Im Back, Plan for Responding to Site Feedback, and Providing Some Assistance to the Get Large Jam

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Hello everyone! A few of you may have noticed that I have been slowly getting back online here, but now that I have most of the moving done and work is starting to slow down I can finally get back to all this (though did not think I would come back to the fire Steam and Itch has lit lol). I would like to thank you all for your patience so lets just get right into it.

Plan for the Response to the Recent Site Feedback

So I think this goes without saying but quite a lot of questions were asked in the feedback post and I think if we were to do one big response post it would just turn into a massive wall of text and thats not good for anyone. So I think it would be better to break out the response into 5 separate posts and spread them out a bit to give time for discussion on each topic. This is what I am thinking:

  1. First, I figured we would address the voting irregularities that happened in last years jam.
  2. Then I want to talk a bit on AI, including some of my personal opinions on it, what we have observed, and why its been hard for to come to a decision on it.
  3. Next I want to talk a bit about the story of rose situation and how we plan on handling similar situations in the future.
  4. I want to do a bit of an open letter to the community instead of a status of the site update. There have been quite a few things that have been happening in the background that I have not been good at sharing so I think I need to put my cards on the table.
  5. Finally, we will get into the future of Weight Gaming and what my plans are for it.

Some of these are going to take a bit to get written up and we also don’t want to interfere with the Get Large Jam where we can help it so we do ask for your patience, but I do promise I will try to get through all 5 of these posts in as timely of a manner as possible.

Providing Assistance to the Get Large Jam

For those of you who do not know two of our community members, @PeachClamNine & @IceDev have decided to host a jam over on Itch.io since we are not hosting one this year. And I am sure everyone also knows, itch just blew up on all the content tagged as NSFW on their site.

I am sure you can imagine how this throws a bit of a wrench at them, so Peach asked if we could help them out considering the extraordinary circumstances. Due to this we are giving them a category on the forums to post the submissions to to help out with any discoverability issues.

The plan is that Peach will create a new post under this subcategory for each submission made in their Jam and users will be able to reply on those posts. Peach will also be given temporary mod status to deal with these posts as they see fit.

It should be noted we don’t usually do this, but considering the circumstances we didn’t feel it would be right if we ignored a request for help. But we also want everyone to remember we are not going to be involved with their Jam beyond this assistance so anything related to the Jam should go directly to @PeachClamNine or @IceDev.

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I feel like it’s most important to focus on how game hosting sites are taking down all NSFW games entirely. We’re worried how these decisions will further impact us as developers as a whole. Where will we post NSFW games in the future if this continues?

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Unfortunately, at the moment while one of the most active threads on the forum is about exactly that (and I have shared my opinion on the matter there) there is nothing the admins or developers of this particular forum can do other than host the forum for people to share their games so that they at least get the visibility here despite being hidden or deindexed or removed elsewhere. The WeightGaming forums do not have the storage space or bandwidth to host games directly, and payment processing is a huge legal deal which involves directly interfacing with the same entities (Visa and Mastercard) who forced Steam and itch to remove the games in question on threat of being banned from processing payments for any games at all.

I am at a loss on what additional focus can be given here, unfortunately. It already has significant awareness on this forum, since this is a niche and controversial (and unfortunately stigmatized) kink. We are decidedly on the list for purging. I just do not know what more there is for a forum run as a part-time gig on donation funding to do about it.

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I do plan on addressing that in the 5th post where I talk about the future of the site. I haven’t talked about it much in a bit but I have still been working on the main site so plan to talk about whats been going on there in that post.

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Which sites took down all nsfw games?

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Steam recently took down a fair number of nsfw games from their platform, but the larger take down was itch de-indexing all games that where marked as nsfw or adult for review.

Itch recently announced they are going to begin re-indexing all free nsfw/adult games but this has shaken overall confidence in them and is still an open question for anyone looking to sell games with such content.

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Ohhhh dang i knew about itch, i didn’t know steam took down much

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I do want to say, after checking on that due to my own curiosity, both that game and the creator’s itch page are gone. Their Patreon is still up, but doesn’t have any updates or commentary about it.

This is purely conjecture, but I’m sure it’s likely that itch warned them about the game and they tried to pull the same bullshit they tried to pull here before getting the entire account suspended for violating their rules.

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