pledges made via Pledge Over Time or Late Pledges, Stripe can still suspend a campaign that Kickstarter has approved”.
“Stripe operates under its own legal and compliance requirements separate from Kickstarter’s own rules” Leow states. “Over the past several months, we’ve seen a growing number of campaigns that had already been approved by Kickstarter get suspended by Stripe mid-funding”. Leow states that “we advocated for those creators directly with Stripe, and in some cases, we were able to get mid-campaign enforcement reversed so creators could finish their campaigns”.
“We thought that the best path forward was to close the gap, giving creators one set of rules to work within, versus having to navigate two different policy philosophies”, Leow says – so Kickstarter’s updated its content policy in line with Stripe’s. “The decision we made wasn’t the right one, and in an attempt to create rules that could work across both Kickstarter and Stripe, we rolled out something that was too restrictive and too far removed from what we actually believe”.
Leow states that when Stripe suspends a project, “we will advocate for you as we have been, and we’ll do our best to help you understand what adjustments you need to make to your project to make it supportable by Stripe, but we can’t guarantee the outcome”. Kickstarter has also created a guide “to help creators understand common review triggers and make informed decisions about how they present mature content publicly on Kickstarter to reduce the risk of disruption”.
Adult content on crowdfunding and gaming platforms is a vexed issue. Much of it is pablum, a very small minority of it is obscene, and a lot of it is focused on objectifying women rather than celebrating, exploring, or interrogating sex and sexuality.
But art and expression from LGBTQ+ people is often labelled as pornographic or obscene; restrictions on expressions of sexuality inevitably suppress information about sexual and reproductive health; and erotic artwork is a meaningful part of human expression. Supporting those things in the gaming space can mean making common cause with people who want to 3D print big-titty elf statues or inflation fetish videogames.
For an online community that supports adult expression and LGBTQ+ freedoms, come and join the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
